I had to get this urgent episode to you sooner rather than later, given the climate of fear in the U.S. in current times.
For many employees right now, work doesn’t feel like a safe place. It feels uncertain, frightening, and deeply personal. In moments like this, how leaders respond matters more than ever.
Michelle Feferman has spent decades helping organizations navigate complex DEI and workplace culture challenges in ways that protect people and strengthen the business.
We talk directly about what leaders can do to support employees in the face of ICE raids and immigration-related fear, how to create real psychological safety at work, and why most DEI efforts are still entirely legal if you’re focused on risk mitigation, clarity, and care.
We also unpack how retention, engagement, and productivity are tightly tied to DEI and empathy work, and the key elements leaders need to think through right now to support their people while capturing the full business benefit.
This is a practical, compassionate conversation for leaders who want to do the right thing without panicking, posturing, or staying silent.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Listen in for…
- Creating a diverse team that goes beyond old-fashioned quotas.
- Key benefits of having a wide pool of differing viewpoints within your organization.
- Actions to put in place to keep your employees safe and informed about handling ICE raids that could be used as a template for other crises.
- Tips to create an FAQ that matters
“If you can take the time now to get these things in place, the majority of people will relax, to some extent, and feel like they can come to work and just focus on work. People will relax more and be much more productive at work.” — Michelle Feferman
Episode References:
About Michelle Feferman, Founder and CEO, Equity at Work, Author of Do DEI Right
Michelle is passionate about helping organizations have a profound impact on their employees, businesses, and communities through their diversity, equity, and inclusion work. She is the Founder and CEO of Equity At Work, known for creating innovative, customized solutions for even the most complex DEI and workplace culture challenges. Her clients outperform their peers in revenue and margin growth, productivity, engagement, and retention.
Michelle is the author of Do DEI Right, co-host of the podcast Your DEI Minute, and on the Investment Committee of RevTech Venture Capital. Before this, she spent 25 years working at Accenture, Kurt Salmon, Macy’s Inc., and The Walt Disney Company.
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Equity At Work: https://www.equity-at-work.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleebogan/
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/equity_at_work
Substack: https://mfeferman.substack.com/
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Ross 00:00
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business, for many employees right now, work doesn’t feel like a safe place. It feels uncertain, frightening and deeply personal. And in moments like this, how leaders respond and organizations respond matters more than ever. My guest for this special episode is Michelle pfefferman, founder and CEO of equity at work, and author of do dei right. Michelle has spent decades helping organizations navigate complex dei and workplace culture challenges in ways that protect people and strengthen the business. Her clients consistently outperform their peers in revenue growth, productivity, engagement and retention, because they understand that empathy, inclusivity and psychological safety are not optional. In this conversation, we talk directly about what leaders can do to support employees in the face of ICE raids and immigration related fear, whether they’re citizens or not, how to create real psychological safety at work, and why most DEI efforts are still entirely legal if you’re focused on risk mitigation, clarity and care. We also unpack how retention, engagement and productivity are tightly tied to dei and empathy work and the key elements leaders need to think through right now to support their people while capturing the full business benefit. Michelle also adds great case study about innovative dei work being done with hourly workers, and how that has completely boosted performance, engagement and productivity in ways even the client didn’t expect. This is a practical, compassionate conversation for leaders who want to do the right thing without panicking, posturing or staying silent, and I had to get it in your hands sooner, rather than later. Take a listen. Welcome Michelle Fefferman to this kind of bonus emergency, timely episode that we are making sure we get to our listeners around dei and psychological safety in these tumultuous times. So welcome to the show.
Michelle Feferman 02:58
Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here so
Maria Ross 03:01
you and I know each other through a group that we’re in called Samudra that I reference a lot on this show, and you know, very complimentary work. You are a dei expert, the author of do dei right, which recently came out, and the CEO of equity of work at work, which we heard earlier. So tell us a little bit first before we dive into the details, tell us a little bit about how you even got into this work. What’s your story?
