Recorded Webinar

Transcript

[00:00:00] Laura Mastrorocco: Welcome to DEI in the Modern Era. Evolution, Trends, and Strategies for Business Growth. I'm Laura Mastarocco and I'm your producer for today's session.

[00:00:11] So I'd like to tell you a little bit about PILOT before we jump in. PILOT is a 100 percent virtual emerging leaders development program designed to provide your early to mid career employees the soft skills they need at any level. Each cohort of 20 to 30 employees benefits from a six month program that includes group coaching, executive fireside chats, self reflection exercises, and guided one on one manager feedback.

[00:00:47] The time commitment is only two to three hours per month for the participants, and PILOT is built to scale by HR professionals, so we can launch in as little as two [00:01:00] weeks without requiring additional headcount for the team. But don't take it from me, we've asked some folks who've been through the PILOT program what it means to feel powerful at work,,

[00:01:10] Thanks so much. Let's hear from those PILOT members, those who've been through the PILOT program.

[00:01:18] I was very, you know, daunted and intimidated by chatting with, you know, being in

[00:01:22] meetings with people. who were 3, 4, 5 levels above my analyst role, um, it was very intimidating. But PILOT helped me realize that it's not about title at the end of the day. You can still take responsibility and ownership over your

[00:01:35] work and still work within your space to gain influence to achieve results, ultimately.

[00:01:40] Through PILOT, um, being able to learn the, you know, professional development and how to make my needs and wants heard. I was able to have conversations with my directly managed. Um, and thankfully because of those conversations and because of PILOT, my title changed. So I'm went from the Community Engagement Strategist to Social [00:02:00] Media Content and Engagement Manager within

[00:02:02] a matter of six months.

[00:02:03] And now

[00:02:04] I have this framework of how do I work with my team to understand what needs they have, you know, how can I help them work more efficiently? Um, and it's, it's been a

[00:02:14] unique kind of questions

[00:02:16] or series of self

[00:02:17] reflection that I've gone through in PILOT and actually taking

[00:02:20] that same type

[00:02:21] of reflection on how I'm working for my team to make sure their needs are getting met and that they're able to work effectively.

[00:02:28] PILOT enhanced that for me. Uh, it's to learn. Do and then teach and then just keep repeating that and then you will get better and better at the things that you are doing.

[00:02:37] I'm telling you if you're not your biggest champion no one

[00:02:46] Even if others believe in you, you can believe in yourself and advocate and champion for

[00:02:51] yourself. Um, it goes to the wayside. Saw the result. I am happier. I have, I'm [00:03:00] boosting my confidence. I have more challenge going out of my chest. comfort zone, but, uh, it's, I'm okay with that. So thank you very much.

[00:03:12] Now that we know a little bit about our sponsor for today's webinar, before I full on introduce our speakers today, I'd like to get you thinking about the question on the screen. So in your chat panel, please share a yes or a no response via chat. Are you seeing a gap between how employers and employees rank current corporate DEI practice results?

[00:03:36] And as those responses flood in, I will begin introduction. So it is my pleasure today to introduce you to PILOT's founder and CEO, Ben Brooks, who is our host today. Ben is a former SVP of HR at a Fortune 500 company. He's an executive coach and an HR executive, top 100 HR tech [00:04:00] influencer. Now, Ben is not your ordinary leader.

[00:04:03] Ben served on the board of directors for outer SLDN, the organization that spearheaded the successful effort to end the Department of Defenses discriminatory. Don't ask, don't tell policy. Ten years ago, Ben unexpectedly let go of his long held aspirations to climb the corporate ladder and instead has chosen to fly his own plane.

[00:04:26] Thanks for joining us today, Ben. Glad to be here. I'm super excited for

[00:04:29] Ben Brooks: this conversation.

[00:04:33] Laura Mastrorocco: And a warm welcome to Joe Santana. Joe is chairman of the CDO Power Circle, an association of senior chief diversity officers from organizations that collectively generate close to three quarters of a trillion dollars with over one million employees.

[00:04:53] Joe is also a futurist, author, and keynote speaker who is today's leading voice on [00:05:00] establishing DEI solutions that drive positive social and economic impact for organizations in this increasingly diverse 21st century. His articles have been published in Forbes, and FAST Company, where he is a member of the Business Council and Executive Board, respectively.

[00:05:19] His latest book is The New DEI and ERG Frontier, which was released in 2022. Welcome Joe, so glad you could be with us.

[00:05:30] Joe Santana: I appreciate being here. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

[00:05:33] Laura Mastrorocco: Excellent. So Ben, let me turn it over to you to share the big idea.

[00:05:37] Ben Brooks: Awesome. Laura, thanks for warming us up . And, this is not your parents DEI. That's the big idea. Yeah. As Laura laid the groundwork for us here this morning with bringing Joe and I together and the contrast between employee and employer perceptions, we're going to talk today that DEI has changed.

[00:05:55] We've used the same acronym or words, but the [00:06:00] context has changed. And so we have to be situationally aware. And that's what we're going to get into

[00:06:06] Joe Santana: today. Yeah, absolutely. The only thing that I have to add to that is that there's so much opportunity today for DEI leaders to have a real impact, a bigger impact than they ever had in the past, but it calls for making some changes in the way that we execute our practices and what we focus on.

[00:06:26] So I'm looking forward to this conversation with you, Ben.

[00:06:30] Ben Brooks: Awesome. Well, if we go to the next slide, Laura think Joe, what would be helpful, what I learned a lot in our practice chats around this was a bit of the historical perspective. And I think sometimes people think DEI and they think, oh, back to 2010, they think 2015, things are very different before and after LGBT or same sex marriage, or they think You know, the aughts or something else, but really, we're talking, half a century or more of history here that I think will help give us a context.

[00:06:58] So, can you tell us a little bit, Joe, [00:07:00] about this sort of backstory

[00:07:01] Joe Santana: yeah, sure. So Ben, as you mentioned, it's more than half a century that we've been working on DEI.

[00:07:08] And actually the birth of a lot of practices here in the United States primarily started around 1964. That's when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. And then later on, we had a bunch of other laws that came into play. Like, for example, laws that required organizations that did business with the government that had more than 50 employees to, sign up for equal opportunity employment to show that they were making efforts in terms of trying to have a diverse and a fair workforce. And this was a piece of it. It was a moving part, but if we move on to the next slide, there's a little video there that I'll narrate for you as we go through it. So 20 days later, after that signing, it was in this little neighborhood up in Rochester, New York, where something happened that really triggered a lot of what we see today.

