People and Strategy

Jonathan McBride on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Episode Summary

Jonathan McBride, former global head of inclusion and diversity at BlackRock and advisor to boards, CEOs and executive teams, dives into the thorny issues surrounding diversity and inclusion. In this interview with Eric Severson, EVP and Chief People Officer of Neiman Marcus, McBride gives concrete actions to move the needle on equity and inclusion in your organization. (length 35:59)

Episode Notes

Jonathan McBride, former global head of inclusion and diversity at BlackRock and advisor to boards, CEOs and executive teams, dives into the thorny issues surrounding diversity and inclusion. In this interview with Eric Severson, EVP and Chief People Officer of Neiman Marcus, McBride gives concrete actions to move the needle on equity and inclusion in your organization. (length 35:59)

Episode Transcription

Eric Severson (00:02):

Welcome everyone. I'm Eric Severson, chair of the board of directors for SHRMs Executive Network, the premier network of executives and thought leaders in the field of human resources. We advance the HR profession by engaging thought leaders and executive practitioners to create solutions that drive success for people and organizations. I'm honored today to talk with Jonathan McBride. Jonathan is the former global head of inclusion and diversity at BlackRock and was director of the presidential personnel office in the Obama White House. Today, he serves as a trusted advisor of boards, CEOs, and executive teams. Welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan McBride (00:44):

Good to see you. Good to hear you I should say.

Eric Severson (00:47):

Well, Jonathan, your background spans a wide range of industries from media finance, marketing, and government. Can you talk about those experiences and how they prepared you for the work you do today?

Jonathan McBride (01:02):

Yeah, Eric. It's interesting, since I started my career in politics and then went into finance and then entrepreneurship and kind of came into HR later in my career, I feel like one of the benefits of that is as HR professionals we're always trying to speak the language of our internal customers and try to build ourselves into their business plans and I think having been a practitioner and an entrepreneur and a founder, et cetera, helps me do that quite well. But in a lot of ways on these conversations personally, I find myself thinking back to my childhood and the way I grew up as much as anything else. I'm half black and half Syrian. I was adopted at birth and raised in the Midwest. My parents happened to both be white, as my sisters are as well and my brother's half black and half Korean. Yet our family we grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is a hyper segregated city.

When we think about kind of human behavior change at work, I think a lot about behaviors when we were young, because these things are formed so early. So I feel like the early experiences in my life growing up with that kind of a background and that kind of environment prepared me as much as the experiences of being an entrepreneur, working different political settings, working in multiple different industries and being both a customer and a provider of HR support.

Eric Severson (02:22):

Great. And Jonathan, to kind of bring us into the present, given the incredibly volatile environment in which we're operating in the middle of COVID, the elections, et cetera. I'm wondering what some of the most common themes you're hearing today in your conversations with executives.

Jonathan McBride (02:45):

There are a couple. One is the fact that if you think about it, this global pandemic moment was a very human moment. It was very personal for people but largely experienced through work. You were wondering, am I essential? Am I going into the office anymore? Am I going to get laid off? How am I going to run these meetings? And so people experienced that through work.

And then similarly, we had this movement around racial equity and having kind of frank dialogues, and those were also heavily experienced at work. And one of the things that I would say CEOs and executives are saying unsolicited in early conversations most often about all that was the very frank dialogues that they had this summer with Black and Brown employees. It required them to be in virtual rooms with those employees, maybe for the first time, maybe not, but with their ears really wide open, really listening. And those employees telling them probably more candidly and openly about what it's like to be them, whether that means in their day to day lives or while working for those executives. And that experience is one of the things that executives say unsolicited has left kind of an indelible impression.

The other reality of those two things, both COVID and BLM, has been movements that are internal to companies rather than in the past where there's been more external pressure from advisors and media or whatever the case may be. And that means those people aren't going anywhere. External attention wanes and people's attention spans are short. If your employers are the ones pushing you to change the way you run meetings in a virtual workplace, being more focused on equity and inclusion not just diversity, they're not going anywhere. And so there's both a sustained effort that's going on internally, but also personal for executives or at least it was this summer whether that trend continues.

Eric Severson (04:38):

So Jonathan given the recent tragic murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and others, and the national protests for racial justice that followed that you just referenced, there's obviously been this renewed emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion. And as you noted, much of internal pressure, rather than just external pressure within businesses. I'm curious what you believe are some of the most common mistakes that companies make in executing on their DEI initiatives?