Michelle Feferman 03:26
Yeah, I mean, it’s funny when I look back. So I, I started equity at work about eight years ago, and I came out of 25 years in retail, most of that in retail consulting. So like, very different background, very deep in one industry. And if I, when I look back on my career, you know, I went in very wide eyed and assuming that, you know, once you got into the business world, everything would be equal and fair, and if you just worked really hard, you could prove your worth, and you would get promoted, and all the things, yep. And as so many women experienced, that, you know, did not exactly happen, or it happened until a certain point in my career, and then very much stopped happening. And for me, I, you know, I hit my ceiling between from me going from manager to partner, right when I had just had my first baby, and I was up for partner, but got delayed because, then, because I’d had maternity leave. I, you know, took some time off and so then that they didn’t really know what to do with me because I hadn’t, didn’t. Then have three years of consistent metrics or whatever, even though my performance had been great, so angry and not just personally, but because I saw we were losing so many wonderful women because of that, right? So I was determined to then get over the hump before I had my second child, or I knew I would have just have to go like I just didn’t have the patience to start over. You know, that much later on. But once I made it over to partner, and then later became a senior partner, I became determined to completely retool the system that we had in place. I just felt like. It was a disservice to our employees, a disservice to our clients. It didn’t reflect our brand and the values that we said that we really, you know, wanted to live up to, and so I helped start one of the first women’s networks. Gosh, it’s almost 20 years ago now, and we it was before, you know, before zoom and all those things that we have little groups across all the offices, and everyone was kind of nervous, because there were never more than a handful of us in any one office, and the men would make a lot of fun of us. And, you know, make jokes about, oh, there’s so much estrogen in that room, and God, and, you know, but finally, we got really serious about, you know, what is it we’re really trying to push for? And it was really retention of more women and promotion of more women. And I will never forget presenting to our senior leadership team, which I was part of, but I was the only woman on that team, and I was just like, not getting through with them on the language we were using, and the examples everything kind of got chalked up to, like, well, that’s just that one person’s situation. Or, you know, oh, that would never happen again. Or, you know, whatever, yeah, I went and dug up an org chart. HR wouldn’t give it to me, so I just sort of very scrappily cobbled my own together, yeah, and I figured out the male female ratio for each level in our firm, and I created one slide. And, you know, because I’m a good consultant, I had to put it in PowerPoint right? Created a slide that showed, you know, the ratio. So at the consultant level, we were great. We were one to one. At the Senior Consultant, the early manager level, one to one. Super balanced. Senior Manager started to fall off. And then it was like this nose dive cliff, where for every one of me as a partner, there were 14 to 16 men, and there were only two to three female partners at any given time. And it really wasn’t until I had that data in front of this team that they it was like a slap in the face, like, oh my gosh, that’s not who we want to be, right? But they just didn’t see it. Otherwise it was, like, too personal, or, you know, there’s always a story something, and I just saw the power of what that information did, present it that way, as as data, like something you just can’t argue with. And I ended up then using that other places that I worked, where I would sort of naturally get involved in helping more women or people of color, or, you know, any sort of underrepresented community, tried to advance, and ultimately I ended up getting just burned out on retail. I mean, it was wonderful experience, but at the end of the day, we were helping companies sell more pants more profitably, and, yeah, yeah, didn’t really fill my bucket after a while, so I decided to take the leap and start a consulting business focused on dei and really focus on data analytics, built out a whole analytics toolkit to help people do what I did, but even in a more, much more robust way, but just help organizations understand this is part of a business strategy. It’s a core part of running a really well run organization is that you you set everyone up for success, that you bring in. I mean, that’s what all of us should want from our employees, that we can help them get to their full potential, be as productive as possible. A lot of that comes down to fair treatment, and, you know, equal pay and getting biased out of all the systems and so forth. So, yeah, that’s what led me to start equity at work, and I get to bring all of my, you know, transformational change management knowledge with me, and you know how to work with lots of disparate groups, and all those things that I learned through on my retail consulting days. So yeah, it’s been a wonderful experience.
Maria Ross 08:37
Wow, that’s amazing. And, you know, I mentioned that you, you recently came out with the book do Dei, right? And was, is that really just a collection? Is that a is that a framework for people so that they can they can maybe do this for themselves or seek outside help?
Michelle Feferman 08:53
Yeah, absolutely. So when I started the business, I really had a mission to make my knowledge and my team’s knowledge as accessible to people as possible. So whether that be, you know, if you’re a giant organization with tons of budget, we’re thrilled to come in and do a large project with you. If you’re smaller and you need a phone, a friend, we can be a phone a friend, kind of one call, you know, dei experts if you’re having a crisis, right? But there’s still a lot of people where their organization is under resourced, or they just, you know, they’re all part time, kind of volunteers who have a passion for this, but don’t have a ton of budget and resources. So the book was a way to get this knowledge into anyone’s hands who wants that. And the book is built around a dei maturity model that I built that helps. Because what I find is a lot of people say, Oh, you’ve got to have ERGs, and you need, you know, better benefits, and you need these policies, whatever. But nobody explains how to go do that, or right, what order do you go in? Or where are the dependencies? Where are you going to get pushback? How do you deal with that? So I wrote it in a way that would make. It’s super accessible, really practical, easy for anyone to implement, and it’s built around this maturity model that shows, not just what do you do when you’re kind of setting the foundation and then you’re operationalizing it, and then you’re kind of like in, you know, best practice land, but also, what are all the cultural dependencies that you’ve got to have in place for any of this to work, but especially to move from kind of one step in the maturity model to the next into the next. So that’s where things like empathy that you talk about is really important, being an inclusive leader, psychological safety, transparency, you know, lots of kind of core great cultural things that need to be in place that, yeah, you know, we had so many clients. Like, I don’t what is culture, our culture and di different? Do they go together, you know? And it’s like, yeah, there’s a lot of they yes to both questions, you know, right? So we wanted to make sure we help people understand where those two things connect and where to kind of invest their time, right?
