Caring for the Whole Employee: How to Recruit and Retain a Diverse Workforce

Only 48% of employees are confident their employers care about them, according to the 2023-2024 Aflac WorkForces Report, an annual survey that gauges Americans' attitudes toward their workplace benefits and mental health. How do employers address this perception among employees experiencing the burden of financial fragility coupled with the epidemic of burnout and workplace stress? How do employers care for the whole employee and, in doing so, recruit and retain a diverse workforce? In this fireside chat with Aflac's CHRO Jeri Hawthorne, Jeri will provide a comprehensive roadmap for corporations seeking to put care at their core to boost workers' job satisfaction and mental health. Jeri will explain why it's not enough for corporations to prioritize employee engagement in the 21st century workplace. They must prioritize employee well-being as well. Jeri will leverage Aflac's revamped employee benefits and compensation package as a case study to detail how the Fortune 500 company is putting care at its core and fostering employee wellness across five pillars — emotional, physical, social, spiritual and financial. She will also explain how caring for the whole employee at Aflac is contributing to the company's recruitment and retention of a diverse workforce.

Transcription:

Eric Silverman (00:09):

Let's start by taking a selfie, huh? Come on everybody. Hands up. Let's go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Alright, see, that would grab some attention. How about that? Good morning. Who's ready for a great day? Two. Who had a great day? One who can't remember last night? I can't. I'm not a big drinker. Guys, I got so much out of yesterday. One of the biggest things that I got, I was telling a few of the panelists that I ran into yesterday was the afternoon session on the GLP ones. Anybody in that room? Anybody here? And what I really liked was how the panel talked about, and Emma specifically said what she was asking questions about ROI on GLP ones. And she said, geez, we never asked for ROI on cancer treatment. Anybody that kind of hit home a little bit so I could go on and on, but that was a big point eye opener for me.

(01:08):

I've never heard anybody explain it that way. And I had to beat Emma up a little bit because we're good friends. So I was like, Hey, how come you kept that magic little secret to yourself and never told me that? Never explained it that way. I don't remember what she said. It was over a cocktail. So today we have a lot of fun stuff. We have, of course, we're going to have plenty of breaks. We're going to have networking in the exhibit hall. Continue to please, please visit and support our solution providers, vendors, and so forth. And sponsors. Again, I can't stress enough without them, we'd still be on Zoom and Teams. Yes, same joke as yesterday, but it's still applicable. Let's just be honest.

(01:43):

Let's see. We have a lot of the same, but a lot of different, lemme look at my handy notes. I told you I'm no mc Pro. I want to make sure I hit everything before I get my paycheck rejected from Heather. Let's see. Oh, I got to talk about myself for half a second, right? Closing session tonight, right this late afternoon, early evening is myself moderating a keynote panel, but more of what we're calling a town hall with Erica Sing and David Contorno. And please, please, please start jotting down, typing in your notes section on your iPhone or your Android device if you're one of those green folks. Put some questions together to ask. I mean, I have some quick questions I'll start it off with, but we want it to be interactive. We're going to have a few people going around with mics. It's going to be a town hall forum and it's all about what we can expect from their point of view for 2025 and beyond.

(02:38):

Make sense? Who's going to be here? Don't let me down. Right? Alright, good, good. So I'm excited. I want to kick off the day with our keynote panel or fireside chat, I should say with my Steam co mc colleague. Much more handsome than me. Raise your hand if you agree. It's okay. I said it. All right, Mr. Ed Ligonde. Come on up, Ed. All right. Totally cool. I get it. Come on up, Ed. Don't be shy. All right? Yeah, absolutely. Right now would be when I say Now. Come on, Ed. Thank you. Ed Shy. Don't forget Ed's shy. Okay, and then I just got to meet for the first time. I've seen her on Zoom many times, but Jeri Hawthorne, Senior Vice President, CHRO of Aflac, incorporated out Columbus, Georgia. Come on up, and what a small world. She asked me where I'm from. I said Marilyn, and she lived in Towson for 20 years, and my office was in Towson for 20 years. If you don't know where that is, it's in Maryland. Doesn't matter. Guys, have a great session. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Ed Ligonde (03:43):

