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Creating a Diverse Workforce in NH

Published Thursday Jan 4, 2018

Author SHERYL RICH-KERN


Staff members at WEI participate in a team meeting. Courtesy photo.


While many CEOs want a diverse workforce, how they define that diversity and achieve it varies from company to company. When the Diversity Workforce Coalition (DWC) surveyed businesses in 2014 on how they define diversity in their own organizations, most executives honed in on race and religion, says Tina Sharby, president of the DWC and chief human resources officer at Easterseals NH. That surprised her, she says, because in NH, persons of color comprise only 9.2 percent of the population, with the majority situated in the Greater Manchester and Greater Nashua regions.

Giving diversity a face based on color or religious garb is only one dimension of a multicultural organization, says Kim Dukes, founder of DSP Executive Search, a Cambridge-based diversity recruitment firm and former executive vice president of diversity recruitment for KNF&T Staffing Resources in Boston. What’s underrepresented in one organization—for example, women in an electrical engineering firm—inverts in another—for example, men in nursing departments. Diversity can also cut across socio-economic lines, gender or gender identities, sexual orientation, educational attainment, age, physical challenges or political biases.

“Diversity is an imperative to support your clients better,” says Dukes, and it also makes good business sense. Companies in the top quartile of diversity are better able to win top talent, strengthen client relationships and increase retention compared to the national averages of their competitors, according to a 2015 report, “Diversity Matters,” compiled by McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm.

Another reason companies focus on diversity is that it drives innovation and increases market share, according to 2013 research from the nonprofit Center for Talent Innovation (CTI). “Our workplace has to represent our customer base and our community,” says Todd Grubbs, COO of Worldcom Exchange Inc., known as WEI, in Salem. The IT support firm employs around 100, with half the heads of its 10 departments representing diverse backgrounds.

Its co-founder, Belisario Rosas, is Peruvian, and he encourages collaboration from all employees. A diverse workforce makes that approach stronger as new ideas often spring from heterogenous brainstorming, he says.


WEI Co-founder, Belisario Rosas, left, talks with Virtualization Practice Manager Mark Gabryjelski. Courtesy photo.


Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen often enough, according to the CTI report. In companies where minorities are less represented, women are 20 percent less likely than straight white males to gain support for their ideas; people of color are 24 percent less likely; and those in the LGBTQ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning) are 21 percent less likely.

Cultivating Diversity
So how do companies in NH find job candidates of diverse backgrounds? “You have to meet them where they are,” says Dukes. That means not simply advertising online on sites like indeed.com, but attending networking groups like Future Tech Women, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME), the National Association of Black Accountants or the Alliance of Business Women International, just to name a few.

It also means finding people who aren’t necessarily looking for a new job, says Dukes, and that includes internally training people of diverse backgrounds so they can progress into positions of increasing responsibility.

Grubbs says WEI pursues employees mostly through word of mouth and is willing to invest in training candidates that do not currently have the technical skills but do have potential. WEI pays for their training, which sometimes includes English language learning, says Grubbs, “and in two to three years you have a certified minority engineer who otherwise would not have received that role.”

Wire Belt, a manufacturing company in Londonderry that supplies conveyer belts for the food processing, textile and electronics industries, embraces a similar philosophy. On its production floor, Danijel Kosic supervises 28 people from Cambodia, Vietnam and Latin American countries. Kosic knows a thing or two about melding cultures. He came to Wire Belt as an 18-year-old Bosnian refugee in 1996. He spoke no English but learned how to weave metal components by studying the gestures of other foreign-born employees in the Wire Belt shop. Although no one else grasped his Serbo-Croatian dialect, “we found a common language,” he says.


Danijel Kosick, third from left, with a group of employees he supervises at Wire Belt in Londonderry. Courtesy photo.


However, the diversity that exists on the manufacturing floor where up to seven languages are spoken is not mirrored in its senior management team. Eliana McCarthy, a human resources specialist who is originally from Colombia and has been with the firm three years, says the company wants to change that. She doesn’t see barriers for women or other minorities because “we’re building succession plans.”

On a hot August afternoon, McCarthy sits with colleagues in the cafeteria for an epicurean affair the company labels, “Diversity Day.” McCarthy brought in empanadas and afritadas, but during this lunch she samples the burritos and Asian noodles from the potluck buffet. As McCarthy explains, the event is a celebration of traditions and a chance to mingle with employees of all ranks. CEO David Greer, whose grandfather launched the company in 1919, says food is a connection to family, an affinity all cultures share.


Eliana McCarthy, left, talks with Gerardo Martinez at Wire Belt. Courtesy photo.