Maria Ross 10:55
And we’re going to dig into psychological safety in a minute here, you know, we I’ve done a lot of episodes on the show where we’re talking about the business case for empathy, for inclusion, for dei from your perspective, tell us a little bit about the results that you have seen with your clients, who believe in this, who invest in it, who commit to it. How does it impact? What are the business implications?
Michelle Feferman 11:21
Yeah, I mean, this is one of my favorite parts of this work, is that you do you can actually find ways to put an ROI on the work if you’re really intentional about it. And I think when you can do that, then it’s really hard for any leader to argue that you shouldn’t continue to do the work. So we always lead with that. And to me, the benefits are on one side, from a kind of growth and opportunity perspective, when you have it’s not just the diversity, it’s really making sure that and whatever the diversity looks like. I know most people think about, oh, it’s race, it’s gender, it’s sexual orientation. There’s really so much more totally diversity of experience, of economic, background, education, you know, or do you have a disability? Is it visible or invisible? Do you have a veteran in your family? Are you about I mean, there’s so much that goes into that, but anything that brings in a better way to add creative thinking to great breakup group think, to look at risk, creatively, to look at opportunity more creatively, to represent, you know, your consumer base or your client base, any of that, that all drives, you know, revenue growth, innovation, margin growth. And I will say, I before the long before all the business studies came out about that, we proved that with this women’s group and the initiatives that we did all these years ago at my old firm, where, after investing in changing the systems and getting not only did we get more women promoted and retained, it ended up opening opportunities for really anyone who wasn’t kind of the traditional mold of the past. And through that, we had the highest margin in the history of our firm. We started selling more strategic projects. Our clients stayed with us longer term, and a lot of that was because we were bringing much more diverse solutions to the table for our clients, and our clients who maybe had invested in more of that, because retail is actually pretty decent at that, felt like they were better heard and understood because we, you know, sort of matched up when we when we met in those organizations?
Maria Ross 13:23
Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, for me, it’s the whole thing about bringing people together that see a problem or an opportunity in different ways, so that you don’t miss anything, right? And so sometimes, when I’m asked, why does it matter? And this is, you know, empathy fuels it. You can have all the diversity initiatives you want, but if no one’s being empathetic, you’re really not harnessing that value of it, of exactly trying to get to know someone else’s perspective. But the reason it’s important is not because you’re trying to, you know, dei wash your company, or be right popular, or it’s, it’s really about being smart business. And that’s that’s the amusing thing to me about the recent backlash, because it’s coming from people who either understand and don’t want to admit it, or, quite frankly, are too ignorant to understand that there’s huge business value when you have different experienced and different life experiences and different abilities looking at a problem, because they’re going to see different facets of it. We’re going to be able to point out those risks or those opportunities that some people miss. And if you all think the same way, you’re all going to only see the same thing. And I, I’m kind of a game show junkie, so bear with me on this analogy. But I watch, I’m a huge Jeopardy junkie, but I also watch some of the mind numbing stuff, like family feud and things like that, yep, and the teams where it’s like a team that has to think of answers right to something, I always see this. It’s pick the people that think differently to be on the team, because you’re all going to try. Brought out the same answers, if you all think the same way. But if you have someone who you know Zags when other people Zig, right, yeah, those people are going to come up with answers that you can’t come up with yourself, right? And so you see it play out. You see it you see it play out. I mean, we all can relate. We see it play out in sports, right? Completely. Not everyone on the team has the same talent. In basketball, you’ve got,
Michelle Feferman 15:24
like, yeah, we’re not going to do well actually,
Maria Ross 15:27
for sure, you’ve got rebounders, you’ve got centers, you’ve got forwards, you’ve got the people that are more aggressive, the people that are more adaptive. And we understand that analogy in sports, and for some reason, there’s too many people that don’t understand that analogy in business, right? And think it’s just either, you know, well, we’re just going to hire people that are less qualified. No, no.
Michelle Feferman 15:47
If you’re not giving anyone a pass, that’s not, not what this is about.
Maria Ross 15:50
Exactly, exactly. So tell me where you are in terms of what’s going on with dei and the backlash and the executive orders. Yeah. What’s your take on it? What conversations are you having with clients and what misconceptions are you going to bust for us right now? Okay, because there’s a lot.