I'm glad Eric. Hates the stage. Well, good morning everyone. Really excited to be back for day two and hopefully have a wonderful conversation here with Jeri. So just to kick things off really quick, the goal behind this morning session is to talk about whole person, whole person wellbeing. What does that really mean? Let's talk about the investment behind it, the time behind that, the diversity impact that organizations can have, and why do we even need to focus on it in the first place? Is it a waste of time as well, right? Let's get some opinions from you, but definitely want to hear Jeri talk about it. But before we even jump in the topic, I'd love for Jeri to share a little bit of her story of how she got here in the first place and how she's impacting Aflac, if you don't mind.

Jeri Hawthorne (04:27):

Well, I went to the airport at Atlanta yesterday, and then I got on the plane. I'm teasing. I'm sorry. Come on. You guys can tell jokes.

Ed Ligonde (04:35):

I love it. I love it. Yeah,

Jeri Hawthorne (04:37):

So I've been in HR longer than I am, pleased to admit, but about 25 years and got into it in a little bit of a unusual way. I got into it through cross-cultural training and development and design way back in the nineties, which now has kind of transitioned much more into diversity, equity, and inclusion and thinking not just about different cultures, but about the impact on organizations and diversity overall. So did that for a number of years, had the opportunity to live and work abroad as a global HR person with Novo Nordisk, which if you were at the session yesterday, does anybody know Novo Nordisk? Ozempic GLP one. So they are the creator of ozempic. So worked for them for a few years and then came back to Baltimore, worked at t Rowe Price for a few years, and then at Constellation Energy leading their retail energy business, which is really a financial services, the wholesale and retail, because it's trading power and gas moved into talent management and then worked for a smaller hedge fund for a little while.

(05:42):

And hedge funds kind of have the, it's great when things are going well with hedge funds to work at a hedge fund, but when it's not, it's not. And so had met some of my now colleagues from Aflac at an HR educational event and had a great rapport and relationship with them. And so when I started looking, I reached out to them and I was just fortunate that an opportunity existed. And so I've been with them since 2019 and I'm responsible for HR for the entire organization. So all facets. It's funny, when I talk about this stuff, I always think my head of total rewards is probably better positioned to be at these kinds of things because she is so steeped in these efforts. But I'm thrilled to be here today and appreciate the opportunity to talk with you all.

Ed Ligonde (06:32):

Thank you for sharing that. And I want to give some kudos back to you during our prep session. A lot of times when we're talking about a specific topic that's so vast like this, it's pretty easy to just digress into so many different areas. But I heard a lot of passion behind you in there as well, and I heard a lot of passion from a lot of people yesterday and talking about some various topics like bipoc and obviously the GLP ones yesterday. So just getting back into the topic here really quickly, whole employee, whole person wellbeing in the benefit space. For the longest time when I first got in, we'd always talk about wellness, like, oh, we're going to start this wellness program and I'm going to sell wellness to my employees and we're going to save money. But at the end of the day, it started to feel a little bit gimmicky. It started to feel like a check of a box. And so now as benefits have evolved and our cultures have evolved as organizations, I'm wondering what does whole person, whole wellbeing mean to you, especially at Aflac, and how should we really look at that from a definition standpoint?

Jeri Hawthorne (07:36):

Yeah, I started by saying how long I've been in hr, and for those of you who have been in it as long as I have, I can remember back in the day when you never asked people personal questions, like the guidance to leaders was don't talk about personal things because you could create an environment, people might feel uncomfortable on and on. And we're 180 degrees from my point of view in a different direction right now. And I think the pandemic was probably one of the factors that really helped to, to increase the speed at which that happened. I don't know if we would be where we are today from a whole employee perspective. And so when I think about it and what we think about as Aflac is it's not just the person who's sitting in the cube beside you or on the zoom next to you.

