Cindy Lu:
Well, hello there. This is Cindy Lu with CHRO partners and I'm joined with Chris Sinclair. And I'll have Chris introduce himself in a minute but today, we're going to talk about D&I lessons from the perspective of a head of HR who doesn't have somebody dedicated solely just to the D&I function. So, Chris, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, as well as PMG.

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. Thank you, Cindy. I'm super happy to be talking to you. I'm Chris Sinclair. I'm the head of HR for PMG. We're a marketing and advertising agency with kind of offices throughout the U.S. and also in the U.K. I've been in HR leadership for the past six, seven years and prior to that, I was actually in marketing. So I'm a reformed marketer. Originally from Scotland in the U.K. Don't judge the accent. It's a bit muddled but been in Texas for the past 10, 11 years and I'm a big fan.

Cindy Lu:
You say y'all occasionally or no, never?

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. When the mood strikes. I'll try and throw one in to this conversation then.

Cindy Lu:
So Chris you all have been through a really interesting journey and I'm always interested when an organization doesn't have somebody dedicated to D&I and can move as quickly as you have. Tell us where this journey started for you.

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. And we've been focused on D&I for a few years now and we have diversity inclusion groups and we've done some trainings on unconscious bias, microaggression group. So we've done I think what we now realize was just kind of the bare minimum but I think after the George Floyd murder and the kind of inflection point in our country, I think that our leadership team kind of sat down and we kind of realized, "All right, we've kind of fallen short and we haven't done enough and ..." So that was part of it. And then the other part was, I think our employees also kind of told us, "Hey, as an organization, we haven't done enough." And I think we're fortunate to have the kind of culture where our employees give us feedback and our employees do speak up.

Chris Sinclair:
I think whenever that's the case, then, I mean, it's a great sounding board and a great point of feedback for sort of leadership and for HR to understand, okay, where do we need to improve? So I kind of think it was a little bit of a combination of those things and it helped that our CEO was kind of very passionate about it as well and he was one of the first to say, "All right, we have to be part of the change." So yeah, I mean, I guess it was part timing and just part reflection and part the feedback from our teams.

Cindy Lu:
So you mentioned you had already done some training on unconscious bias, microaggressions, and you felt like it was sort of the bare minimum. When this inflection point happened, what was sort of the first steps you all took?

Chris Sinclair:
Once we committed to this being something that we felt we needed to focus on, the first thing we did was we built a task force. So we were very conscious that this shouldn't be something that is purely driven by HR. And we as HR professionals, I think we're prone to want to own things and kind of drive things. And this one is no different. So as a HR leader there was some discomfort that there wasn't going to be solely our group that was going to drive it but we realized to do this right and to get all the perspectives that we needed into the conversation, it has to be kind of a cross functional group that you bring in to drive it. So our group had a couple of us from the executive team. Then I had several people from across different functions, different levels of seniority, different demographic groups were represented in that group as well. And so there were about nine or 10 of us in total.

Chris Sinclair:
And so that was the starting point. It was like you got to get the right team with a variety of perspectives and a variety of voices in the room to start talking about this and what you should do. So that was the starting point for us and then-

Cindy Lu:
Did you nominate people? Do people apply to be part of this group or how did you go about that?

Chris Sinclair:
We're fortunate. So we're just under 300 employees as a company so I think we're in the fortunate position that we know our employees relatively well. And so we kind of know the folks who are passionate about this. And we also knew the people who were speaking up in that moment as well. And so a lot of the people that we pulled into that group were the ones who were kind of raising their hand or were kind of active in the community around these issues. We invited them to be part of the conversation. And, of course, it was inviting them. If they didn't want to, of course, that was okay but we found generally our employees were very eager. We still have more volunteers than we have kind of spots we're able to give in terms of engaging with the initiatives.

Chris Sinclair:
So I think if you involve your employees you'll find that a huge number of them really want to help in some way. So, yeah, it was a little bit of a combination of people who had already raised their hand and us going ahead and saying, "Hey, you seem to have a really great perspective on this. Would you like to be part of the group?"

Cindy Lu:
Oh, that's great. So you put the task force together. What happens next?

Chris Sinclair:
Well, I would say after that figuring out where to actually start is really hard.

Cindy Lu:
I'm glad you said that. I hear that all the time.

Chris Sinclair:
It's really difficult because D&I is not something that you can decouple from any area of the business. It is part of every area of the business. So it's really hard to know where to start. So we kind of broke it down and we tried to simplify it and we did that in a couple of ways. The first was we said at a high level what we want to do is we want to know where we are today with diversity inclusion in our organization. We wanted to find where we want to go. And then we wanted to find, "Okay, how are we going to get there?" And the where are we today turned into kind of an audit not which I can talk more about and all the things we looked at. Where we want to go became, "Okay, what are the targets and what are the goals that we want to set?"