Michelle Feferman 16:09
There are a lot. Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, since the executive orders came out last year, I think it for at least six months, it was just constant confusion, fear, chaos. You know, nobody knew what to do. You saw some people like, do an extreme retreat and then pay the price for that. If you think, like, targets are the perfect, perfect example of that. You saw others step up and like, lean in really hard and still do well. So Costco was a great kind of counterbalance to target in that example. And then a lot of companies just sort of in between, trying to figure out, okay, if I just change the name of this, can I does everything go away for me, like, is it still fine? Do we have to pull back completely? You know, we spent a lot of time and are still doing this, like helping people really assess their risk related to the executive orders. And I think the way that those came out, the language, in the orders, and the flurry of activity that followed, I think, was all very intentional to create confusion and fear, and it worked for a good period of time. Now we’re at a point where people are like, Okay, I see this happening everywhere in everything that’s being touched by this administration. And I say this, you know, regardless of your political affiliation, like to me, di is not political This is about like doing right by your people in the workplace, so that your business does well and your people do well. So it doesn’t matter what political party you affiliate with, anything else. It has nothing to do with that. But in the environment we’re in, there’s just sort of chaos, confusion, crazy, kind of everywhere. And so I think what’s happening now is people are realizing that was a tactic, and they’re swinging back to, okay, I’ve got to go back to kind of the basics of I got to figure out what’s right for my business. So based on my brand, my culture, my business model, my customers need, what my customers need? How much do I have to be like in touch with, sort of the end consumer things like that. They’re, I think they’re getting back around to like, we need a strategy for what’s happening now, not just a reaction set of tactics, which is a good thing, because we’re at a point now that research is showing that the demand for this is back at the high that it was in 2020 from employees. I predict the minute the job market starts to loosen up, you’re going to have a lot of people that are saying, my company didn’t stand up during this time, I’m going to go and it’s table stakes. It’s baseline expectation for Gen Zers, a lot of millennials and above. I mean, I mean, I think a lot of women in leadership roles in particular, like, you know, if you didn’t stand by me, there’s during this time I’m going to go lead somewhere else, right? So it’ll be interesting to see what happens. But I do think we’re having a swing back to like, let’s recalibrate for where we need to, know, go, you know, from here on, after surviving the the fear, right? I will say the companies that are very and we work in nonprofit as well, and so a lot of those folks just have been,
Maria Ross 19:08
you know, well, their funding hangs in a balance. Yeah, exactly, yeah. You know, if you’re
Michelle Feferman 19:13
dependent on federal money, it’s a very different story. And if you’re, you know, it’s if you’re, if 1% of your business is federal money, versus 20% it’s a very different equation. So if you’re, you know, 20 or more percent of your business comes from federal money, like you have to keep the lights on. You need to keep people employed, like you’re going to have to pull back on some things, more than companies where they either don’t have that or it’s a very, very small, you know, part of the equation for
Maria Ross 19:38
them, right? Well, in the conversations that I have with some of those folks is many of them, obviously, they’re in that space, so they think it’s ridiculous, yeah, and they’re sort of just keeping their heads down until the storm passes. That’s what they’re hoping, is, how do I still continue to commit to this work and benefit my organization and our stakeholders and our shareholders? Dollars, yes, through this strategy, but stay out of sight. Yeah, not, you know, yeah, and not hiding, but
Michelle Feferman 20:06
you’re right from the right, don’t. You don’t have to go scream it from the rooftops. But I think where, and we’ve certainly had some clients that have gone into, like, major stealth, what they’re calling stealth mode, because it’s just hard to, you know, they feel maybe they’re dependent on state money, or, you know, some other things that they’re like, we just have to be extra careful, right? I think the risk there is if you go too far into stealth. Do your employees not even know that the work’s happening, like the HR knows it’s happening, or other leaders know so they’re, you know, it’s tricky. Every company has to find their own strike the right chord for them. But you know you want to make sure you’re doing enough that people inside
Maria Ross 20:44
still know that you’re committed. Yeah, important? Yeah, I have a question for you, because I’ve heard this from some folks that I’ve been out talking to, which is, perhaps it’s there’s a silver lining to this in that companies are realizing that it can’t be this own separate function and separate initiative. It has to be a pervasive mindset that’s built into the system so that you’re almost you know, someone once told me, my hope, someone in this space said, my hope is that we don’t have heads of dei anymore because we don’t need them. I agree. Do you kind of see it that way too?
Michelle Feferman 21:20
Absolutely, and we really, when we do projects with our clients, we really, the whole focus is like, how do we help you embed this into just the DNA of your company, like, how it normally works, and it’s not labeled di, there isn’t a DI lead. There may be someone kind of on point to just, you know, almost PMO, the whole thing kind of, you know, track everything and make sure nothing goes off the rails. But it really should be a C suite imperative, you know, and each of them to sort of have an area of responsibility related to it, but it just becomes part of how everybody works, right? And then, then you don’t really have to deal with this, all this nonsense about, is this legal or not? Because it just is. You’re not calling it a diversity initiative, right? You just naturally have taken the bias out of all these processes and right? Good business anyway, and
Maria Ross 22:08
that’s legal. It’s legal 200% legal. Legal to be a welcoming culture that where everyone belongs. It’s legal to hire diverse talent and expand your recruiting pool, expand where you know your pipeline, it’s legal. Good, yeah, it’s legal to up level the people in your organization that have maybe been forgotten. And absolutely all of those things are things that dei addresses, but, but those initiatives and that strategy and that mindset, it’s all still legal folks, right?