(08:26):

Are they a parent? Are they a parent of a young child? Are they a parent of an adult child? Are they a caregiver to their parents? Are they L-G-B-T-Q and living in Columbus, Georgia in the deep south and adjusting to life there? Do they have a disability? It's thinking about the person who works for the company, not just as an employee who works for the company, but as a human being who works for the company and all of the things that come along with that. We all know that when you go into the office every day, you're bringing your whole self. That's what companies ask of us. They ask of us to come and bring your whole self to work and to give it a hundred percent, and you can't do that. Or some people can compartmentalize really, really well. I sort of admire those folks quite honestly because I'm not one of them. But when we're asking our employees to bring their whole selves to work, we as organizations, I think have a responsibility to respond and say, okay, then when we are thinking about our wellness offerings, when we are thinking about our educational support and offerings, when we are thinking about our philanthropic efforts, we're thinking about it not just through a singular lens, but trying to think about it through the lens of the vast mix of employees that we have at the organization and who they are as whole individuals.

Ed Ligonde (09:51):

I'm glad you used the word responsibility in the employee benefit space. I feel like for the longest time employee benefits has equaled insurance, and you obviously now work with an insurance organization, but we would argue that it's actually the inverse where it's the benefit of being an employee. And what I mean by that is when you are recruiting someone or when you have someone come to work for you each and every day, and if you're asking them to bring their whole person to work, isn't it kind of our job as employers to make sure we're providing the resources and the values to make sure they feel bought in to make sure they feel motivated and resilient and such? So I'm curious, how are you working with maybe your leadership team or you mentioned you had a colleague that's actually really in depth with these programs. How are you actually getting these things off the ground? Where's your kind of starting point to doing? So

Jeri Hawthorne (10:46):

Working for an insurance company, it makes it easier. So from leadership, because we want to be best in class with how we think about our employee experience, how we think about engagement, how we think about wellness. And so for me, in my role as an HR leader, I'm fortunate in that I'm not having to convince people of why having robust programs at the very least are important. That's kind of table stakes for us, but that's the easy part. In some ways, that's the check the box. It's easy to go to a benefits page and see 45 different benefits and your AFLAC plans that we give to our employees and the different counseling services and the different educational benefits, et cetera. That's easy. The hard, harder part, and the part that I think most organizations still struggle with, us included, I think we're moving the needle, but we talk about it a lot, is that how do we ensure that what we are offering our employees, that they understand what it is, that they understand who it's for, because not all of our programs are for everyone.

(12:00):

They're just not. We have an EAP service targeted to L-G-B-T-Q employees, so that's a very subset of our population. We want them to feel supported and heard, but if they don't know that we have that, what good does it do? And so we actually talk about it through the lens of caring for our employees, and it plays a little bit on an external marketing campaign that the organization has, but our CEO says, look, if you take care of your employees, they take care of the customer. There's a whole industry built around engagement surveys. We all know this. Higher levels of engagement, higher levels of discretionary effort, higher customer satisfaction, higher net promoter scores, all of these things we all talk about. And again, it's a little bit of a check the box, but it's how do you make them, and I always talk about educated consumers of what all of these things are so that they're not necessarily trying to use it in a moment of crisis, that they've thought about it, that they've looked at it, that they understand how to maximize their 401k, that they understand that we have an online mobile health provider that's free.

(13:15):

So if you aren't feeling well at 10 o'clock at night, you don't have to go to the emergency room as your first line of defense. You can go there first and then have that person tell you if you should go to the emergency room. I'm not saying don't go to the emergency room simply saying if you're having a headache or something, you might want to start there. So it's really, I think it's about when I think about caring for the employees and getting the programs off the ground, we show usage to our leaders. So how utilized are these programs? But we also show it in a way that says, we are only targeting 20% of our population for this program. And so of that 20%, 60% is actually accessing and taking advantage of it. And so I think it's when you're talking about buy-in from leadership to bring it all the way back around, it's having that broad swath of offerings if your organization is able, but then understanding the size and scope of that population that you're actually targeting and how they're engaging and using that service. We actually do that both quantitatively and qualitatively. So we look at the data, who's using it, and then we do the assessments of how beneficial was this? Did this help you with your decision making? Did it help you to not make a decision that you might've made otherwise? So we do some qualitative assessments as well.