[00:07:55] There was a party going on and in this neighborhood in Rochester, and [00:08:00] a young man got a little bit drunk from drinking a bit too much, as young people do everywhere when they're in parties. The police wanted to arrest him. His friends and family wanted to take him home. People started resisting and helping resist the police when they tried to take him in.

[00:08:15] The crowd grew gradually into a larger and larger number of people. The chief of police called in more reinforcements in order to quell what was becoming a riot. Eventually it was declared a riot. It grew to about 2, 000 people and there were several people that died, several people that were arrested, and, the whole thing just turned into this huge mess.

[00:08:38] The governor declared it a riot by the next day and when, we woke up the next morning we found that area, that neighborhood, was in complete shambles. That was really a sparking event, as it were. And if we move over to the next slide, what happened after that was that companies that were in that [00:09:00] area that had their offices in that area, they felt that this was a blemish on them and their headquarters, so they decided that they would take some action.

[00:09:08] And some of that action that they decided they could take was to increase the business they were doing with PILOT. minority owned businesses in the area, as well as hiring more people from minority groups into their organizations. And there were these groups that were starting to develop within these organizations, they were called caucuses back then, so there was a black caucus.

[00:09:29] inside Xerox. And the CEO and others started tapping into these groups to get information about what were some of the best approaches for being able to effectively bring people into the organization. So these caucuses later on, more caucuses came into existence here and in other companies. And they were the precursors of what we today call employee resource groups.

[00:09:53] And so the result of all of this, if we move on to the next slide. The result of all this, [00:10:00] and we can bring up all those bullets in one shot, and I'll just read through them was that we ended up having a lot of efforts to show good faith because that helped us to comply with some of the requirements of the new laws that we spoke about previously.

[00:10:14] And also in terms of giving the organization a better face as it were to the to the public as well as to potential employees and existing employees. So Heritage Month celebrations and all of these things just came into, the annual diversity reports and all of these things that we see today.

[00:10:33] pieces of that came into existence during that time. There were no major changes to the structure of the organization at that point. These companies that were built for a 1950s workforce that that was very different from this emerging diverse workforce didn't really change that much What they changed were some of the things they were doing to show effort and to show that they were doing outreach.

[00:10:55] And for a while, that appeared to be working well for these [00:11:00] organizations. But as we'll see as we go on in our conversation, that, that changed a little bit later on.

[00:11:06] Ben Brooks: Yeah. And I think Joe, it makes me think just, it's all relative on the context, right? Those things on that last slide. might have seemed revolutionary back then, right?

[00:11:14] Because you were talking about them, and they were like a major shift at the time. Now, to your point, they didn't change the organization, but they were a change. But now, I remember in 2007 in New York City, no one had ever brought a same sex person to the holiday party at a elite management consulting firm that hired from the Ivy League schools in New York City.

[00:11:34] And again, now it'd be like, no one would think twice about that. So it's all kind of part of that context. So Joe, in that period of time, like where are we at? What's changed over that time? Cause it sounds like some good fundamentals are put in place, but not exactly game changers.

[00:11:48] How has this

[00:11:49] Joe Santana: evolved? So what happened, Ben, is over time, two things. Number one and this is just human, psychology, right? You said that these things that they were [00:12:00] doing back then were game changing at that point in time, and they worked to some degree for organizations. But, as we all know, if we've ever been to an amusement park, and we thought, wow, this is great, and then we went to another amusement park that was a level up, like a Disney, all of a sudden, we start judging our past experience by our new experience, so our bars continue to go up.

[00:12:20] Well, today's bar is significantly higher than it was, 60 years ago. Not only that, but our ability to communicate with each other externally has grown tremendously. In the past, the only information that we had about what was going on in an organization was the information that was released by the organization.

[00:12:39] But today, any employee can go out to, let's say, a glass door or a fairy god boss or whatever, and they can put information in there that, that is perfectly probably much more honest than what they'll put into an employee survey that's done internally in the organization. So as you can see, a lot of the information that's been collected most [00:13:00] recently shows that employees today are not as satisfied as employers would think.

[00:13:07] with the practices that they have in place. So that very top most quote that's there from this Gallup survey, employee DEI needs are being met. 97 percent of HR leaders, and by the way, business leaders tend to agree with this, say, yeah, they are. We're doing great. We're celebrating Women's History Month.

[00:13:25] We're doing all these wonderful things. Meantime, only 37 percent of employees actually agree with that. And if you look at all the other stats below that, there are big gaps. Sometimes, three times difference or four times difference when it comes to opinions around things like experiencing discrimination, that employees feel respected, that employees think the company is ethical and has integrity and so forth.

[00:13:47] There are big gaps there. So what, A lot of organizations are doing today, or many organizations are doing today, is not really resonating the same way with employees. And that comes out in this study, and there [00:14:00] are several other studies that have been done that show the same thing. If we go over to

[00:14:05] Ben Brooks: Joe, real quick, just Go ahead, Ben.

[00:14:07] I think you're, it's such a good point is that typically the narrative around DEI comes from the enterprise, from the company itself. We won this award, we're doing this thing, we donated here, we're hiring this. And it's really easy to have a nice looking webpage about slash diversity or slash DEI and have the report.

[00:14:26] But I think that, the perception here is so stark. I'm shocked by the way, also that 60%, only 60 percent of HR feels that employees feel respected. That's concerning to me of 122 CHROs at large organizations, but again, I think we often do things it's important to look good and I know that there's been a fear of, organizations, getting, boycotted against the other thing.

[00:14:48] So there's like a lot of pressure to demonstrate progress, but I think it, I think it's so important to get that perception from employees. And, I think that can be through engagement surveys and a variety of other things, [00:15:00] but I know some organizations are so sometimes so desperate to say, Oh, we added a woman to our board rate, and that is a wonderful thing.

[00:15:06] If you don't have that sort of representative diversity, that's not hitting a home run. That's hitting a bunt in a lot of ways that you're getting on base. That's wonderful. But there's so many other wins. So I would love, by the way, in the chat, does this, plus one if it is what you expected, or maybe a comment if it's not what you expected, because again, I think Joe and I want, and Laura wants to as well, learn from you all in your perceptions that this aligns with maybe how you think your organization would answer it from HR perspective versus the employees.