Michelle Feferman 22:39
It is. It absolutely is, yeah. So in terms of myth busting, yes, it’s, you know, when you and I had to read those orders over and over and over again, because the language is so fuzzy and, uh huh, you know, I don’t know, just very inflammatory, and so it sort of makes you angry, and you think, which I think, again, is purposeful, so that it’s hard to get down to, like, what is this
Maria Ross 23:00
really saying? Well, they’re trying to distract So, yeah, I think that’s the goal. Yeah, yeah,
Michelle Feferman 23:04
but there’s very little that is illegal. You should not have quotas. But I think we’re in an age where hopefully almost nobody had quotas anymore anyway. So you don’t want to hire say, We want three women, two black men, a disabled person and a gay person on my leadership, like that. No, that doesn’t have anything good for them. It’s not good for the company. Like, it’s bad all around yeah. So no quotas, which is fine. You can still have goals of, like, you know, balancing your representation a little bit better. But like, as long as you’re not, like, hiring heads for specific to hit certain numbers, that is fine. ERGs need to be open to allies and other people that are interested, so which we’ve been encouraging people to do anyway, because it, you know, ERGs, you want to have a safe space for people without affinity to connect. But if you go too far, you end up siloing yourself out of the rest of the companies. So you want to have something that’s a little more fluid, right? That’s fine. And, you know, the thing that broke my heart was to get rid of programs that were really focused on uplifting some folks that, you know, just came in more disadvantaged than others. And I, you know, I think the way we’ve helped people get around that is keep the program, maybe expand the criteria a little bit, because there are still other people that need to be lifted up as well. And hopefully this will kind of come back around, and you’re you can still achieve the goals you’re going after, but Right? Maybe expand some of the criteria a
Maria Ross 24:30
little bit, right? I mean, in things like pay equity and transparent compensation strategies, and that’s all still fine. You know, leveling to the market when you need to, like we should be doing that anyway.
Michelle Feferman 24:42
Absolutely, it’s good business. That’s how you retain your employees. Yes, they know that you’re taking good care of them well.
Maria Ross 24:48
And you know, to your point, from earlier, I mean, this is the thing that I’ve studied a lot within the empathy space, and not that I’m a generational expert, but, you know, I did dig up a lot of data around Gen Z and younger millennials. And. And the reason they’re demanding so much about out of the cultures that they’re joining is because things are transparent. Now, right? Yes, when I was a teenager, and, you know, the 80s, when I shopped at a store, I had no idea how they treated their employees. I had no idea how they you know, the ethicalness Is that a word of the ethics of their supply chain. Oh, no, we had no idea know what shenanigans were going on within the organization in terms of how they treated employees, or how they treated customers, or, you know, even, you know, even at that age, sort of what their what their customer policies were, yeah, that’s the difference. Is that we have younger generations that are savvy to this. They know where to look. They’re looking and they’re saying, No, we’re going to call you out, or no, I’m talented, but I’m not going to join
Michelle Feferman 25:51
your organization. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, that’s a huge thing, yeah.
Maria Ross 25:56
So let’s talk about psychological safety, because that’s obviously a huge component of creating a culture of inclusion and belonging. Yeah. Again, we’ve had a lot of folks on the show, but what’s your definition of psychological safety through the lens of the work that you do? Yeah.
Michelle Feferman 26:10
I mean, to me, it’s it really goes so I don’t think you can have effective dei work, or whatever you want to work culture, work, inclusion, work, and any work. Out. And you know, when I came across this term, it was like a light bulb went off for me that explained I finally had a term I could use for all the times I just felt like icky in different situations at work, or unprotected, or kind of like vulnerable in the wrong way, or like nobody exposed. Yeah, exposed, or I was being kind of hung out to dry potentially, but I there was no word for it back then. So I love this term, and it really says that if there’s cycle. So what I really love about is psychological safety. Yes, it’s a cultural it can be a cultural kind of mission, but it is very situational. So from meeting to meeting, team to team, obviously, situation, situation, it can vary. And so you’ve always got to figure out, especially as a leader, am I creating a space at this moment where people can ask questions, they can speak up, they can have different ideas. They can approach me about a concern, and they don’t feel like it puts their career at risk, or their job security at risk, or they’re going to be penalized in some way. And so if you can really embrace that, and I think the challenge is to the leader, to really set the tone and role model that it, you can still have healthy competition. You can still have, you know, a lot of the things that people are kind of depending on, you can still have a focus on productivity and great output, and I would argue you get more of that by focusing on this, because people feel like you have their back. I mean, it’s really that simple,
Maria Ross 27:50
and they’re not wasting their time looking over their shoulder and worried about politics. Because I was just having a conversation with someone earlier, it does, and I was having a conversation with someone earlier about what a waste of productivity that is. Oh, completely keep someone in that mindset of, should I or shouldn’t I? Can I or can’t I? Like, Oh, I see this risk, but if I point it out, I’m going to make my boss look stupid. Or, you know, or I have this great idea, but if I throw it out there and it doesn’t work, I might lose my job. Think of all the opportunities and the productivity you’re missing out with people just churning on that in their minds and not staying focused on the work. And that’s where I’m like, this is about this is not about coddling people. This is about not helping them engage their frontal lobe and their executive skills and not put them in fight or flight or freeze or fawn, yes, which I just learned as a fourth one, yes. So yeah, it just makes sense, right? So in that vein of psychological safety, the reason I wanted to talk to you sooner rather than later is you published a fantastic article on LinkedIn that we will link to in the show notes around how to create psychological safety at work, amidst in specifics, the ICE raids that are going on in the United States. Now, we could probably insert any other sort of fear based crisis in here, but you had some great operational and very practical points to make in this article, and that’s why I thought it was it was wonderful because as we spoke before we started recording, so much of the advice out there is just help your people feel safe. Check in with them, yeah, make sure they know you’re available, right?