Jonathan McBride (05:18):

In moments like this Eric, the most common mistakes, the first is to react in a way that has you doing entirely extraordinary things. If you go back to the same time period in 2016, we had a guy in Nice turn his car into a weapon, we had an Orlando nightclub shooting, we had black men and boys getting shot it seemed like every week. A black police officer in Dallas, if I remember correctly, shot in response. And you would've really thought based on all the conversation and statements that people were going to really change their behaviors at work and start to focus on equity. And there are very few companies that can say they've made any sustained changes in 2016 that they're still seeing the benefit of in 2020. And part of that is because if you do something extraordinary or really fast, it's harder to sustain. So in these moments, there's a lot of pressure to react quickly and you can't underestimate how profound that pressure could be.

But sustainable movements in companies and in large organizations are thought out, measured, planned, implemented over time. In other words, it takes a serious process over time to implement and sustain them. But we rush because there are so much pressure. And then as a result, things don't sustain. And so while making lots of announcements and having lots of things to say feels good in the moment, the reality is doing one or two things for a period of time until they sink in is actually the innovation, like sticking with it for multiple years. Once you have progress on one or two things, the third thing is easier and the fourth thing is easier than that. But it is just difficult, and I completely empathize, I've been there, in those moments where people are saying, Hey, we want you to do something extraordinary because it signals that you're serious. I just don't think that's how businesses behave when they're being very serious about business decisions.

Eric Severson (07:15):

So Jonathan, I'd love to dig in a little bit on equity specifically, because as you suggest, it's probably one of the more difficult objectives to achieve. And as I mentioned, you were head of DEI at BlackRock and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has made pretty bold statements about the need for diversity and is committed to increasing the percent of BlackRock's workforce who are black to 30% by 2024 and doubling the percent of senior leaders there who are black. So, during your time at BlackRock I'm curious how you helped create the mindset for change within the company and then more specifically around creating equity, what tactics you think BlackRock will likely employ to achieve those ambitious objectives?

Jonathan McBride (08:16):

Eric, those announcements obviously were this past summer post my tenure, but obviously these things build over time and I was at BlackRock for the five years prior. One of the answers to your question is actually embedded in the question, which is, without senior leadership buy-in it's very hard to start to really reprioritize and get organizations focused on something that is audacious as some of the goals that companies have put out. And I learned that actually as much in the political world where we were hiring people to come into large agencies for short periods of time, and you would see how the personality of the agency would shift with a new leader in pretty quickly. And so having Larry who was so personally committed to these issues, but also as somebody who was willing to stand up and take a stance and show a lot of courage, that's actually a really necessary component.

But then it's the hard work of everybody underneath, including people who have roles like mine, to make that real in the organization. And if you go back and look at his statements and things that as far back as four years ago, he was talking about being long termist and thinking that diversity and purpose were part of a long term belief system for companies to operate in these communities. He talked about tying diversity targets to compensation. He talked about his compensation and the senior leaders being tied to these efforts. He spent a lot of time personally on these things. So, that was a huge input. But after that, it requires a whole bunch of energy underneath. And if we are not measuring these things to the best of our ability, if we're not, again, linking them into business processes and conversations that we're having and we're not incentivizing people based on them, it's hard to imagine how organizations that use all of those tools for just about everything else are going to be serious about it. And that's something that Larry and the team at BlackRock have been doing for some time.

Eric Severson (10:16):

Jonathan, I long believe that probably one of the most important actions a company can take in creating an environment of inclusion is ensuring that there's equity and leadership representation. And I'm curious if there are any particular practices that you think are particularly effective in helping organizations achieve goals like the ones BlackRock has set for increasing leadership representation for people of color?

Jonathan McBride (10:51):

Well, the first is you have to be able to do more than one thing at once. I think if you look back in the late '90s and early aughts, there was a big push by a lot of business service companies, consulting firms, law firms, banks, et cetera, to diversify. There's a study that I believe E&Y did or on the brain drain that came out of that, which basically showed that there was kind of like a three or four year kind of revolving door because people were doing the D of the DEI, in other words they were hiring, but they weren't changing the environment, which is where the equity and inclusion part comes in. And so you have to do more than one thing at once. But if you just take the hiring part of it people's switching costs if they're good and they like their current employer are pretty high.

