When an organization is trying to keep its finger on the pulse of 25,000 employees, is the go-to pulse survey actually enough?
For Grainger, the industrial supply distribution giant, employee surveys are only one small piece of a much larger feedback puzzle that helps them hear from and serve every member of their expansive workforce.
"As we think about our talent strategy, and then our
To do that, Carroll and her team rely on a combination of pulse surveys and informal, on-the-fly feedback collected from managers as well as the leadership team through a series of Q&A sessions and lunch and learns. They also take the time to examine their own policies and DEI efforts, from analyzing pay equity to more recently working to remove biased language from job postings.
Read more:
That's all helped them
Carroll recently spoke with EBN to dig into just how the company checks in on those strategies, the tools that help them do it, and the impact those efforts are having across the organization.
How did Grainger rework its job postings and ensure that all non-inclusive language was removed. What was the impetus for that exercise?
As we're learning more about unconscious bias and language, it's evident that we need to be more cognizant of how we're talking about jobs. We recently launched a tool that actually scans our job postings and identifies language that might be biased or deter someone from applying. We had over 11,000 revisions to approximately 400 postings, and since then, we've seen an increase in female applicants by 15%, and
It's often language that you don't even realize might be biased. A job description could say, "We're looking for young professionals with lots of energy," which could insinuate a preference around age, or "He or she will join a four-man team," which implies all men. It's subtle, but when this tool flags these moments, there are always more neutral ways to say it that make everyone feel they can succeed.
Once someone joins the Grainger team, how do you enable them to give feedback about their experience?
We have a multi-pronged approach. We do have a survey platform that we use for annual engagement surveys as well as pulse surveys. We do candidate surveys on that platform and exit surveys, which has been helpful for us to see our strength and opportunities.
But Grainger also has a very organic feedback culture, and there are tremendous opportunities for members to give feedback, even up to our CEO, who does frequent roundtables. We also do skip-levels with not just our CEO, but me, my peers — it's really a part of our DNA. Those are typically about 10-15 people, really talking about what's going on, and an opportunity to do a Q&A with our CEO or whoever is hosting that week.
Read more:
How has communication shifted throughout the course of the pandemic?
At the beginning of the pandemic we launched weekly leader calls — unscripted, hour-long calls hosted by our executive team with the CEO. We were primarily giving updates on COVID at the time, and we figured that once we saw attendance decrease, we'd know that we don't need these calls anymore. But week after week, we still had 2,000 people leaders joining those calls live. So we don't do them weekly anymore, but we still do them monthly, and we still have 2,000 team members dialing in live. And of course we've shifted from talking about the pandemic to talking about business matters, but it's building an end-to-end mindset with our team.
How do you help managers talk to their teams about pay equity and the various pay scales at the company, especially as transparency becomes more prominent in workplace culture?
We're definitely following everything going on around pay transparency, and we're compliant, and we're continuing to do work on our job architecture and our pay architecture so that as we evolve as a company, it will be easy to have that transparency. Every year, we do a very detailed analysis. We started focusing on women and have since expanded it. We're not perfect, but our discrepancies are a very small percent of the population, and if we see something that needs to be adjusted, we will adjust it.
As far as educating and making sure our team members and people leaders understand pay and how pay works, we have an online portal that explains all of the facets of our total rewards program — this is available even to external candidates. And if you're an employee, you can log in and see in real time your total comp package. That's been really helpful for our team members.
Read more:
We also do training for our people leaders — we just did a lunch-and-learn around inflation and wages, and the interplay between the two, as we've been getting a lot of questions there. We're fortunate that our people leaders are committed to their roles as managers, and we want to make sure we're providing them with what they need to support their team members.
Speaking of total rewards, are you seeing employees speak up and ask for more from the company, beyond normal salary requests?
We have extremely competitive benefits, so whether or not the team members are being vocal, it's on us to understand where the market is going and what's important to our team members. We make tweaks to our benefits package: we recently moved to a new EAP provider that focuses on stress management, and we've expanded our parental leave policy for both birthing and non-birthing parents, which we're very proud of. We're in the process of expanding our bereavement policy to include pregnancy loss, and we've added travel reimbursement for procedures that aren't available within 100 miles of home.
Then there are what I call micro benefits that are important to our team members, like making sure all of our facilities have all-gender restrooms. As another example, I was recently at our board meeting at our New England distribution center, and I was in the restroom washing my hands, and there was a period-product dispenser with a big sign on it that said, "If you need a product, you can get it in the cafeteria." And I was like, oh my gosh, I can't imagine walking to the cafeteria to get a product. So from there we had a couple conversations with our DEI leader and real estate, and just worked to make sure that period products are available in all of our facilities, where they should be.
When you think of a 95-year-old distribution business, I'm really proud of how we've evolved, and how we continue to evolve. It's often the little things that matter, and even if someone doesn't need those little things, making them available and providing our team with what they need, that speaks to culture.