Michelle Feferman 29:29
Yeah, it’s so loosey goosey. I don’t think anyone knows what to do. And I also think leaders, especially frontline leaders, that are on the ground in these locations where this is happening, you know, if they’re coming into your building, your store, your distribution center, whatever it might be, you know, they’re immediately stuck between, like, am I supposed to be the voice of the company? Am I supposed to be the voice of this building? Am I supposed to be the voice of my employees, my team myself, like it’s sort of this mad scramble, and I think a lot of people just don’t know what to do. So, you know, was. With all the ICE raids, you know? I mean, there’s just, there’s so many things we could talk about related to that, but I think, you know, obviously you’ve got to, you have to be set up to follow the law. You know, you’ve got to be able to coordinate with your local police, but really, you’ve got to make sure that your company policy is outlining all of the things that could potentially happen, so that everyone knows very clearly what the company can do and what the company maybe can’t do, or even thinks where there’s a gray area, just so people know going in and have that well communicated. I think people in these times, you know, I think back to covid. I think back to different, you know, where we’ve had, you know, a massive recession, or, like, economic uncertainty, I mean all kinds of different disasters, like Mega things that happen. And I do think a lot of the temptation is to freeze or be like, I’m not going to deal with that until it’s in my face and I have to figure it out. I think what we’ve learned from all of those is you’ve got the more you can communicate and try to be proactive and just even, sort of even if you create different scenarios and kind of like, practice your response, the better everybody will feel every day dealing with this, because at least you’ve thought it through. You’ve, like, had a moment to think it through. So creating those policies and making them very, very clear, I think, is an important sort of initial first step,
Maria Ross 31:17
yeah, and I think the thinking that, Oh, if I bring this up, I’m going to scare everybody is a moot point, because they’re probably thinking about it, and we’re already Yeah, and I should add, it doesn’t matter if you employ a lot of immigrant workers or people from other countries because US citizens are getting pulled into this as well, or if they suspect someone is on your facility, or in your store, in your office. So everyone needs to be prepared for this. We can’t just be like, Oh, our office is fine because we’re all, you know. We’re all from Kansas, where you know whatever, whatever you want to say. So I loved that you had very specific questions to ask. And so if you wouldn’t mind going through those and saying, These are the things you should put in place or think about. And you know, again, for folks listening, flex this to whatever the next crisis of fear will be for your office or for your The sooner you get out in front of these and actually have these policies and these protocols in place. It’s like a fire drill. Hopefully you never need it, exactly, but don’t ignore it. Yeah.
Michelle Feferman 32:27
So without eternity, I grew up in California, I still remember getting under my desk and holding my head for an earthquake drill, for the earthquake drill. And you know, if the earthquake was really bad, that really wasn’t going to do any good, but it made us all feel like we’d had something to do, you know, and so it just created a sense of calm. So I think this is a very, you know, similar kind of situation. And and I, before I go through the questions, I do want to reiterate, Maria, I mean, you brought up a really good point. This isn’t just about immigrants. Everybody is freaked out. And, you know, what started with? You know, terrible racial profiling has expanded into like, political profiling. And are you just speaking up? Are you just asking questions, like all of those things, people are being, you know, tased, they’re being sprayed in the face. They’re being pulled they’re being hit, they’re being knocked down. I mean, horrible things are happening. So I think the the fear is very widespread at this point, but the questions that some of the questions I started with, because, again, our my focus is, like, I want to tell you how to do these things, not just what you need to do, and kind of help you take it a few steps further, like, connect the dots down to, like, what the employee really needs and how you make that happen. So beyond the communication piece and the policy stuff that I talked about before, you know, making sure you have something like a hotline, whether it be a phone, an email box, whatever it might be for your employees to voice their concerns, I think is really important. The extent to which you can make that confidential would be even better. Because I think a lot of people, again, if they’re not sure about this safety, you know, kind of related to job security, whatever they want, to know that they can at least raise the question without, you know, sort of being identified as the one who asked the question. Right? Have you, you know, figured out, like, legally, what an employee can do and who to reach, who they should reach out to if ice suddenly is on one of your premises. So, you know, I know people have been slamming some of the retailers where ice has gone inside the store. For all we know, those store managers had no idea what they could and couldn’t do, right So, and then all of a sudden, you’ve got ICE agents interacting with your employees, potentially some of your vendors and your customers, so making sure that you know some of this frontline leadership is really informed on what they can and can’t do, and who that you know, who they what’s sort of the chain of command. If they see ice coming, they get, you know, whiff of this coming. Whatever. It might be versus and, and, of course, on the premises. Another thing I think a lot of people are forgetting about is, you know, many EAP programs have
Maria Ross 35:10
actually assistance programs, right?