If you are a person from an underrepresented group and you feel like you found a home that you feel comfortable in and you feel like it's somewhat inclusive, your switching costs are much higher. And yet we think about time to fill in terms of a matter of 30 days or 40 days. In other words, if you're trying to recruit people in a short window and you're trying to recruit people in these populations who are highly sought after, it's going to be very, very hard. So one of the things that people should be doing is mapping the talent that exists in their marketplaces that they might want to hire. Because in most cases, the number of people who fit all these different profiles, who are at a level that you'd want to hire for a senior executive position in a given city, state or country is finite and knowable. And smart companies work ahead, start engaging people when they're not necessarily looking to hire them so that over time that person decides that their next opportunity would be best at that company and then hopefully something comes along.

The second part is, inside the company having a mindset towards behavioral change, but also the patience to stick with it because obviously behavior change takes time and it's hard. And so looking for early adopters and not thinking about changing the entire company, but testing, measuring, and improving loss of literal attempts to understand what it is that unlocks inclusive behaviors or managers and a sense of belonging among employees is a serious approach because there are not a lot of roadmaps when it comes to the E and I, the equity and inclusion, in the workplace. As I mentioned, people have been spending a lot of time on the D not so much on the E and I. So being ready to test a bunch of things, get a lot of things wrong, but learn from them and move forward is extremely important. And for a lot of companies, especially for senior executives, failure, making mistakes is kind of tricky in the culture for a lot of people. They're not necessarily willing to admit it all the time, but in this case this is going to be a startup, it's going to be a lot of test measuring and so people have to be willing to try a lot of things and employees need to give managers time to try and learn.

Eric Severson (13:41):

Jonathan, it's really helpful. And I think one of the things that you intimidated in your response is that you really need to develop leadership and employee buy-in. And there are a number of studies that have demonstrated that diversity, equity and inclusion can have a positive impact on a company's bottom line. Which raises the question, how would you recommend that listeners make the business case for investing time, effort and energy in DEI, particularly when there are so many other priorities in a business and in particular at such a volatile time as the present moment? Are there metrics, for example, that board directors and C-suite leaders particularly value or other ways that leaders can get the attention of the business to focus on DEI?

Jonathan McBride (14:37):

Well, the first thing is to actually tie it into the business, right? So you have a series of business operational, strategic sales targets that you produce every single year. You need to have team dynamic, team construction and talent based metrics that help you meet those things. So tie it into those processes and give it the same sense of focus. Because recruiting is a process we over index on the recruiting part, specifically at more junior levels because there's a broader talent pool, we have a whole mechanism usually for hiring from campus. And so people kind of over index on that.

I think the area where data and measurement and kind of a business approach is going to continue to accelerate is, again, more in the equity inclusion bit. And people often look at it from an employee opinion survey standpoint. I believe that's going to be disrupted quite a bit. Not that employee opinion surveys don't matter, they matter a lot. But a once a year backward looking survey asking a whole series of questions is kind of a estimate of how you feel right now about the past year and kind of right now of your managers and others. Having more regular check-ins and asking questions more frequently, but then taking the heat map that data provides and following up with more qualitative conversations and trying to get an understanding of not just that 83% of people feel a sense of belonging, but what does that actually mean? And importantly, what are the other 17% feeling? And how big is the gap between your happiest people, the people with the greatest sense of belonging, versus those who have the lowest sense? Because you might have an 83 overall score, but the gap could be 90 to 50%. And another company might have a 78%, but the gap is 82 to 71. I would argue the second company is delivering a more consistent experience and they might want to move that band up.

But looking at the gaps in experiences, and then going and talking to those audiences and understanding what's driving those? What are the behaviors they would witness that would change those feelings? What are the actions people could take to kind of bridge to them? What are the actions they, as individuals, can take to be more included in this to have a sense of belonging? That is an area where I think in the workplace of serious people trying to solve these things, we're spending a lot of time on that and that's where I would spend a disproportionate amount of time.

Eric Severson (17:01):

So Jonathan, a related question. Once we get past, which I trust we will, this historic moment where there has been certainly national focus in the US on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion to a degree we haven't seen in some time. How would you recommend that leaders who care about DEI keep the focus alive in moments outside of crisis? Because I'm sure we both experienced times in businesses where there's an internal or external crisis and it becomes a mandate for change. And as the crisis, ameliorates there's less focus on it. How do you keep the focus on making progress, particularly when many dimensions of DEI, in particular leadership representation, progress takes time?