[00:15:37] Seems like there's a lot of plus ones, but if not, diversity of thought here. Let's hear from you if you see it differently. Sorry, Joe, let's go. You want to go? No, absolutely.

[00:15:45] Joe Santana: Absolutely. So yeah, so you see this big gap in perspective. And here's the thing. If you want to know what people experience in your organization, the best way to find out is to ask them.

[00:15:58] Now, people may be [00:16:00] reluctant to expressing what they really feel in certain environments, but they certainly aren't reluctant to doing it in places like Glassdoor, Fairy God Boss. I always tell people, look at the outside. world. Look at outside of your walls to see how your company is being perceived, because you're going to get a more honest view than if you just look inside at data that's collected inside.

[00:16:21] Now, that's the employee view. If we move on to the next to the next slide here what we're looking at is what investors think. Now, investors that are pro DEI, and I know quite a few, I do a lot of work with them, I speak at a lot of these groups, investors that are pro DEI, are skeptics also. A lot of them, to your point Ben, they look at things like, well we won this award, and we have this diversity report.

[00:16:48] They look at this as being narrative of, here's the effort that we're putting in. What the investors want to know is, what are the results that you're getting? out of those efforts. Do you have more women in [00:17:00] leadership? Do you, have you closed pay gaps? Have you done, what have you done? Because the bottom line with investors is, it's really a simple decision whether or not to put money into a company.

[00:17:09] A, is it competitive enough that I'm going to get the biggest return in dividends? for the money I'm putting in now, and B, is this company set up to grow as we advance further into the 21st century, which obviously is going to become more diverse and more global? And if the answer to those two questions is yes, then yes, it's a buy.

[00:17:28] If the answer to those two questions is a no, then we have to look at it a little closer. And if you look at that chart that's at the right or at the yeah, at the right of the screen here, that chart represents All the proposals or resolutions that investors have sent the companies challenging them and asking them for information on things like their environmental efforts and also their social and governance and social and governance is where DEI lives.

[00:17:55] That's precisely where DEI lives. Now, if you look at that chart there, [00:18:00] you'll notice that those have been trending up. So more challenges to organization on what are you really doing in the environment? What are you really doing in social and governance? Governance. The yellow represents the social and governance.

[00:18:11] The block represents the environmental, and it doesn't take a lot of exploration to see that the biggest challenges are in the yellow, which means that more and more investors are actually challenging organizations and saying, what are you doing in this particular area? And there are. consulting organizations that help them put together these types of resolutions and challenges.

[00:18:35] So if you go to an organization like, let's say, for example As You Sew, one word, org, and you look at resolution tracker, you'd be surprised at how many organizations that have beautiful websites and say, we're doing all this wonderful stuff relative to diversity, are actually being challenged by their investors to prove that what they're doing is more than just performative, that it's producing actual results [00:19:00] that they can measure, that they can see.

[00:19:02] And you'll also see some organizations that are resisting giving out that kind of information because that kind of information that transparency is going to reveal a lot more about the nature and the impact of what they're actually doing.

[00:19:16] Ben Brooks: And Joe, I'm wondering, so if I'm an investor that cares about these matters, to your point, people that you know.

[00:19:22] You think of the D, the E, and the I. The diversity, the equity, and the inclusion. I would think the most measurable thing to verify would be the D. Right? Do you have the representative diversity, which organizations might aggregate, they wouldn't say, though, we got a lot of people of color, but they're all at the lowest paying roles.

[00:19:41] They'll just say, hey, we have 30 percent people of color, and that's great. Is there even any way that they can understand the measurable results around the E or the I?

[00:19:50] Joe Santana: Yeah, the answer is yes. There are some ways to measure that. So, let me go back to the diversity piece for a minute and then address your specific question.

[00:19:58] The D part, [00:20:00] one of the things that investors want to know one question that they want to know is let's say an organization says we have 30 percent African Americans and we had 30 percent African Americans last year. Here's a great question. Are they the same African Americans or are we churning? Are we keeping that number up by, because these, because let's say African Americans are leaving the company faster than anyone else, but we're basically going out and hiring more in order to maintain that figure where it is.

[00:20:26] And the other one is, where is that distribution? As you mentioned, we have 30%, but they're all in the bottom jobs. Are they distributed across the, up and down vertically, or are they just in the bottom part of the organization? So that's one of the more. are in depth kinds of questions that sometimes organizations are challenged to answer.

[00:20:44] In terms of the inclusion and the equity piece, right? Let's take inclusion. Inclusion can be measured If, depending on how you look at it, if you look at inclusion as a perception, then the measure is, hey, Ben, do you feel [00:21:00] included? And your subjective perception might be, yeah, I am. Joe, do you feel included?

[00:21:04] Sure. That's my subjective perception. But There are other ways of measuring inclusion that, in fact, I had someone on my program, we had an extensive discussion around this, around organizational network analysis. And, that's the science of measuring who is connected to whom in an organization informally.

[00:21:24] Who goes to Ben and who does Ben go to when he has a question? Who does Joe go to? How connected they are? And one of the things that we find when we take a step back basically a snapshot of a company using an organizational network analysis map is that a lot of people sometimes that are in marginalized groups are outliers who are connected to other people that are in the same marginalized group, but are not interconnected to the organization.

[00:21:49] So case in point, Ben, you might subjectively think. that you're working with three other people and that you're included, but unknown to you, some of your colleagues actually have a [00:22:00] skip level relationship with your manager's manager and are being groomed for a higher position. So your perception of being included may not necessarily match the reality of how included you are.

[00:22:12] A network analysis would reveal that. It would show that everybody else except you, Ben, is connected to the CEO or to the skip level supervisor. So that's one way of measuring using empirical data. whether people in the organization are actually connected to each other, or if they just have the illusion, the inclusion illusion, as one of my friends wrote in this book.

[00:22:33] Oh, I like that. I like that term, inclusion. Yeah, that they're connected, right? The other piece is the equity piece. Equity if you look at equity from the standpoint of policies and practices in an organization it's a question primarily of are the policies and the practices of the organization, the structure that holds the organization together.

[00:22:55] Is it set up in such a way that it supports all the employees in the organization? [00:23:00] So let's say, for example, an organization has a reimbursement policy that will reimburse employees. us for a martini with a client but won't reimburse, let's say, a woman or a man who have child care responsibilities for extraordinary, babysitting.