Developing Talent
Sprinkling an organization with different shades and tones is not enough to exemplify a diverse workforce, says Loretta Brady, principal of the training consultancy, BDS Insight, and psychology professor at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. Companies need to create intentional pathways that nurture talent across the organization. “If you’re working hard to bring in different types of people,” she says, “but you’re not working hard to grow them, you’re wasting your efforts” to build an inclusive labor pool.

That cultivation is a manifesto for Wire Belt’s David Maestri, vice present of operations and human resources. Maestri got his start with the manufacturer 43 years ago as a janitor. At 19, he ran the shipping department. Today, he’s mentoring employees like Kosic. Maestri partners with Manchester Community College to offer internal training in leadership, lean manufacturing and effective communications. The company also reimburses for college tuition.

Kosic is working towards his associate’s degree in business administration from Southern NH University. He says Wire Belt not only pays for school, but also books, a tutor and “whatever I need to succeed.”

At WEI, Carlos Castillo is a computer technician and assistant manager of the integration team who, over an 11-year period, received his certifications through corporate training. He’s seen the company grow more than threefold and the numbers of nationalities among his co-workers expand. With political rancor in the news every day, particularly over immigration, he says it’s only natural that hostile conversations might spill into the office. “But here,” says Castillo, “I can come into work and know everything will be OK. We have differences of opinions, but we’re all working towards a common goal.”


From left: Carlos Castillo, Josh Taylor and Mike Nickerson work in customer integration projects at WEI. Courtesy photo.


A Welcoming Culture
Creating a culture where employees feel welcome is a more daunting task in larger companies. Many are struggling, says Brady, with finding a balance between allowing people to freely express their views while not offending others whose existences are marginalized.

When Google software engineer James Damore wrote an internal memo attributing the low proportion of women in the tech field to genetics and not discrimination, an avalanche of debate ensued over the company’s mission to recruit people other than the predominantly white and Asian males. And the tech world was already in the hot seat for allegations of pay inequity and sexual harassment.

The Google controversy triggered other issues, too. Did Damore have the right to express his values, even if they didn’t align with Google’s doctrine? In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal, Damore wrote that his viewpoint “is generally suppressed at Google because of the company’s ‘ideological echo chamber.’ My firing neatly confirms that point.”

Many at Google, including senior management, said that Damore’s rants, which went viral, crossed the line: his views that women are less likely to make good engineers provoked resentment. Opposing political views are one thing; views that ostracize a subset of workers are another and are damaging.

Uncomfortable work environments subvert productivity, says Brady. She says she sees a growing interest in NH around diversity issues, especially since Trump’s presidency. “When we had a black president, everyone thought this problem was solved.” But it’s not. “Companies have a right to be concerned,” she says.

At one time, diversity issues fell squarely either under the auspices of the human resources department, or in the domain of organizational development and training. Yet in many cases, it’s a function of both, says Brady.

About five years ago, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC), a regional, nonprofit health services company with local offices in Manchester, decided to make its diversity initiatives part of a strategic lever across the organization. Karen Young leads the Center for Inclusion Initiative at HPHC, and one of her roles is to help people understand that inclusion is a transformational experience for everyone, including HPHC employees, members, providers, suppliers and other partners.

Take for example HPHC’s web redesign. When graphic designers, software engineers and project leaders teamed up with the community serving people who are blind, they discovered ways to make HPHC’s website easier to use on accessible devices. The end result was that the web enhancements made the site easier for everyone to use and brought value to the organization.

None of these diversity initiatives happen overnight. And while many companies have opened doors to minority groups, they haven’t all figured out a way to make them feel welcome.
Easterseals NH was short-staffed by close to 300 positions, many of them working with behaviorally, emotionally and physically disabled youth in an educational residence. Meanwhile, Sharby says she kept hearing about new refugees needing jobs.

The convergence of these two factors was the genesis behind the New Americans program, which offers refugees, most of whom do not speak English, a three-week language immersion program followed by four weeks of training to manage children who may be nonverbal or aggressive. Many of these immigrants worked in refugee camps, says Sharby, and they have the compassion to handle crises, including medical emergencies, with children. Sharby says that at least 20 people completed the training so far, and all but one are still employed with Easterseals. That’s an attrition rate that testifies to the program’s success.

The initiative benefits more than the new Americans. This fall, around 400 other Easterseals employees in Manchester and Lancaster will attend workshops to better understand how various cultures influence behaviors and preferences when working together as teams. The hope is that staff will also learn how to capitalize on differences to inspire creativity.

At the Diversity Workforce Coalition, Sharby says the organization is hoping to provide more resources for companies to commit to and understand diversity and inclusion through workshops and networking opportunities.

As Young says, “the more we understand ourselves and each other, the better we can leverage that for our collective health and well-being.”

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