Chris Sinclair:
And then how we're going to get there was kind of the nuts and bolts of the plan of figuring how are we going to do that. So we tried to break it down because I think you have to to make it even kind of manageable. So that was kind of how we did it. And then when it came to the audit piece which kind of the where we are because if you understand where you are the rest of the journey becomes easier because you see where the gaps are or the issues are or the opportunities are. So the way we broke that down and we spoke to a couple of different people outside the organization who are much more experts at this stuff than we are because again, we don't have a diversity inclusion leader within our organization who's dedicated to it.

Chris Sinclair:
We talked about, "Okay, when we're looking at where we are today, let's look at kind of three things. The first is the environment; the workplace environment and the culture. So what is it like to work there? And let's look at talent and what are our talent practices: how do we hire, how do we train, how do we assess performance, how do we reward, all the talent practices." So that part sits most squarely in HR and then the last part was more around kind of external. And how do we live as a company within the broader industry and the community. And looking at our partnerships and how we market ourselves externally and kind of all those things that are a bit more external to the organization, so. That helped to define the things we would look at. And I think giving yourself a little bit of structure around it really helps because it kind of gives you some points on the horizon to work towards. So that really helped us and got us started.

Cindy Lu:
And I hear some of those experts came from your HR circle group. Sorry, I can't help it. I got to give a plug.

Chris Sinclair:
I think they may have done. They may have done, Cindy. And it was hugely valuable conversations because I think sometimes even just a small piece of advice of "okay, here's a framework" or "here's how to think about it," that can be a huge unlock in your mind especially when you don't know where to get started. So that was huge.

Cindy Lu:
Oh you know, no point in reinventing the way all right if somebody has already figured it out. So way to go. That's also some lofty ... I mean, it's like, how did you even decide what's reasonable or what's achievable?

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. Our company as a whole, we tend to bite off more than we can chew. So we're kind of used to doing that. And I think some would argue we probably did that with this as well, but we wanted to be very ambitious. So our goals are very ambitious. You'll see in the things we've shared publicly. Our goals are very ambitious. Our plan is very ambitious and our timelines are very ambitious, but some of my team didn't love me immediately after the plan came out but it's okay. So obviously you got to make sure that things are realistic. What you don't want to do is set goals and an agenda that you're going to fall woefully short off because that is, of course, you're not going to drive change and then it's going to be a negative perception from your employees but you also don't want to have goals and a plan that seems too easy to accomplish.

Chris Sinclair:
So the somewhere in between those is the sweet spot where you want to challenge yourself and your organization because we all have to drive the kind of change we need to drive within our companies and within the world. We've got to challenge ourselves on this stuff. And so we definitely did that but our perspective is, "Okay, if we do everything in our plan and we approach it with the same enthusiasm and energy that we're approaching creating the plan, we'll get it done." So there's definitely a sweet spot for how ambitious you go.

Cindy Lu:
So I love how you talked about how it's impossible to decouple it from everything else that's going on in your organization but just to focus in more specifically on your talent practices just because we don't have all day. What's the biggest area or maybe a couple of examples of how you're breaking down the tasks and saying we need to redesign processes and whether it's talent acquisition or talent management or compensation?

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. We definitely are spending a lot of time looking at our talent acquisition functions and our practices. There's kind of two kind of challenges and again, you can separate them but you have kind of representation which is even though you don't have obviously the diversity that you need in your workforce and then you have inclusion which is the environment is not set up in a way that's going to retain or develop diverse talent. So from a representation perspective the data we pulled on our workforce showed us that we had work to do when it came to bringing more diverse talent into the organization. So we spent a lot of time looking at ... And we'll continue to looking at our kind of recruiting practice and where are we posting jobs, how are we sourcing for candidates.

Chris Sinclair:
We use a lot on our referral program. We, like a lot of businesses, have built a lot of our business on referrals. And referrals are great. And all the data shows that they perform really well and you can retain them well and all that, but it's a double edged sword because if you don't have a diverse workforce and then you bring a lot of referrals it tends to be people who are like which we already have. We already offer an incentive for employees to bring referrals but we're looking at offering a higher incentive if someone also refers a diverse candidate. That and just having people be more mindful about who they're referring based on the team and what really makes a strong team. And what makes a strong team is having diversity.