[00:23:16] We can't expense that. Well, that policy is perfect for a 20th century workforce when there was a stay at home mom and, it was leave it to beaver time and dad was the only one working and dad had no child care responsibilities. For today, it is not. Organizations have policies about what holidays they celebrate.

[00:23:36] Usually they're Christian holidays. Everybody else has to take a personal day. Is that policy really equitable? Is that policy really supportive of the performance of every employee in that organization? Or is that policy still geared towards supporting an environment that used to exist? 50 or 60 years ago.

[00:23:55] So there are very, objective ways that you can look at the [00:24:00] practices and policies of an organization and ask yourself, is this organization set up as a house for diversity, or is it set up as a house for a workforce to support the performance of a workforce of the 1950s and the 1960s? That's such a

[00:24:15] Ben Brooks: vivid contrast.

[00:24:16] And Laura, if you can go to the next slide, one of the things if you're not in the chat right now. There's a lot of comments, Rihanna, Eric Mustafa, other folks, Andrew are sharing things, Joe, just, Andrew shared, they're in ed tech and they're having DEIs having a big financial impact because they've had states that have contracts that are holding up funding because we've been out front with our DEI initiatives and it says our executives are now scared to speak about what we're doing.

[00:24:41] So again, yeah. you think about there's both sides of it. There's the people that want the DEI, right? But then there's also in the crosshairs that's become in the political wars is some sort of trigger word for something bad that, various states are firing at, state universities and, state governments, offices of DEI, and they're now being skeptical of [00:25:00] doing business with organizations that have DEI.

[00:25:02] So I think that, again, that, It, in some ways we make a lot of progress, but then we slide back, right? There's a stasis to

[00:25:07] Joe Santana: all of this. Yeah, there is that seesaw effect. And one thing I'll say before I respond to something you just said is that I want to apologize to Corey for making their head hurt

[00:25:16] that wasn't the intention, but let's go back to that whole seesaw effect before we go to this slide. There are some clear tensions now because of the pushback. An interesting thing that I've seen in some organizations that I do business with is that in the past, The idea of supporting DEI was very much motivated by, by, public facing PR, it really was a lot of, we support, it was a form of virtue signaling in some cases, we support DEI, we're doing all these different things, but The fact of the matter is that many of the things that DEI proposes or does do have a powerful, [00:26:00] positive economic impact on the organization.

[00:26:03] And whether you call it DEI publicly or not, depending on what your relationship is with the government, there are certain common sense things that you can still do and should do in order to make sure that your workforce is operating at optimum levels. For example, You can call your training diversity training, and maybe that, in certain states, will raise the hackles of people who oppose you.

[00:26:25] Or you can simply have a training for how to get more effective teamwork out of a 21st century workforce, and do the same exact training with the same exact components on bias, with the same exact components on how to effectively understand and work with people who come from a different place of thinking.

[00:26:42] And you'd be doing the same thing. It's just that you're not, putting the word DEI out there as a target, for someone to do skeet shooting. Right. But there's so much. But so what I say to organizations like that is, what you're what you need to be careful with. as you're fighting this battle, [00:27:00] is with wordings and so forth that people are co opting to attack you.

[00:27:05] But what you shouldn't stop doing is the kind of work that's going to make your organization more effective in terms of working in teams with each other, as well as working with your marketplace, which is equally becoming diverse. But just summing up this slide here real quick, What employees, what clients, what investors, what all of them want, and it really jumps out at you, is they want genuine changes to outdated policies and practices that they see as not only holding back underrepresented people, they see them as suppressing profitability.

[00:27:38] That's where you get these activist investors. Their drive is, I want dividends now, and I want a company that's going to grow in value. tomorrow. So they're looking for things, the hard things, and you and I had a conversation about this. Closing pay gaps is not easy. It involves a bigger investment than, than celebrating, Women's Heritage Month with a [00:28:00] couple of volunteer ERG leaders.

[00:28:01] We're talking about stuff that's more substantial that involves reshaping organizations so that they move from being 20th century supportive to being 21st century supportive. And so we're talking about less sizzling celebrations and more opportunity stakes. Not saying there's anything wrong with having celebrations, but that's not enough.

[00:28:23] We need to do more than that. Because investors and employees or employee candidates, they're looking for companies that genuinely reflect their value. So in a nutshell, as it says down there, this DEI environment. What was good? free 1900s, not good enough now.

[00:28:42] Ben Brooks: And Joe, my team is pinging me because I think I, I take ownership.

[00:28:46] I got us a little slow off track. We're going to go, on a podcast when you can go listen to 2x. We're going to be kind of New York minute as we go through the rest because you've got so much to share, but I just, I love everything that you're talking about. There's some additional great comments in the chat [00:29:00] around, are we doing DEI for our customers or clients, but not for the workforce?

[00:29:04] Chanel is in the healthcare field talking about that. So if you're not in the chat, Dana's sharing some links, Laura's actually dropping some articles and research that we put together. And thank you, Laura, for doing this very thoughtful the around DEI. So there's a lot out there. If you're feeling alone on this.

[00:29:17] or you're feeling like you're pushing a rope up a hill or you got a bunch of headwinds, you're not. You're in really good company in these eras. But I will just mention on, as we talked about pay equity, you think, oh, like we should pay everyone the same. That makes sense. Yeah. But I've been on the inside of pay equity at big companies.

[00:29:32] You have to do regression and studies and understand if there's a difference that's not, let's say, gender related, because sometimes it's oh, this person makes less, but there's a reason it has nothing to do with their gender, but you have to test for that, and then you do it, but then what you typically do is you don't tell the person, hey, we underpaid you, what you do is you give them a large raise or a large bonus at the end of the year, and then you the lawyers have to pass, so, organizations are not going to want to admit that and have some class action lawsuit, but they want to right the wrong and level the playing field, so it's a very delicate balance.

[00:29:59] Right to do those [00:30:00] things. And I think it speaks to also the def difference between kind of the pressure to signal externally versus the need to execute internally. And I think a lot of organizations, I don't know, Joe, if you agree with me and if, and audience tell me if you're a yes or no in the chat, have focused a lot on the external message.

[00:30:17] Rather than the internal reality ly. Joe, is that how you've

[00:30:20] Joe Santana: seen it? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, yeah, let's talk about the

[00:30:24] Ben Brooks: current trends then. Let's go to the next

[00:30:25] Joe Santana: slide. Laura. Yeah. You wanna go in the New York minute on this? Yeah, I can go through this in the New York. I'm a New Yorker. So you're, this is right up my speed here.