Ed Ligonde (14:37):

You mentioned something around making sure people aren't just focusing on the programs during times of crisis, and that's something that we focus on pretty daily as well, but I feel like that's natural. A lot of times you hear about the benefit, you're like, ah, I'm not going to worry about this until I actually need it.

Jeri Hawthorne (14:52):

That's it.

Ed Ligonde (14:52):

And they come screaming like, what the heck happened? Right.

Jeri Hawthorne (14:55):

Yeah.

Ed Ligonde (14:56):

So my question, I guess what I'm hearing is not only do you have to have the right programs in place to be able to support the vast majority of employees you have, but they need to be communicated and educated to fall. That's right. So how are you focusing on that aspect? What does communication look like to make sure people actually do understand what you're putting in place and it's valuable to them?

Jeri Hawthorne (15:18):

That's right. It's a little bit of a constant drumbeat, I would say. I mean, we're all in open enrollment season or most of us, so this is a very natural time to start the conversations or to ignite conversations about what's new, what's different. But we do a few things. So one from a wellness perspective as an example, we had a few of our senior leaders, they had a weight loss competition and a getting healthy competition, and it was light, it was fun. They recorded a little smack talk to one another, and we put it on our internal portal, but it was then they built teams of people who were on this team and that team. And we made shirts, and I know it all sounds kind of silly and kitschy, but it got people engaged and they would talk a lot about the programs and the services and what they're doing and that they're going to the fitness center on site if people want to meet them there at four o'clock, they'll be there to show the other person up and taking the stair challenge and recording themselves in the stairs to again, kind of smack talks.

(16:19):

So engaging your leaders and having them talk about it and have fun with it, I think is a key part. And the other part when I talked about beating the drum is that, talk about it more than open enrollment. So we have a calendar, so we started, it was quarterly and now it's monthly where we have a little bit of a theme topic a month, and then we have a constant drumbeat of communications around our different programs. And we try, sometimes you have to go for the largest population. My team has limited resources too. And so sometimes when we're talking about what we want to do from an educational perspective, we do say, well, the largest number of people have told us they want to know about this. So this is what we're going to talk about. And there might be a subset that we need to do something more unique for that may be put to the side in the short term, just in reality we all face that.

(17:19):

But what we try to do, and we do have a lot of conversations about this, is to, if the topic is financial wellness for a month, we're going to have a financial wellness session for single parents. We're going to have a financial wellness session for people who are close to retirement. We're going to have a financial wellness session for people who have student loans to understand how they can maximize savings. So we're going to try to take that broad topic and then target it in educational sessions. So again, you might only have 30 people at the session, but that session is intended for a subset of your whole population. So we do that on an ongoing basis. We have the portal. I would tell you that most of our employees go to the portal in a time of need. And most of them, honestly, what we found is they still prefer to pick up the phone and call Susie in benefits and ask her what to do.

(18:16):

And we were a high touch company. That's a little bit of the history of the company. It started in Columbus, Georgia with, it was a family owned, it went public about 50 years ago, maybe 40, I'm sorry, I can't remember exactly, but it went public at some point. But our current CEO is the son of one of the founders. And so it's a family, it's based on family values. And so you have people there with 30 plus years of tenure, a lot of them. And so they do know people. So we have a population that absolutely prefers high touch, and it's something that we know that we're aware of. And so I staff around that. So when we do these educational sessions, we know that a certain percentage are just going to pick up the phone and call the person that they know to get their insight and their perspective as opposed to going on the portal and looking around and seeing, we also know that this new population that's coming into the workforce, recent graduates prefer technology. And so we're doing things like adding apps of our benefits so people can do open enrollment on their phone. That's something new that we're putting in place this year. It might seem simple, but it's not something that we had done. And so now it's what we're trying to say is there is this changing population and they have a different set of expectations. And so we're trying to balance both of those, which is challenging, but we have to be mindful of both at the same time.