Chris Sinclair:
So just educating our teams on that I think is important as well. And also our graduate program. We bring a lot of graduates to PMG and so we looked at the schools that we partner with and look at ... We need more HBCU partnerships, we need more HSI partnerships, we need more intern programs. So those are also things that it kind of increase the diversity of the candidate pool. And then once you kind of get your candidate pool to be kind of more diverse and more reflective of the type of workforce you want, then you kind of have to look at how do you interview and select talent. Make sure that when you're getting that really great, diverse candidate in the door that they have the same opportunity as every other candidate to be successful in the process. Whether that's the resume screening or interviewing or what have you.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah. I've seen a lot of bottlenecks at the sourcing stage, right? So in a previous life I used to work for a search firm and we did experienced hiring for a global management consulting firm. So diversity was key. In fact, their HR executives their bonuses were tied to diversity. So what was interesting is if it took a hundred candidates to get a typical slate, it would take about double that to have a diverse slate. And our bonuses, as a firm, were also tied to a diverse slate. So we also had skin in the game. So that was a really interesting exercise because a lot of people will say, "Hey, we want to have diverse slates." But they're not willing to put sort of the time or the money. It just takes more time and money. And so if you want a diverse slate, it's going to take twice as many candidates and you also have to have more patience, right?

Chris Sinclair:
Right. [inaudible 00:15:37] rework some processes and some things that are already there which again, takes time and resource and some money but ultimately it's going to drive what you want in the long term. Yeah. Absolutely.

Cindy Lu:
Another idea I heard from a university in the Midwest, the provost office actually would set aside a budget for top diverse candidates. And they would say to the departments, "Look, if you don't have the budget this year, the provost office will fund. If you find the A player who is of a diverse candidate, just hire them and we'll put them in our budget for the first year then you have to figure it out the next year." So I thought that was really brilliant from a ... Okay. Putting your money where your mouth is, right?

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. No. That's great. That's really great. From a internal hiring perspective, we kind of look to see, "Okay, what is the ..." As we kind of get progressive we get more senior in the organization, what does the representation look like? How does it change? And like a lot of companies, we become less diverse the more senior we go in our organization. So from an internal hiring perspective, we need to put a much greater emphasis on ensuring that diverse members of our team have opportunity to be promoted into new positions, that they get opportunities to take on stretch projects, that the way that our performance management kind of system is set up, it truly is kind of fair and equitable for everybody.

Chris Sinclair:
So we don't want to purely be recruiting from the outside because we all know some of our best talent is already within our organization. So that's been a really big focus too. And then the one other thing I would say is from a leadership perspective, it's super, super important that at the highest level of your organization you do have diversity there. So that's another focus that we have. Is to increase the diversity levels of our executive team and kind of our senior leadership team because I think that speaks a lot about your organization. And I think it also is going to be to kind of the point of moving people up through the organization. It's a lot harder for people to feel like that's achievable if they look up and they don't see anybody who looks like them, right?

Cindy Lu:
Yeah.

Chris Sinclair:
So I think that's something else that we're kind of focused on. Is making sure that the top layer of our organization which will require some external hiring, is diverse.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah. I think that's really smart to work it from both ends obviously because if they don't see someone who looks like them, who can help sort of mentor them, it's a challenge and that's where we hear most companies having a big challenge, so. That's brilliant. So as you start to look at these talent practices, I'm sure it's sort of like the foundation of the talent practices have to be good to begin with, right? It's probably helped improve some of these processes just as you consider the diversity element.

Chris Sinclair:
It has. As we've sat and had conversation and we've reflected, it's expanded our view of what diversity is and this came from one of the more kind of junior members of the task force is they kind of looked at our learning and development practice and they kind of looked at the content and said, we, technically, we're a great agency and where everybody's very technically proficient with their job in the day and day, which is, of course, really, really important. But we kind of looked at and we said we don't have enough content on creativity and innovation. How do you help develop people to be more innovative and to think differently? A big part of diversity is diversity of thought as well, so.

Chris Sinclair:
And if we're only developing our people primarily on technical capability and that's how also we're assessing performance then we're missing a pretty big opportunity to be encouraging to kind of different perspectives and different ways of thinking that we need within the organization. So we're taking a really hard look at our R and D function and what are the curriculums and what are the learning paths we put people through to make sure that we're covering a lot more soft-skill, a lot more creativity, a lot ... We'll still cover technical and how to get their job done because that's important but putting additional emphasis on these other areas. Because even if we bring a demographically diverse workforce and we bring them all in and just kind of trends to do just the technical thing like "here's the way it's done, go do it" then I think we fall short, so.