[00:30:32] So Laura, if you could just bring all those up for that first slide. I'll just read through them. laptops, getting cheaper, smartphones, ubiquitous things like hotspots, easy to get, very cheap, under a hundred, maybe two hundred dollars, and you can get high speed internet anywhere. Loom allows you to have meetings without even being in the same time in that meeting, so that you can have asynchronous meetings, right?

[00:30:55] You have meetings in the metaverse. You have service drones. There are [00:31:00] drones that provide coffee and so forth. I actually saw one of these when I went to Florida to take my one of my grandsons to a bowling alley. I saw a service drone there. And we also have drones that do warehouse pilot working.

[00:31:12] So net of this is the ability to work remotely, the capabilities, the technology is growing, it's pushing. If we flip over to the next one, another signal that we're seeing is the fact that people want to work remotely. According to this estimate, millions of people basically they want to and prefer to work remotely.

[00:31:34] We're seeing the first chart there to the immediate left, a big uptick in the number of people that are digital nomads. That means They live either traveling or abroad, and they work in another country. We're seeing the reasons why. Some cases, people like the laws and the setup in one place, but they want to have their talents paid top dollar, and that maybe is a place where the company is in another country.

[00:31:57] country. So that's happening more and more. There are actually [00:32:00] countries that are coming up with digital nomad visas that support that. You have people who have gotten to the point where they feel like, you know what, I'm tired of pushing the rope, to use Ben's analogy before I'm going to go somewhere where I can raise my family and not deal with a lot of racial or other pushback, but I still want to work in whatever country, whether it's the United States, Canada, the UK, et cetera.

[00:32:23] And they move to other places. In fact, New York Times had an article where they call this Blacksit. So that's another thing is this growing number of people that want to work remotely and now have the ability because of technology to do it, even in jobs that used to require you to be there in person.

[00:32:39] We can move on to the next signal. And this signal over here the majority is turning the minority is actually turning into a majority. In the United States, that's about 2045 when that's expected. It's actually not happening immediately in 2045. It's actually happening right now with every passing year.

[00:32:58] And we don't need [00:33:00] to guess or do a lot of, regressive mathematics to figure this out. We just have to look at the children that are around us and what their demographic mix is, realizing that they're the workforce of that period of time. And this is not isolated to the U. S. It's also happening in Europe.

[00:33:15] We can go on to the next signal. Signal number four, the other thing that we're seeing is that international hiring is also growing. This company, Deal publishes a lot of stats on international hiring. In fact, they support international hiring. And as you can see among the top companies, the U.

[00:33:32] S. is there and so are a couple of other places that are familiar to you. Globally organizations are hiring people in other countries, which means that not only are their local populations becoming more diverse, But they're also increasing their diversity by interconnecting across former former country and regional boundaries.

[00:33:50] And fifth signal, if you please. And the fifth signal, Cornyn Ferry just released this not too long ago, saying that the crunch that we're [00:34:00] having in talent, the human talent shortage, is such that By the year 2030, there may be 85 million people, or roughly the equivalent of the population of Germany, that will be needed to fill all the different jobs that organizations will have.

[00:34:14] And unchecked, that will cost organizations about 8. 5 trillion in unrealized annual revenue. So if we flip over to the next slide, the summary outlook is really very simple. The workforce, workplace, marketplace, investor community, increasingly diverse, increasingly global, increasingly distributed, and demanding not only to see nice PR and virtual signaling, but to actually have organizations that can support their

[00:34:42] Ben Brooks: success.

[00:34:43] One Joe, to your point, we have a colleague that's a marketing firm that works with PILOT. He and his wife have a transgender child and they were in Texas and they actually moved to the northwest just because of the laws. And they said, we don't want to be so that the black set for them was for just their child who [00:35:00] was different than their own demographics.

[00:35:02] And then when you mentioned, the corn ferry study, I saw, I was at an event last fall with the P, PNC chief economist and the Ernst and Young chief economist that both said exactly that, that essentially the structural challenge is the labor market will be tight for the next 30 years. So the idea that you can just always hire people or just find out, it's like not, there's going to be a you think the world's growing all these people.

[00:35:22] Qualified labor is going to be in scarcity, so you have to be more attractive. Just having a paycheck won't be enough. Now, I do want to also mention, Joe, there's a lot of questions in the chat about benchmarks and best practices and things. I would imagine, Joe, we've got some of those. I bet you have some ideas around where people could find them.

[00:35:40] Joe, if I'm going to open up people to maybe put some requests in to email through us, that we could maybe, come together and then send something back out to the attendees, would that be okay

[00:35:50] Joe Santana: with you? Yeah sure. And any information that they want, if they go through you, I'd be happy to answer the questions.

[00:35:55] Or in the end, they'll get some they'll get some information on how they can reach me. I'm more than [00:36:00] happy to share. I share a lot of free stuff. I share a weekly newsletter that has a lot of ongoing data on trends and where things are going and so forth. So people can sign up for that as

[00:36:10] Ben Brooks: well.

[00:36:11] So what I'll just ask everyone, I just put an email in there. Layton's my colleague, Layton at pilot. coach. He's not a bot. He's a fabulous person, a wonderful father. He's a musician and he works on the pilot team and very friendly. So if you've got a question, a lot of you, Deidre and Ashley and Mustafa and, bunch of you, Dana have asked about benchmarks, best practices, if you've got a request.

[00:36:32] around DEI. Send them to Leighton. Send everything you got to Leighton. I don't know if we can always answer it, but what we want to do is gather that, because Joe may have a resource, PILOT may have a resource, and we'll start to package that and send that out to everyone, or one off, depending on it.

[00:36:49] But, put in any kind of request around these benchmarks, best practices, resources, etc. into Leighton. Joe, back to you.

[00:36:56] Joe Santana: Yeah, no, absolutely. That's great. That brings us to, how does this [00:37:00] shift the underlying goals of DEI? Well, for the last 60 years beginning in that time period in 1964, a lot of the efforts in DEI were designed to comply with government, regulations, provide a good faith, effort and AAP reports or affirmative action reports to to really brand the employer as being an employer of choice.

[00:37:24] But today, the drivers really are to make sure that the organization is able to effectively engage and fully leverage an increasingly diverse and global workforce in a way that drives real value, to make sure that when you start inviting people into your house, that you also have fashioned your house so they can effectively support the success of the people that are coming in.