Ed Ligonde (19:41):

So you're dealing with not only obviously multicultural, but definitely as many of us are all working with a multi-generational workforce and bringing technology into the mix. So how are you assessing that particular aspect, or I guess how often as well, I have to imagine you've got a lot of other things to worry about too. So how often are you saying, Hey, we need to bring some of this education in play, and which aspects of that do you want to start focusing on?

Jeri Hawthorne (20:06):

So I have a team that's focused nothing other than our employee experience. It was a little bit of an experiment when we started it in full transparency, we had come off of a year of an engagement survey where our scores had declined and we as a company had historically have had very, very high scores. And so we were brainstorming different ideas and we said, okay, we hear all about ex and employee experience and kind of the digital employee experience. What if we created a team to think about what I refer to as, it sounds a little kitschy, but moments that matter to employees and to those whole people. If you're looking for a job from that candidate experience all the way through to if you're close to retirement and you have to make a decision about are you going to take a lump sum on your pension or are you going to take an annuity?

(20:58):

So that whole gamut, and they do a few things. One, we have them, they literally listen. So they're out talking with employees, they're out having focus groups, having conversations, just small group conversations to get a little more of that water cooler talk. So what's happening? What are you hearing? They do it for our virtual employees and our onsite employees. They also are responsible for looking at our array of offerings. So they're not necessarily intended to come up with new products or new benefits or new kind of events, although they do that and that's probably the favorite part of their job. But what they're really intended to do is to say, okay, we have all of these things.

(21:44):

How do we package, educate and put them out there? And so really, so I have that group of people, it's eight folks and that's all they focus on. And I would give us a B if I were to give us a grade, I think that we have opportunities to get better at digital. We put a person in place to focus more on that last year. So prior to that, that whole team had been on site and a lot of them were longer tenured. And so they were really great at thinking about that population that I talked about that later career population. But we needed folks to think about the digital and the earlier career. So we've kind of changed that. And they're not solely responsible for the ideas, but they're responsible for facilitating the discussions with my internal experts and with our constituents to understand what they want and then to bring those back. And of course, we can't do everything, budgets, time, resources, et cetera, but they're also responsible for helping us think through and prioritize where we will have a bigger impact based on what they're hearing and seeing.

Ed Ligonde (22:46):

Perfect. I remember you talking a little bit about the smack talk with

Jeri Hawthorne (22:51):

Yeah.

Ed Ligonde (22:51):

Some of the senior leaders. So I'm actually very curious about how that shook out with the employees. But just going back, touching on the leadership approach there really quickly, I have to imagine there's maybe some employers out there where they say it's important and behind closed doors maybe it's not so important. So I'm curious, I don't think there's any senior leaders here from Aflac, but other than yourself, but how important was it for your leadership to be bought in and the fact that they were involved in some of those programs? Was it difficult to get them to be kind of front facing with that?

Jeri Hawthorne (23:25):

It wasn't actually. So first of all, I think it's critically important. I think it's critically important for leaders to care. And by the way, that's actually something that should be easy because we're all human beings. And so to demonstrate that you actually are curious about how someone is feeling and what's happening with them to know if they have a child that just got a scholarship from one of our scholarship programs, it's a small thing and it should be easy and it's easier for some leaders than others, but they have to be bought in. If employees don't believe that they care, then it all becomes programmatic, then it all becomes check the box. And so it's part of the culture of who Aflac is as a company. Again, it's a family company started by families. We, our CEO has said, if you take care of the employees, they'll take care of the customer, but he also believes that you have to take care of the employees because it's the right thing to do for the employees.