Michelle Feferman 35:12
Yes, thank you. Have access to some kind of legal counsel, usually for a couple hours. You can get some free or discounted legal advice, making sure that number one is that included, and hopefully it is. But secondly, are those people who can help with citizenship questions with, you know, if I’ve been detained, or my colleagues been detained, or a family member, you know, are they equipped to answer some of those questions? If not, can you get Can you kind of shore that up so that people have some sort of legal representative that they can reach out to at a, you know, affordable cost, and then thinking through, you know, if you’ve got employees who either have to miss work or leave early because they’re in fear of being detained, or just in fear of kind of this situation in general, now that it’s become so unsafe for kind of anyone involved, can they miss work? Will they be penalized for that? What if they can do it? How do they do that? What you know, do they use PTO? Do you have some kind of like emergency days that they can tap into? Can you pull some days so that you’ve got a group of employees that, if they don’t have it, someone else is willing to share. This is a great place. A lot of people feel. A lot of you know they want to help. And so you may have employees that want to donate a couple days off so that others can do that. And then, if you have an employee who was wrongfully detained and missed work and then is released, are they penalized? Do they have a job to come back to do their benefits continue? You know, you have to kind of think down. This is where empathy and compassion and like, you know, really sort of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes really pays off of, like, pretend this happened to me. What are all the questions that I would have exactly, you know, and try to anticipate that and more and create, you know, a Frequently Asked Questions document with answers that are that’s available to everyone. This is an area to totally over communicate in. So if you have a physical location, putting up, you know, information physically around the building is great. Having on a portal, having emails go out, you know, I mean, I’ll just have it come from multiple sources, but also that someone can get to the information without having to ask someone or log into something. I think this is a case again where people just want their privacy, so helping them think through that, I think, is really, really important.
Maria Ross 37:35
I want to say something about FAQs, because I helped my son’s school his old school, several years ago through a crisis that they had, and my first advice I was on the board at the time was, we’ve got to create an FAQ document. And I was like, We don’t care if we have the answers or not. Let’s just document all the questions, all the questions we can think of, all the questions you know, we’re getting from other people yes and start to populate that document. And for the ones where we didn’t have an answer yet, is we’re working on it. We’re trying to find the answer, but being able to sort of brain dump that all of those different questions and just get them out there, even if on the FAQ it says we’re not sure yet, but we’re working on it alleviates some stress for your employees, that it’s at least on your radar, right? So don’t be afraid to put the question there, just because you don’t have an answer for
Michelle Feferman 38:28
it yet, absolutely, and make sure you give a couple points of contact if people want to follow up or they need more information. Having a, you know, generic suggestion box or email, you know, like an email box where people can send questions confidentially. It’s also great, but yeah, and that whole we’re working on it and give a date and time when you’ll get back to people and then really do it right, you know, and again, communicate. We’re continuing to update this, you know, once a week or every day, or whatever the you know, place is,
Maria Ross 38:57
because what it also does for people is, if you disseminate that, and there’s questions on there that you’re not sure of. Maybe there’s someone in your organization that does Yes, and part of the call to action is, if you have knowledge of any of this, please come to us and let us know, and we’ll populate it into the FAQ for other people. Yeah.
Michelle Feferman 39:16
And you know, this isn’t as scary as this time is, and and scary isn’t even the word that captures all the feelings. But just to run with that for a second. You know, people want to help, and they want to come together and support each other and be part of the solution. I mean, it’s been really amazing to see how communities have rallied. People that you would never have expected to be at a protest are coming out, just even everyday, small acts of kindness are huge right now, and so giving a way for your employees to participate in some of this brainstorming and providing solutions would be amazing. I mean, that also is part of psychological safety that they get to contribute to the solution. That they’re just as valued as an hourly worker or a low level manager, whatever it might be as some of the leaders in charge, that also takes the pressure off the leaders to have to figure everything out by themselves, because none of us can anticipate everything that someone’s going to wonder about right now, it’s just would be impossible.
Maria Ross 40:17
So what’s your take on a leader hearing all this, a C suite, a VP, and going, this is a lot. How am I supposed to get work done? It is a lot.