[00:37:48] And in turn, that's, supports the success of the of the company. And to do that, it calls for genuine changes to areas that are a lot more than just doing celebrations and, [00:38:00] and putting nice logos out, to show that we support, heritage months and stuff like that. So that is essentially where, where we are.

[00:38:07] today. And and what that calls for, if we flip over to the next to the next slide, so what that calls for is a shift from a focus on signature events, public relations work, to make the company as is more appealing and positive looking externally and internally, to working together to actually reshape policies and practices to make the company more effective you.

[00:38:30] attracting, retaining, leveraging that global diverse workforce and and leveraging global diverse supply chains to serve an equally global and diverse marketplace.

[00:38:42] Ben Brooks: So it sounds like, if I had to summarize, Joe, in a lot of ways it's moving from the sort of looking good to doing good. Yes.

[00:38:48] Absolutely. The, your parents DEI was like some check boxes some optics, some things we can, we got that, we've done it versus this is really changing to [00:39:00] adapt to the future, right? Imagine companies that 20 or 30 years ago were not digital. everything was paper, everything was in person, there was no software.

[00:39:09] Those companies are either gone or they've been gobbled up, right? It was the ones that were leading on that are now the leaders and that's because the context changed. Well, the labor market, for the last 30 40 years has been advantaged employers. It's been a, it's been Pretty easy to get talent.

[00:39:23] And I think it was only in the last 10 or 20 years, this idea of the war for talent was it's like a new concept in 2007 from the McKinsey study. So it's a relatively recent idea that employers are gonna have to work hard to get talent. And so that's something really profound. So in terms of our next question, Laura, if you go to the next slide, please what steps can organizations take today immediately to enhance their current DEI practices?

[00:39:46] While positioning themselves for future success. Kind of a balancing the big picture ambition with also the practicality of the now.

[00:39:54] Joe Santana: Yeah, absolutely. And Laura, you can bring all those up and I'll just go through them step by step. But [00:40:00] to your point, now organizations have to start preparing.

[00:40:03] for that new world that's becoming more distributed, more diverse, more global. And, I was just talking to someone else, and we were talking about organizations being like a battleship. And you know that a battleship, you can't wait until the year 2034 to say, oh, let's do something now because this is upon us.

[00:40:22] That's like a battleship racing toward an island and saying let's wait until we're at least, five nautical miles away before we start to make the turn. It's not going to happen. You're too big, you're moving too fast, and there are too many moving parts. So some of the things that I recommend that people start doing right away is, one, review and adapt the policies you have as needed to support the current workforce that you have.

[00:40:45] And, some of the things that I mentioned, I'm sure that people look at their organizations and they see some of these policies that are out there that are pretty much, you relics from the past that no longer really effectively support everybody who's in the [00:41:00] company right now. Companies are becoming more global, so too let's start looking at how we can structure global DEI practices for a global world, as opposed to trying to export what is.

[00:41:13] ever models we have in our particular region where our companies originated. I see that a lot with American companies that try to engage, let's say, people in, EMEA and other places with words like underrepresented people, or, and this is meaningless in other places. Whereas, let's say, for example, if you're in India, they're going to talk about Dalits, and that's meaningless somewhere else.

[00:41:37] Or if you're in, let's say, England, they have what they call non white minorities, and that means something over there, but what does it mean over here in America? What does it mean in South America or somewhere else? So let's start using language that is more globalized. I wrote an article about that in Forbes.

[00:41:55] which is about upgrading your local DEI practice for for global [00:42:00] relevance and impact. And, it's a great read. It's free. It's out there. Just click on that name and, Google and it'll come up and it'll give you a lot of information on that. Three, leverage your ERGs.

[00:42:11] Leverage any kind of resource group, whether you call them BRGs, ERGs, whatever, name you use. to gain insight into your workforce, not just a polisher employer image. You want to know what women really think about their career opportunities in your organization? Ask them. You could set up a safe place.

[00:42:30] You could set up places where they can provide information, focus groups, and so forth. And that'll give you some insight. If you go out to, let's say, for example, Glassdoor, and you find that women aren't that happy in your company, according to that's an opportunity to go back inside the company and say, Hey, what do you like about this organization in terms of how it supports your success?

[00:42:50] And what do you think we could do better? You can make it sound as non threatening as you want, but that information is pure gold because it tells you where to look to make changes that your [00:43:00] employees then will experience and say, yeah, I feel that changes are happening that are really making this organization better suited for me.

[00:43:07] Likewise, 4 do the same thing with your market and your supply chain opportunities. Again, Find out from these ERGs what, what they think, and also how they can help. There are organizations that have actually I know one airline that made millions of dollars just by listening to some of their ERGs and finding out how they could create packages for people who through their faith required travel for certain times of the year.

[00:43:35] These ERGs can do a lot more for an organization than simply do celebrations. And again, I say simply, but I don't mean to belittle that. I think that's great that they do that, but they can do so much more if you leverage them correctly. Five, don't appoint people into an ERG and then just, leave them there to figure out what they're to do.

[00:43:55] I've been to a lot of organizations where people say we have five ERGs, [00:44:00] one is great, and one is, is on life support. And they think it's the leader here is really great, and the four leaders over here aren't that great. A good organization actually supports people so that most people come up as great.

[00:44:12] Most people are average. So if only outstanding people can perform in the highest ways in your organization, your structure is not supporting high performance. Look at yourself, what you can do, maybe there's training needed, maybe this particular leader didn't have the background or the experience that the other person had when they came into this role.

[00:44:31] You want to make sure that they're successful so that they can they can drive value. Six is avoid using just correlation and emotional appeals when you want to drive value. change or drive actual efforts within your organization. And the reason for that is really very simple. If you're asking for a couple of, a couple of hundred dollars to run a women's celebration day, you don't need to make a, you don't need to put a big business case for that.

[00:44:59] But if [00:45:00] you are in a women's group and you discover that maybe some of the pay disparities or other things that we were talking about before are the key issue that are hurting your organization. You got to put a good business case together because you're asking your organization to invest as, Ben was describing a lot of time, a lot of resources.

[00:45:17] It's not an easy thing to do. So for the hard things to do, you need a business case. And a business case is not saying McKinsey says that organizations that support diversity, make 35 percent more revenue. That's a correlation. A business case is, hey, we're bleeding 20 million of turnover, and it's because of this particular policy, and if we invest 100, 000 in that, it'll eliminate 20 million.