(24:34):

This is a person who, this organization was founded in this small town he went to high school with. A lot of these folks, runs into them at the grocery store, knows them, knows their family members, knows. So when you have a CEO who has that much of a connection to the population, it's part of the expectation of the senior leaders. It's part of the expectation that I know what's happening with our employees, not just from an engagement survey, but that I know what they're feeling and what they're thinking, that I have my thumb on the pulse. And so when we offer up events, our senior leaders, they volunteer because they enjoy it and they know it's important and they know that it's a key part of who we are as an organization. It's something that I think is a little bit of our secret sauce as a company that makes us as successful as we are and our financial results are stellar.

(25:26):

If you look at us, I mean, I joined in 2019, the stock was $30, it's over a hundred. I don't know why. It's over a hundred and full transparency. That's not inside our trading. That's literally my lack of fully understanding how it spiked to the degree that it has recently. But there is a belief that our leaders care. We did a small reduction in staff. We have about 6,000 employees in the us, another six in Japan, 6,000 in Japan. And we did a small reduction in the US earlier this year was a hundred folks, most of them sitting in Columbus, Georgia, our corporate headquarters. So how we approached that was, first of all, we planned for it longer than I've ever planned for a reduction at large or small. Second of all, we gave people 90 days, 90 to 180 days to look for other jobs.

(26:18):

We have a career success center that does nothing other than help support people with resume writing. With interview prep, we had them teed up to support this group of employees. Every person had a benefits person who was their point of contact, an employee relations person. And the career success centers, a lot of them are still there actively looking for jobs. Our TA team and our leaders are asked to prioritize them. So if there are openings, give this group of people look at them first. We're not saying you have to hire them first, but we are saying we want you to look at them and consider them first. The day that we had the conversations, it was about three in the afternoon, and our CEO called me and he just said, I want to know how it went. Who was really upset? How are people feeling? Is there anybody that you need me to call? And so when you have an executive leader who sets the standard, it really makes it so much easier for everything else. That

Ed Ligonde (27:18):

Is a very unique program. I'm sure we can all agree to that as well. And I'm glad you mentioned. I think we both agree that it's the responsibility of the employer, but also the opportunity as well. I mean, if you think about it, us as human beings are spending most of our waking hours at a place called Exactly. And so as employers, you just really have an opportunity to really impact the lives of those as individuals and leadership. I wanted to touch on that, how much leadership, caring, really, really matters.

Jeri Hawthorne (27:50):

It does matter.

Ed Ligonde (27:51):

I've been the beneficiary of both aspects. I'm sure many of you have. We have a leader who couldn't care less, and you have a leader who really gives a damn.

Jeri Hawthorne (28:02):

 Yeah.

Ed Ligonde (28:02):

At the end of the day, fortunately right now, I'm living a good life. Our leader cares about us very individually and it helps us all feel like we're really bought into the mission. But then touching on what you mentioned about helping them with career advancement as well, I think is key. How did you come to that approach? How did that become an area of focus and investment of time?

Jeri Hawthorne (28:23):

Yeah, so I will admit I'm a beneficiary of that. So we've had that for about 10 years. I joined five years ago, so it was in place. And about 10 years ago, the organization started talking about the fact that we need to better leverage technology. Everybody talks about this. We were a very manual paper-driven company. We need to get better at process. We need to get better at technology, we need to get more efficient. That meant that the jobs of our employees would be changing. And we have very long tenured employees. And a lot of them came forward and said, well, what does that mean for me? If this is changing, Aflac has been my only, I've worked here my entire career. I consider it an extension of my family. If we're going to go to this place, I don't have those skills because I've only worked here and this is what we've learned.

(29:14):

And so at the time, we got that feedback from a lot of our operational and frontline employees, and the organization said, okay, we have to listen. We have to respond. And it was actually the idea of at the time, the president of the us, her name is Theresa White, and she said, why don't we think about this through the lens of almost like a career counseling they have at high schools and in universities. And she and the former CHRO, my predecessor, Matthew Owenby, they kind of got together, came up with this brainchild, brought it forward, presented it, got by to pilot it. We have it right now in two of our core locations in Columbus, Georgia, and Columbia. We've just added a remote effort. But it was really brought forward by our employees saying, you're telling us what your expectations of us are going to change? How are you going to help us change with that? And so we said, okay, we need to re-skill. So we did a whole educational around Six Sigma. We did a whole technology upskilling program for our employees. But then the other thing we did was we said, we need to help people think about their careers in a broader way. And that's where the career success centers came from. That's

Ed Ligonde (30:25):

Fantastic.