Jonathan McBride (17:54):

Yeah, progress definitely takes time. The first would be that this moment's going to pass, but there will be others for different populations and you need to build up enough muscle memory to start to get better in those crisis moments. So think of Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink about making better split second decisions. Organizations need to do the same thing. The military does something called after actions, which is they spend a lot of time after an action diagnosing what happened, going through it in great detail, pulling out all of the learnings. Having organizations do the same about what they just went through with senior leaders, picking up scenarios of something that might happen in the future with a different audience in a different part of the world and running those scenarios now. Scenario planning is a basic process, we're running those scenarios now and starting to get better at talking through these things, understanding where each other kind of stands on these things.

And then lastly, as you mentioned, crises focus the mind and if you're highly responsive in those moments and you haven't thought about it, you're going to probably make less good decisions. But there are also some good things that come in a crisis, such as you usually look for innovation, because you're in a moment where the old way of doing things probably got you into this. There is a high degree of focus and so senior people are paying more attention. You're usually a shoe kind of inertia, bureaucracy, old business practices, which means all those biases and you kind of look for good ideas anywhere that you can find them. Going through this process with teams at different levels and having a conversation about what we just learned about how to operate better and how can we take the benefits of a crisis and employ them without having a crisis going forward is a very concrete way to think through this moment.

So we'll go back to the story about executives who sat in rooms with Black and Brown employees this summer and got a very candid exchange for the first time on things that were really important to those individuals and are part of tapping into them and getting the best out of them as an employer. If you ask those executives, have you followed up and had more conversations with that group and then have you started having conversations with other groups? The answer is usually no. So in that moment people did something, they would tell you now that it changed their view for quite some time, changed maybe even their conversations with their own family and with their friends. But are they making it routine? Are they systematizing that better way of working without having to have a crisis? Not as much as you would like.

Eric Severson (20:25):

Really helpful. Jonathan, I think one thing that most of us can agree on is that people are increasingly divided in bringing those political opinions into the workplace. What would you recommend business leaders do to help facilitate civil conversations internally that are relevant and authentic at such a time?

Jonathan McBride (20:55):

Eric, this is a really tough one because not just the context we're in right now but just as a general matter we've become more polarized in many communities around the world for a whole bunch of reasons, echo chambers, different information, et cetera. But beyond that, we've become reflexive too often in our judgements of other people based on who we think they might have voted for or party they might belong to or whatever the case may be. So this is tricky because, and this is maybe the first point, it is hard to espouse a standard inside your company that is entirely different than the world your people are operating in right now. These are societal issues and human issues that walk in with them notionally when they come to the office or come to a Zoom conversation. And so the expectation inside organizations, we've created this false dichotomy between how you are and the rest of your life and how you are when you walk into work. One, that was always artificial and didn't allow people to be themselves. Two, younger generations don't buy it, period, they don't separate the two.

So for all those reasons, one thing is a mindset where we have to focus on, listen, these are people coming into a workplace. They are human, and we want them to be more themselves, which means they're going to have conversations about values and beliefs. So we need to be open to that and not set a standard of we will never say these types of things or do these types of things. We need to set a freedom of speech standard, which is for me, I need to respect someone's right to say something even if they're standing in front of me and saying something I can't believe in, as long as they don't incite something or act on it.

These are these political discussions with work are similar. So creating enough space for people to have a conversation, setting clear expectations that we want that conversation to be adult and show kind of like maturity, but we're going to disagree. Not making it the domain of every company to arbitrate every one of those conversations between two employees who have different views, no more than anybody else could but creating those conditions is really important. Here's the hard part. The hard part is when it's going on, there's so much fear that it's going to get outside the company, become a PR nightmare and put you in a defensive posture before you can do anything and then you're kind of stuck there. And that is a logical fear because that happens quite a bit.

The question you have to ask yourself is like, if I'm going to take such a hard stance, is that really measurable over time that we can police people's beliefs and habits that much. Can we arbitrate those discussions or is it more sustainable to create a basic mindset and then know that at times is going to get a little bit tough. We're just going to have to endure it, but it's a more sustainable posture over time reminding people and hopefully in the next couple months, even in the United States will be reminded more of this, that we are in this together. And we are more alike than unalike, as Maya Angelou wrote in a poem, is something we can all hope for. But we also need to leave room for people to disagree, and sometimes they're going to disagree with a little bit of passion. I think we have to create the space for that at work. It's just, it's very uncomfortable when it's happening.