[00:45:44] That's a business case. And you don't need to be a financial genius or become a math whiz to do that. Work with finance organization, work with your own internal people analytics team. They have all that data already and they can help you put that together. And then [00:46:00] finally in seven, instead of reacting to emerging needs, you need to anticipate and prepare for them by tracking signals.

[00:46:07] We don't live in an era anymore where it's good enough. to just see it coming and then react to it. We live in an era where by the time you see it coming, it's too late to react to it. So we need to anticipate and there are plenty of ways of getting data and and the signals out there that will tell you which way we're going.

[00:46:26] And that is essentially what my organization does, the CDO Power Circle. So I work with chief diversity officers actually to prepare them to do that and shore up their organization so they could perform at that level.

[00:46:39] Ben Brooks: Well, great. And again, if you there's a QR code here, we'll have more information.

[00:46:42] And again, Layton is going to have information. Joe wrote a great article that we're going to send out to anybody that wants it, which is the seven key takeaways and information on joining the Chief Diversity Officer Power Circle. So again Leighton is our, is the face of our [00:47:00] company when it comes to this.

[00:47:01] He is very responsive on email, so those of you that have sent in benchmark, other requests, needs, that's that. Another thing I, that, that is, this is, I'm gonna surprise my team here a little bit. This is, I'm gonna, Surprised just a little bit. We actually have a pretty cool swag store at PILOT. We've got, beach bags and athletic jackets and cool dog bulls and AirPods and all these different things that are branded.

[00:47:23] , if you want to book an appointment to talk to one of our people at PILOT, the first five people that do that today, we've never done this before, by the way, I'm freestyling, but the first five people that do that today, and we'll put the link in the chat.

[00:47:33] We'll let you shop in the SAG swag store. You can pick the item, the color, the size you tell that company, not even us, what your address is, where you want it shipped, etc, but it's so it's a nice swag. A lot of our customers, we had people that are asking if they can buy it from us.

[00:47:45] I'll tell you what, we'll give it to you for the first five year that, that book a brief chat with one of our team. And again, we can just talk shop. Doesn't have to be a pitch or anything. We can just talk shop. , go ahead. I

[00:47:53] Joe Santana: was gonna say really quick, there's a question there that I can answer with one line that I don't know if I have enough time.

[00:47:58] And that question is, how do you [00:48:00] incorporate ERGs at this high level when they're volunteers? And the answer to that is another question, which is, if they're operating at that high level, should they just be volunteers? Should they just be volunteers, or should we, if you're going to do celebrations and so forth, that's low demand.

[00:48:17] If you're going to do things like provide that kind of information that provides that kind of value to an organization, then unless you're in a charitable organization that supplies like some kind of, higher level mission, but if you're in a for profit, then I think that's something that should be compensated.

[00:48:33] Ben Brooks: Laura, could you move us to the last slide there real quick, please? And, again this is a from Nestle, one of our big partners there. Again, our mission is for everyone to feel powerful at work. We've been rolling out there. Their CTO is sponsoring our work there. That's where it moves from, let's have a a celebration day in the cafeteria to let's invest.

[00:48:50] We talked to Chief Diversity Officer Joe a couple of months ago that said, Leadership and employee development is an equity play. Part of how you level the [00:49:00] playing field is you level up the talent. So I think that is that, that's great. And then Laurie, can we move to the thank you slide real quick?

[00:49:08] Again, if you're looking for your SHRM or your HRCI credits, they are in the chat and you're eligible for one recertification credit. We have a a timeline that we can stick to for the certification. So. If you need to go you're certified, you're qualified, you saw it all. But just as a little bonus, Joe, do you have another five minutes for any last questions people could drop in the chat?

[00:49:31] People can leave, but if you've got last questions Joe, do you have another five minutes to stay on real

[00:49:35] Joe Santana: quick? Sure, I could stay on. I can stay on. Great. Absolutely. Happy to do it. Put

[00:49:40] Ben Brooks: it, put them in the chat. If you've got any questions or anybody, I will say, that it your point about the business case I've seen often ERG or DEI folks make this 13 slide deck for a 7, 000 ask.

[00:49:53] And it's inverted, right? You're like, versus that should be an email, right? That should be a text, or [00:50:00] maybe you just can allow to spend that. So again, don't, don't put that much rigor because it makes it actually seem a little suspect. You have to put so much kind of gunpowder behind a 7, 000 ask.

[00:50:09] versus the really big ones. So I think that's really key. And like you said, we often have people that are more engaged in their DEI work than their core day job, and they're really good at it. And if so that's something to, consider again, do you create a role around that?

[00:50:24] And they may bring a lot of passion to that, et cetera. And that just know that is a thing. And and and Rianne has mentioned about Nestle and some water. I think Nestle water is actually spun out from their business. Now it's a separate business, which I know that there's some work around some of the sustainability pieces as well, but I can't really speak to that Rianne.

[00:50:41] Any last words of wisdom, Joe, that you'd give? I got a couple ideas, but any last words of wisdom before we wrap

[00:50:47] Joe Santana: up? Yeah, I think that we've said it in a nutshell is that we who are in this space, in the DEI space, need to step up to this opportunity. There is an opportunity here that I [00:51:00] think amidst all the noise is being missed, and that is the opportunity to have a tremendous impact on these organizations.

[00:51:06] That's good for the organization, good for society in general. And in many cases, what you just said right now, I smiled because you had said it during the interview I did with you, which is that A lot of people put together these huge business cases, like, when they're asking for 5, 000, 7, 000, don't need it for that.

[00:51:24] But for some of this big stuff, you do need it, and you can easily get the information you need by just going to finance, going to people analytics, and asking a couple of questions. And yeah, I think that there's a, despite all the noise. The signals are that DEI is going to continue growing, whether we'll call it DEI or whether, the companies will use different ways of describing this, the actual work of improving the way different people work in an organization and across their markets, as the world becomes more diverse and more global, that is a must have in order for [00:52:00] organizations to continue to grow and thrive.

[00:52:03] Ben Brooks: And I think Joe, to your point about maybe you take the DEI training and you call it teamwork effectiveness, you mentioned, I call that the Trojan horse approach to DEI. Sometimes you don't use the trigger word or a thing that people might dismiss as woke or something else like that.