Jeri Hawthorne (30:26):

Yeah,

Ed Ligonde (30:26):

That's fantastic. During an earlier conversation you and I were having, we were talking about just the fact that you, obviously you have a multicultural workforce. We talked about multi-generational and by bringing the whole selves to work, so that can come with a lot of, yesterday Kelly McDonald was talking about how to work with and lead people not like you. Is that a good thing? Is that a rough thing? What kind of biases are we dealing with at the end of the day? So I'm curious how Aflac handles that and during your diversity journey, how you mentioned the deep South to New York City and California, and obviously there's tons of different backgrounds and cultures, and I think that's fantastic, but how does that kind of come together and what kind of programs do you put in place to help achieve that?

Jeri Hawthorne (31:10):

Yeah, it's interesting because Aflac, our overall population is 66% female and 49% people of color are overall in the us. As you get into our leadership ranks, it changes. So our senior leadership population is 48%. Women are people of color. Our board is very diverse. They're about a third diverse women or people of color. And so I talk about our CEO, and clearly I'm a massive fan of his because his perspective is that diverse organizations, that there's more value to having that diversity. And so we have been having a diverse workforce has been something that was important to our organization before. It was something that organizations started talking about and tracking and putting in their proxies and reporting on. And again, that goes back to why my job in some ways is easier because that's not something that I have to convince leaders of. What has happened though is that even with us, we are working on it now, but we became, I would say, a little complacent, meaning it was just, it's what it was.

(32:16):

We just had it. We were just, nobody really thought about it. We just had the candidates that we selected. It was just, I wouldn't say it was happenstance, but it certainly wasn't a deliberate effort. And so as we've gone forward, we have had to start thinking about it in a more deliberate way. And I mean, you all have read the research that diverse teams outperform homogenous teams significantly, but in order to do that, they have to be led in a way that tries to minimize bias and that accepts and creates a safe environment for those differences to come through. And that is something that we do continually work on. So we talk a lot about inclusivity as an organization and how we can not only because what happened in what we realized about three years ago was the pipeline that we had used for our senior leaders where we were getting most of our diverse leaders.

(33:18):

Again, we just weren't paying attention. There was complacency. It became less diverse, so less, and we were starting in a really good place, but less female and people of color were getting promoted to that frontline level, which meant that pipeline fewer to choose from, fewer to choose from. And so we kind of said, what's happened? What happened here? And what we've hypothesized and we don't know is that it was just unintended bias and on taking our eye off of it. And a lot of that happened during the pandemic because there was turnover. We had some generational shifts from a leadership perspective, and it was what it was. So we now, we put a reemphasis on that. We say diverse slate of candidates, diverse interview panel. We try to work with leaders to say, okay, if you don't have a diverse slate of candidates for this role, let's think about the role differently.

(34:17):

What can we do to try to, maybe we take a piece away from it, maybe we add something different to it to try to make it so that a diverse candidate can be successful. And by the way, if we put a diverse candidate in that role, what can we do as an organization to create that inclusivity, whether it's coaching for the team and doing work with them. We do a lot of disc efforts from a team development perspective, but what can we do to try to ensure that these folks feel the folks on these teams feel safe being their authentic selves when they're talking with their peers? So I would say, I don't know that we have a secret sauce, so to speak. I think it's just a lot of effort, a lot of paying attention and really seeing what happened when we did become complacent during the pandemic and what the potential implications of that could be.

Ed Ligonde (35:07):

Absolutely. It sounds like, or at least you're getting to that point, where would you say your leadership makeup is fairly or getting close to the representation of your entire employee base?