Chris Sinclair:
Fundamentally, we're looking at kind of everything and obviously pay, equity and rewards is another big part of kind of what we're looking at. And also what it takes to be a leader at our company. We're looking at that too because I think that inclusive leadership has to be a huge, huge focus for all of us. If we bring diverse talent to our organization but they're not in an inclusive environment and their leaders are not leading in an inclusive way then the voices don't get heard so that's another big focus for us.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah. I think the leadership topic is very interesting because having been brought up by Chinese parents, right? Who I was actually not born in this country myself, there's a certain directness that I was brought up with and I didn't even realize it until I had traveled to China to adopt my daughter. And she was sucking her thumb and this total stranger just came up to us on the street and just yanked her thumb out of her mouth and said, "Don't let your child suck her thumb." And I know it was from a good place. And I'm like, "Oh." I'm like, "Now I know where I get that directness from." So, so many leadership stories that I can tie back to culture, right? And that's for another time but I think what you maybe have been brought up with may not necessarily be the leadership gold standard that people can handle, right? So

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. I mean, I was brought up in the U.K. where they're very polite and that ... I'm upset. I'm very rude. I always stood out. No. That's not true. My culture was also much less direct so I've had to kind of adapt to that a little bit over here as well, so. We all come from a slightly different place, a different perspective and I just one of the really ... I think the silver lining that is going to come off all this kind of turmoil that we've gone through is I think hopefully we'll have a bit more appreciation that different perspectives are valuable and people coming from different places are valuable. There isn't a right perspective or background. It's the combination that makes it great.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah. That's awesome. So it sounds like you guys are in the middle of this journey. We'll certainly have to circle back around maybe in a year and see kind of where things are, but what were some big challenges or lessons learned as you went through that that might help others?

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. I think there were several. One we've already talked about which is just the ... I would say just being overwhelmed by where do I go and how do I get started. I think give yourself grace I would say on that. We all want the perfect response to things that is going to make everybody happy and having one hurrah. When the topic is this kind of personal and emotionally charged that you're going to have a response that is perfect everybody. So you kind of have to accept that. You have to accept that sometimes you're going to stumble on the words and sometimes things aren't going to be perfect and that's okay. I think the majority of people will just appreciate that you're opening up the conversation and that you're driving some actions. I think that helped us to get over some of that initial kind of paralysis.

Chris Sinclair:
The next challenge is kind of when you're looking at auditing where you are today, data. In HR, we don't always have the cleanest or the best data, apparently; they say about us. So that was a challenge. And you tend to have to go into all the kind of dark corners of the HRIS and other places in spreadsheets to get the data you need to understand what does my candidate pool look like? And what's my workforce look like and what has the promotion rate being for different groups in my company and as you start to pull that data together, allow yourself some time because that takes awhile and also allow the data not to be perfect because I don't think HR data is ever perfect. So that was a challenge.

Chris Sinclair:
It's mostly just time and perseverance. And then the other challenge I think is just these are uncomfortable and tough conversations to have and especially when you get ... And we've been very transparent with our employees. Obviously we let a group of employees in to all of the data basically to see everything with the taskforce group. And then we presented out to the company almost everything that we had and that we'd analyze. It's is tough to do that especially when some of the data doesn't look great. So there's a level of discomfort. And we being crazy marketing people, we went a step further and put everything on our website and said this is our commitment and this is ability. So that was uncomfortable too but you have to get over it.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah. I know it's public but can I share that real quick?

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. Of course.

Cindy Lu:
It was really impressive which is part of why I wanted to talk to you about this. Just that the pace [sharing screen] ... Whoops, sorry about that. I've got the wrong screen going here. Speaking of data-

Chris Sinclair:
You can edit it. You can edit that out.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah. Sorry. You kind of just go with it. All right. So this is your homepage and it's the first thing you see. Do you want to kind of walk us through? So is this-

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. So if you click on that, in our industry, the advertising and media industry, there's this group called 600 & Rising which you can read more about that but they basically challenged our industry and the agencies within our industry to do several things. But one of the things was "Okay, those of you who are committed to this, show the data." The level of data they asked for was the level of data that we provided and there's a little bit of distance between those two just because whenever we do something as company we go all in, which is what we did here. But effectively we took the majority of the audit that we did and the majority of the plan that we created and we put it on the site and we said, "Here's our commitment. We stand behind it." We knew that some of the data we have ton of improvement to make and a ton of room to grow. And we just kind of said that's okay.