[00:52:18] And instead you just use the thing that matters to people. I remember my old company, we were working on some of this and all we cared about is organic growth. So I didn't call it DEI, I said it was a growth strategy. And everyone's oh, we got time and money for growth.

[00:52:31] That's our biggest priority, right? So it's speaking into people's listening. And ultimately, rather than this be a moral cause, right? This is a commercial and competitive cause because, you think about, Ford Motor Company, great organization, great company. Their F 150 is the best selling vehicle on the planet.

[00:52:50] Best selling vehicle on the planet. Very successful. But guess who largely doesn't buy F 150s? Women. Women. So guess what? If they want to sell more F 150s, What are [00:53:00] they going to have to do? They're going to have to look at things like the weight of the tailgate, and they started to spring load the tailgate.

[00:53:06] Guess what happened when they did that? You know who's satisfaction with the F 150 went up? Men. Men are like, this damn thing's been so heavy forever. I don't like it either, right? So it's not, so what, the research shows typically what's good for DEI is good for everyone. Because when you're making things more inclusive, more equitable, more diverse, you actually are, people are not losing out in this regard.

[00:53:30] And so when we make our products, our service, our culture, we say, Oh, women need flexibility. Yes. And there's a lot of research that supports having better female representation in the workforce. And we provided a pilot and I believe in it completely, but you know who else, you know, who else needs flexibility?

[00:53:45] Every freaking person needs flexibility. Everyone's got a mom, or a kid, or a dentist, or a chronic condition, or a community organization, or their faith, or their wellness, or volunteerism, or something else. We can say we're doing flexibility for [00:54:00] women, and that's great, that's the reason that gets it across the board, because I stand for having, a much more equitable workplace for women, and here in Women's History Month.

[00:54:07] Bye. It's also that, yeah, there's other people that will benefit from that too. And so I think that's a part of it is realize that this isn't just for a special group or super minority group of people. This is typically raising all boats and that's a part of the conversation. And when you do that, then you're more competitive.

[00:54:25] You get more than your fair share of talent. You have a better pickup truck compared to your competitors that more people like. For reasons that may be less obvious or harder to duplicate or copy a Super Bowl ad, every pickup truck company can make easily, right? You just spend a bunch of money. But the nuance to add, a steering wheel that moves in and out and a tailgate that's spring loaded and floorboards that move in and out and changing the rims so you don't have a dress that gets dirt on it when they get out of the vehicle.

[00:54:52] Guess what? Men don't want dirt on their pants. That's right. It's not about a dress, right? It's just that finally someone said, this doesn't work. Exactly. [00:55:00] And so I think that's some of the lessons we can take in all of this, that this is what makes organizations more competitive by being more thoughtful, and thoughtfulness is something that money can't

[00:55:09] Joe Santana: buy.

[00:55:09] Exactly. Exactly. Well said. That is exactly what it is, and as the world keeps changing, it's, maybe somebody else can do what Ford did, but now they're the Me Too. They're no longer the leader in that particular space. And once people start buying a particular brand and they feel comfortable with that brand, you and I know it's hard to extract them and pull them in a different direction.

[00:55:32] So organizations that lead by taking those moves to prepare for the 21st century, those are going to be the ones that thrive. And the other ones that try to be the fast, the old model was, we're not going to be on the leading edge. We're going to be the fast followers. That may have worked in the 1900s and not good enough for the 20th.

[00:55:50] Ben Brooks: Absolutely. It looks like Kara said this has, been helpful and Jacqueline says it's reassuring and inspiring. I'll leave you with one last story and we'll wrap up is that, the PILOT, right? [00:56:00] Name of our company. I love aviation. I know a lot about it. I used to work in the industry.

[00:56:03] And when it comes to the profession of PILOT, someone that operates an aircraft for commercial airlines, the old way that made it, was you were served in the military. Yeah. And then you, that was your pilot school, right? Very good learning application, right? Best leadership development environment on the planet is the military.

[00:56:19] And so you, you did that and then you go, and you have no debt, right? And you go work for an airline, right? Now, you gotta go to Embry Riddle University and you gotta pay 150 or 200, 000 in tuition and then you gotta go make 30, 000 being a flight instructor and then you make 35, 000 working at American Eagle and all this stuff and work flying through the night and deadheading.

[00:56:39] Thank you. And it's an unstandable profession that's 90 percent white men. And United Airlines invested and they said, you know what, we have to think differently. This is not your parents DEI. Instead of just saying, oh, we want to hire black and female and Latino and Latina and LGBT pilots, they said, we actually have to build a supply chain of talent.[00:57:00]

[00:57:00] pipeline. They started their own flight school. It's called Aviate. It's in Goodyear, Arizona. It's a wonderful case study. And it's, they pay for the tuition. And if you graduate, they guarantee you a job at United Airlines eventually. Now pilots at United eventually, they can make 350, 000 a year and they fly a few days a month.

[00:57:20] So it's a really wonderful job. And what they did is they insisted, though, that 50 percent of the incoming class be women or people of color, which would really help change the demographics. And mind you, every airline is short on pilots. It's a huge retirement cliff. So they need pilots because they can't grow the airline or fly new routes or take new planes unless they have people to operate them.

[00:57:42] So they went way down into people coming out of high school or college and creating a flight school where their first class had 80%. underrepresented minority demographics in the class. And now it's become the place in the industry to go if you're looking for a [00:58:00] job because one, you're guaranteed a job, two, you have no debt and they pay for it, and three, you're welcome no matter who you are.

[00:58:06] So they're going to have an amazing long term competitive advantage because they really thought ahead and it would be difficult for someone to stand up a pilot or flight school in a year. That's a long term play and certifications and licensing and real estate and capital. all that. So these are the kind of things the checkmate kind of moves, whether it's a tailgate or a flight school.

[00:58:25] This is how organizations can be more competitive, not just as the nice things to do, it's the way to really win and dominate in the market of the future.

[00:58:32] Laura Mastrorocco: Absolutely. That's a great example, Ben. Once again, reassuring and inspiring. And on that note, Joe, thank you so much for joining us. Ben, we appreciate your insights and have a great rest of your day, everyone.

[00:58:46] There is hope for

[00:58:47] Ben Brooks: the future. Thank you, Laura, for all your help, too. I know we had a lot to juggle today, but you did a great job and we love working with you.

[00:58:53] Joe Santana: Thank you, Laura. Thank you, Ben. Pleasure being here. Bye bye.