Michelle Feferman 40:26
But you, I mean, unless you’re in a tiny business, which even, you know, I’m in a small business, and we still find ways to leverage all kinds of people and resources people want to help here. And so tap your network, you know, whether it be an internal network, and divvy it up across your team, create a task force, you know? I mean, this is something people are very passionate about. They want to provide solutions. I think you’ve got to really tap into the boots on the ground people that are whether it be, you know. I mean, everyone has different business models, but you’re going to have different perspectives, you know, if you talk to someone who’s in kind of back office operations compared to someone who’s running a distribution center. So you’ve got to really tap into a lot of different voices and perspectives on this one to make sure you’re thinking through you know, but it’s, I think this is one that is much less about, let’s get to perfect to let’s get, let’s get the communication going, right? Make sure people are feeling safe, not just physically safe, but psychologically safe, right? And you can iterate on it as things continue to evolve. You probably have a in house counsel. If not, you got a, you know, external employment attorney that can give you great advice from a legal policy perspective. But then a lot of it’s really down to figure out, like, what are people really need right now, and how can we help them feel safe and cared for?
Maria Ross 41:47
And you know, you are, yes, you are doing all this while you’re still getting work done whatever your business is. But it goes, I think it goes a long way to let your employees see that you’re at least working on it. And it gives them a little bit like, Okay, I know I’ve gotten my briefing. I know this is happening. Maybe I can take a few hours to kind of focus on on what I need to be doing from a work perspective, and it alleviates that whole do they see me? Do they know I’m here? Do they know caring about this? Do they care that I care that I’m upset that I didn’t sleep last night. So we’re not saying, you know, everyone gets a free pass to avoid work, but
Michelle Feferman 42:26
no, and I really think the more you if you can take the time now to get these things in place, everybody will, maybe not everyone. The majority of the people, will relax to some extent, and feel like I can come to work and just focus on my work now, because I know they’re working on this and they’ve got and they’ve got me exactly whereas, if it’s not happening, there’s such a it’s like in the back of your mind all the time, and you’re just constantly distracted. You’re wanting to keep checking the news. You want to check in with other people, like non stop. So this will alleviate a lot of the temptation to do that. People will relax more, be much more productive at work, absolutely. And we’ve seen that. And I will just very quickly share a story of one company we work with. They’re it’s a global, buoyant brand, and they have distribution centers all over the US and and globally. And, you know, I don’t see this is one of my passion points, is investing in di with an hourly workforce, and a lot of people don’t do that because they immediately think, I can’t afford to take them off the floor, to put them through training, and that, do we pay them? What have we have all these shifts and this and that. How do we get everyone covered? Blah, blah, blah. Well, this company figured it out, and it did not take a lot, but we invested in dei work with them, and a lot of it was around building psychological safety and teaching leaders to lead in a non kind of task oriented way, and in more of a people motivation, motivational and care kind of way. And in those buildings, they have, the retention is through the roof, and the productivity is through the roof. And the productivity and the first one we did outpaced every other building in their entire network, the first time that we did it, wow. And it just goes to show that little and it was a little bit of communication, it was a little bit of coaching, of some leaders, a little bit of education, and then activities, and, you know, like engagement, kinds of things around the building and whatever didn’t require tons of time off the floor. Didn’t ask people to come in off shift a whole bunch, like any of that. But the payoff they got from that was tremendous. And so now we’re helping them now with this, you know, the I stuff and sort of, how do we, you know, incorporate that thinking into this? And it’s the same thing. I mean, I see it over and over with a little bit of investment. It just, the payoff is tremendous. So, you know, we talked about revenue and white space and customer centricity and all that beginning. There’s another side to it, which is the retention, getting the turnover down, the engagement, the productivity that comes from this too. And so I think it’s another one with all this, you know, ice, the horrifying ice stuff. If you invest in that psychological safety, like your people stay cared for, they will stay with you when this passes, you know, they will be very loyal to your company. They’ll give it their all. I mean, it really will make a big difference in your business.
Maria Ross 45:13
So true. So true. So I will put a link to this article that has kind of these, I would say, checklist questions, but they’re not really, but I’ll put a link to the article in your show notes, and just thank you for your time and for being willing to jump on a call with me and do this, because I just think this is really powerful information we need to get out there. Your book is called do Dei, right. Your company is called equity at work, and Michelle, we’ll have all your links in the show notes so people can contact you. But for anyone that’s on the go right now, where’s the best place for them to find out more about this work?
Michelle Feferman 45:48
So our website is www, dot equity, dash at dash work.com, we’re also on sub stack, so you can get all of our pot. We have a podcast called do di write. You can get our podcasts, blogs, articles, everything on there. I’m a pretty active poster on there. So you can find us there. If you look up do di rate or Michelle pfefferman, you’ll find us and otherwise, reach out. I’m so happy to talk to anybody who just wants some guidance. You need some brainstorming, anything you can go to the website. There’s a Contact Us button. You can find me on LinkedIn. Just reach out. I’m very happy to help so awesome. You’re free to do so awesome.
Maria Ross 46:25 Thank you so much, Michelle for your time and insights. Really appreciate it, and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate review or share it with a friend and colleague. And remember, cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