Eric Severson (24:10):

Yeah. That really resonates with me Jonathan. And one of the things that makes me think about is that oftentimes people in the workplace really need capability or competency on how to have difficult conversations about which there's much emotion. And I found in the past that one of the methodologies that's particularly helpful is one called nonviolent communication, which teaches people how to have conversations about sensitive things without judgment. You're not triggering people. And I'm curious whether there are any particular approaches or techniques to teaching people how to have conversations with others on subjects about which they disagree or about which there's a lot of emotion that you think really work.

Jonathan McBride (24:58):

So Eric, it's interesting. In my mind, there's a connection between a couple of these things. Creating an artificial divide between who you are at home and who you are at work, which starts when you first start interviewing for jobs, right? People start telling you, hey, you're a little too this or too that or be more this or less that or whatever and we start kind of bifurcating our life. The problem is that we really get to know each other through these more human moments, less about kind of what we're saying and more about what we're doing and how we think. It's also why by the way, in crisis people often say, oh, I really got to know this person or this was really great because you strip away all that veneer because the normal processes being kind of like pushed aside and people are so urgent they're acting in their truest self. So you kind of get to know each other and you actually trust that more.

So, here's the conflict. Our creating the divide between who you really are outside of work and who you are in work as a result doesn't allow for us to understand where each other are coming from. And if you can understand where someone comes from, you can perhaps understand their logic and respect it. But you also are more likely to assume that they have positive intentions. So if they misspeak, they are misspeaking, they don't have intent. It might still have impact, right? Those two different things. But I'm not assuming the person had intent when they delivered the microaggression or said what they said or didn't say something when I wish they had. I'm assuming they might have missed it and I'm going to go talk to him about it. That's a very different place, unfortunately than we are in a lot of instances but you can start to actually create that culture.

One of the ways to do it as you're you're suggesting is being very intentional about teaching people approaches to ask more questions like why. Why do you feel like that? Why have you come to this conclusion? What does it feel like to be you? And you can do that kind of structurally and through different prompts and nudges. But the first thing you have to do is be willing to prioritize we're going to change the way people talk to each other at work. And then there are many mechanisms to do it, power of inquiry, et cetera. But the biggest thing is just saying, hey, we're going to leave room for more personal discussions, which means it gets a little messier, right? It's not going to be as perfect. But the idea that people not being themselves or not sharing what's really going on for them is a better system for understanding your people and getting the most out of them it just seems faulty.

Eric Severson (27:24):

Really insightful. Jonathan, I think we've all seen a lot of these memes recently about the collective angst to have 2020 be over, and maybe to paraphrase Beyonce, I wonder how might we make lemonade out of the lemons, if you will, of 2020. With the kind of sobering effects of COVID-19, the outcry for social justice and the business world, [inaudible 00:27:57] the election drama, how might leaders turn these various challenges into positive momentum for change over the next 5 to 10 years? In other words, what things might we do to not lose the opportunity in the moment with respect to diversity, equity and inclusion?

Jonathan McBride (28:20):

Always wise to quote Beyonce by the way, everybody listens. But I listen, I have thought a lot about this. One of the things that gave a lot of people, particularly who were black and brown, but people in general. Some sense that this was different in this conversation we were having over the last four or five months was the candor of the conversation, the willingness of people to admit they didn't know as much as they needed to know and they weren't asking the right questions, so them being. Vulnerable and also the solutions being systemic, not periodic or one time. I think organizations need to think the same. And the benefit is managers, can't tell you right now that they're not willing to try new things, they've been trying tons of new things for this whole year and are actually probably more willing to take advice on how to be a little bit better because it's been so disruptive.

But you have to think systemically and I've talked about this in other forums, but the mayor of Milan this past summer when everybody in Italy was kind of boarded up, everybody noticed obviously air quality went up, sound quality, everything else. And so they painted 22 miles of bike lanes and widened the sidewalks. Major League Baseball, when everybody was wondering whether they were going to have a season decided to put a designated hitter in both leagues and to start extra innings with someone on second base to shorten the length of games. Now, either of those things, if you had a bunch of people walking around Milan or fans getting ready to go through spring training and already in the season, everybody would've like hollered. But the reality is everyone's so busy and the change has been so significant and their lives are so disrupted, our instinct is to try to diminish the amount of change and disruption.