Jeri Hawthorne (35:19):

I think it is. I think it is. We know there are a couple of areas where we have opportunities, a couple of subsets of different populations that we know. We don't have a Hispanic board member that's not representative of the world that we all live in. So we know there are certain areas that we need to get better at. And we are doing things very deliberately. So we have a Hispanic marketing strategy. So if you look at, Eric and I were talking and he worked at Aflac, and if you look at our distribution team in particular, it's not very diverse out of the Aflac overall, it's probably the least diverse, but there's an absolute focus on that because that team, they're selling into these markets. They're selling into markets across the us. They're selling to single parents, they're selling to Hispanics, they're selling to Jewish folks, they're selling to folks from the Middle East.

(36:14):

So we are saying we need to diversify this population to be more representative of the populations that they're trying to sell to in the market we've just put in place. We're calling it Aflac United. And the whole point of that is how do we diversify our field force? And our field force is 10 90 nines. They're not employees of Aflac. So it's a little bit, we are not hiring them, so they're not part of our overall population. But we think diversity is so important from a cultural perspective as an organization and also from a business perspective for the success of the company, that we have a targeted effort on how we actually diversify and help those 10 90 nines. And those vendors that we work with, especially if they're diverse organizations, become certified so that they get the benefit of being a diverse supplier when they're selling into different organizations.

Ed Ligonde (37:09):

So I love that working with organizations that are representative of what you're trying to build internally as well.

(37:14):

And I think that's huge because at the end of the day, the decisions you make and who you work with are also representative of what you're trying to accomplish. So we only have a couple of quick minutes left here and I'd love to get your parting thoughts on, obviously you're very intentional in your approach surrounding diversity as a whole whole person wellbeing, putting these programs in place. So I'm curious for maybe some employers out there that maybe are struggling with a little bit of bandwidth or time or investment of capital or things of that nature, any particular advice you would have for them maybe in having these conversations with leadership so that they can allocate that time and effort? So really focusing on what benefits for the entire employee means.

Jeri Hawthorne (37:58):

So I think it's knowing your population and listening to what they want and using that to help educate leaders on what people are saying. And at the end of the day, businesses are for profit to make money, and they might have shareholders, they might not. And so you have to think about when you're going to leaders. It can't just be for everything that I've said, and I'm fortunate in that the company that I work for, but it can't necessarily start with that. It may need to start with the financial benefits. It may need to start with looking at stats like turnover. It may need to start with looking at stats from an engagement perspective. May need to start with looking at your healthcare expenses. How high are they? We all know they're going up. And so talking to leaders about here is one way that we can help to decrease our health healthcare expenses.

(38:51):

We know that if we can get more employees to use preventative services, that we anticipate that our expenses could go down 20%. This is why we need you to talk about testicular cancer and getting tested or getting mammograms for breast cancer and being a spokesperson for that. So sometimes you just have to start depending on the type of organization you work with, you have to meet the leaders where they are too. And if that is through data, you got to use data. And I also think, again, it's listening to your employees and smaller organizations using your employees. I talk a lot about the, I see four seconds, 70, 20 10 rule. 70% of the development is on the job. And I say to that to people all the time, create task forces to focus on a project. Employees love that stuff. They love the opportunity to have a bigger impact on the organization. Most of them love the opportunity to have their voice heard. And so don't expect your HR team to do it all. Use those task forces and get those employees engaged because they actually will help. It'll feel a little bit more grassroots and it will also give them a little bit more connectivity and they get to grow and develop by doing those sorts of things.

Ed Ligonde (40:05):

That's a great way to increase your bandwidth too.

Jeri Hawthorne (40:07):

Yeah, exactly.

Ed Ligonde (40:08):

Double your team size.

Jeri Hawthorne (40:09):

That's right.

Ed Ligonde (40:10):

Well, yeah, thank you so much for a wonderful conversation. And there you have it everyone, the Aflac approach to caring for the whole employee.

Jeri Hawthorne (40:18):

Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.