Chris Sinclair:
And the other part for our commitment was that each year we will release updated data on our progress. So that's kind of part of our commitment externally. Internally we're going to do it quarterly. We're going to provide our employees with an update on what we've achieved, what the data looks like today, and also just open up to their feedback and their questions. And so again, those commitments are uncomfortable too because you really got to stand behind your plan. So you'll see all our workforce data is on here. I think our candidate data is on here. It shows things by level of organization. It shows things by overall workforce. It shows a lot of data and a lot of the details of what we're going to do to be better, so.

Cindy Lu:
Kind of a level of accountability by just putting it out there for the world, right? Not just your employees. To me this is also a great attraction tool, right? Candidates who come to your website and see this, I think it's going to, at this point, be a differentiator but at some point it could be if you don't have it ... It's just like in the old days, right? If you are like, "Oh, I don't need a website." Right?

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah.

Cindy Lu:
And so at some point having something like this publicly out there for your organization maybe one of the first things that candidates take a look at.

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. I mean, I hope so. I really hope so. And another thing when we were looking at where we are today, we did look at our employer brand and how we show up and the visuals on our website, who is featured on our website, the voices on our website, our job descriptions. We looked at all of that and we found that that didn't show the level of diversity or the level of inclusion that we wanted to put out in the world. So that as well was another thing that we looked at is how are we showing up to candidates.

Chris Sinclair:
Because if you want to attract more diverse sets of candidates, if your brand doesn't reflect those values and they go onto your website and they can't see things that resonate with them or people that look like them or they can't feel your commitment to it, then there's a good chance that they're not going to apply or be interested. So I think you make a really good point. You kind of have to think about candidates and how can you make sure that they see your commitment to this as well.

Cindy Lu:
Right. All right. Well, this is amazing, Chris. What's next for the project? I shouldn't make to call it a project, right? It should just be a sort of part of the whole part of doing business.

Chris Sinclair:
That's right. I mean, we're certainly viewing it like it's going to be a core pillar of the business going forward and it's going to be something that is moving throughout the business. Back to kind of what we're talking about it. It can't be a line item. That it can't be decoupled. So we have what is a fairly robust kind of plan to work on. We kind of view that as let's build up the foundations. This is something that we are going to reassess every quarter. We're going to look at how we did against goals. We're going to look at the action steps. And we also realize that some of the actions that we've put in place a couple months ago we may get to next quarter or the start of the year and decide, "Okay, those are not the right action steps." So we want to kind of evolve it, so.

Cindy Lu:
Keep it agile.

Chris Sinclair:
Right. Keep it agile. And certainly at a minimum we'll be looking at each year, "Okay, what's our plan for this year? How are we going to be better? How are we going to push forward?" And really having those accountability measures of showing the data I think will help not only to kind of direct the plan but also just to make sure that we keep up that momentum and the energy behind it.

Cindy Lu:
So last question. I want to just hear how people felt once you got this posted and what did it feel like internally for you and your staff?

Chris Sinclair:
Yeah. I mean, there's was a lot of pride I think when we did it. On the one hand there was this strong acknowledgement that we hadn't done enough and that's a big ... If you read the statement that'll come through. There's a lot of humility in that statement which is part of our culture. But I think there was also a lot of pride of being part of a company who was a, willing to make these commitments from the very top driven in a large part by our CEO all the way down. I think there was a lot of pride in that statement in the page that you just looked at and the fact that we put all of that out there. I think the goals we've set they're pretty ambitious goals. So I think that the employees were pretty proud of that.

Chris Sinclair:
And I think it definitely helped to kind of create even more of a sense of community and togetherness within the company to ... Like, "Let's go and get this done and let's go and kind of make a difference." So I'd say from a relationship between the company and employees perspective, I think it's been pretty transformational I'd say from that perspective.

Cindy Lu:
That's great. Well, thank you, Chris. And I understand you'll be attending the big HR diversity event coming up.

Chris Sinclair:
I'm looking forward to it. Very much looking forward to it.

Cindy Lu:
Yeah. So everybody make sure you go by and say hello to Chris. We'll definitely have some very interactive sessions. Everybody will be on Zoom. Video on. Maybe we'll have people on mute during the speakers but it's going to be highly interactive and make sure you tap Chris on the shoulder and tell him what a great job he's doing, so.

Chris Sinclair:
Please do speak.

Cindy Lu:
All right. Well, thanks everyone for joining us today. And we'll definitely do follow up maybe next year after you publish your second report and check in and see how things are going, right?

Chris Sinclair:
I'd love to. Thanks so much, Cindy.

Cindy Lu:
Yep. Thanks.