But it's actually a good time to lever up and to do something, again one or two things, where you systemically change how you approach a recruiting process and a promotion process, a strategy towards retention, reward systems for people for engaging on this and showing real progress, how you collect data and identify positive outliers and share throughout an organization. Adoption of story telling methodology so people are more themselves at work, but it starts from the top and you get them to talk about stories from last week or two weeks ago, which don't seem as scary because everybody went through them. Basically asking for pretty big change, but making it systemic. Anything you can do to create the process around the behavior you want, not just train people and talk to them, but create an ecosystem of change or that incentivizes change. This is the time to think really big. And especially because people's biases in the normal kind of interaction face to face we have subconscious biases that are kind of sub contextual with people. We also overrate when we look at people, talk to people and around people, our ability to read them, kind of look in their eyes and understand them. All of that has been disrupted through virtual work. It will come back in other forms or be renewed when we potentially come back to a new normal.

But don't wait for that to happen. Pick one or two things that are common, potentially probably around meetings, because that's a big area of microaggression and just change it systematically, but just get on with it. Go quickly to the structural change and just demand it and follow through. Because people's appetite or ability to take change right now is high. And if you're not thinking structurally, it's really hard to imagine that it's going to be sustained.

Eric Severson (31:40):

So Jonathan, let's wrap with this one to build on your response to what we might do in the future. Over the course of the coming months, there'll be more and more of a return to a shared physical workspace. That has some potential for white space and change in the realm of diversity, equity, inclusion. Is there anything specific you might recommend that as the workforce is returning to share a common space together that you might recommend leaders undertake to try to take advantage of this moment of reset as people are returning to the office?

Jonathan McBride (32:20):

Yeah. I mean the first is obviously listen to your people and do it slowly because people are obviously in very different places. The kind of small idea and then I'm going to talk about a framework, which I think is bigger. But the smaller idea, which I think a lot of people are already thinking about, is if there have been a number of benefits, not entirely our only benefits, but if there have been a number of benefits to how people meet in the workplace by having it all be virtual, so it kind of democratizes or flattens the experience. Meaning, there aren't 20 people in a room and sitting with them with the most important senior person in the division and then a bunch of people virtually and there's two separate experiences, but everybody's having the same experience. When some people, particularly that senior person starts going back to the office, don't start having 20 people in the room again or probably 7 to start and then 13 and then 20 and create the two part experience, think about keeping people in a more virtual flat structure. I think a lot of companies are thinking about that, but just think about that.

But I would say the bigger thing is more again in terms of frameworks, because the reality of how you do these things in each company is a little bit different but the frameworks are important. There's a company called Brex that I've been talking to that is founded by a couple of young, very smart guys. Who in talking with them and they may not be the only people thinking this way, but one of the things I noted in how they went virtual, cause they're now entirely virtual and staying that way, was not to be thinking about how they're going to take the prior workplace and more fit into this new world. Like take physical office space concepts and ideas and sentiment and move it into the virtual world. They went to the end and later stage and worked backwards. They said that we're heading towards more of less of people in offices in physical space, more of a distributed social network platform that is highly productive and gets work done. So how do we think about social networks and how they organize well and build a workplace that looks like that and then work backwards to where we are now?

I think that's actually a pretty significant shift in how one thinks about these moments and would change a whole bunch of things. But then to build into it things that matter, we think, to building relationships that we're still testing. For instance, they're going to be and have already started getting people together in the real world for dedicated periods of time. So if they're not spending as much money on real estate, they can afford to have everybody once a quarter or whatever the case may be go to the same place, spend a lot of time together, probably less work oriented candidly, but you get kind of high quality interactions with people over many days and in some ways we won't know till you know, years from now.

But I wouldn't be surprised that we find that by doing that model, distributed so you can hire people everywhere, people can work when they want, how they want in the best, in the ways that makes sense for them on a platform that is democratized or fair, and then getting together for dedicated time where they can really focus on getting to know each other and spending many days with each other. I'm not so sure you won't get to know people better than what we were doing a year ago or two years ago kind of brushing by people in the hallway. I'm not entirely sure. But that mindset of kind of going to the future state and working backwards, as opposed to trying to protect what you think was going on a year or two ago, I think is an important change.

Eric Severson (35:31):

Well, Jonathan, you're a treasure trove of really fascinating insights and information on DEI so I want to thank you for sharing your expertise with us today. And thank you to our audience as well for joining us today. For more information on the topics we've discussed or for further details on SHRM please visit SHRM.org and that's all for today.