111: The role of HR in curating organisational purpose and culture: Marcia La-Rose, Group People & Diversity Director, Four Communications

The Elephant in the Room

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Shownotes:

A couple of months back I spoke with Marcia La Rose, Group People and Diversity Director, Four Agency Worldwide. Her story is uplifting - she has been at the agency for over 2 decades with over a decade in leadership roles and has been heavily involved in the agency’s acquisition of B-Corp status.

In our freewheeling conversation we spoke about her journey as a woman leader from the global majority, her learnings from the journey. We also spoke about👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 How the role of HR has transformed in the past couple of years, and the biggest challenges and opportunities

👉🏾 Post COVID workplace, the future of work for our industry - if remote/hybrid working is done for or here to stay

👉🏾 Her views on whether HR should drive purpose and culture in an organisation

👉🏾 Inclusive/equitable culture and steps to creating it

👉🏾 The importance of goal setting and measurement for culture change programme

👉🏾 What the industry can do to increase representation of the global majority in the C-Suite/Leadership teams

We also spoke about what the Elephant in the room is for her and much, more. I cannot thank Marcia enough for her generosity in making time from her busy schedule for this conversation.

To listen more, head to the podcast in the link below:

Episode Transcript:

Sudha: Good morning, Marcia. Wonderful to have you on The Elephant in the Room podcast today. I am tuning in from Gurgaon, India. So it's afternoon here.

Marcia: Great stuff. Brilliant. I'm in London, so it's morning here.

Sudha: So to get started, give us a quick introduction to who you are and what you do.

Marcia: Okay, so I'm Marcia LaRose. I am the head of HR at Four Agency Worldwide. I've been at Four for 20 years now. I am actually an accountant, so when I joined Four I was their accountant. Oh, well I was the whole finance team. And the company was very small then maybe 15 employees. So at that point, it was quite manageable to look after suppliers and clients and paying staff and the like, so that was all absolutely fine, but as the business grew, it was found that I had particularly good people skills by others, I must add.

Marcia: And so I moved into HR, and I've been in HR probably now for about... 12 or 15 years, and I still look after a lot of things to do with money. So I work really closely with the group finance director, and I still look after the salaries and tax issues, student loan issues, those sorts of things. Aside from that I was heavily involved in Four acquiring its B Corp status and I actively work to ensure we are continually improving on that. And separately again, I am a fellow at the PRCA and I am an immigration advisor at the Home Office. So that's what I do.

Sudha: Oh my God. Wow. You definitely have your plate full.

Marcia: Yeah. I like to be busy. Keeps me out of trouble, I think. Yeah.

Sudha: So as a woman leader from the global majority, how easy or difficult has career progression been for you? From the sound of it, it looks like you, managed to find some good people along the way, or?

Marcia: Yeah, I mean, it wasn't necessarily easy but I know I've been lucky, which isn't how it's actually supposed to be. It should be fact, not luck. Many, many years ago when my daughter first started school, she's now 28. So many years ago I was able to work from home due to child care issues that I had and I was only actually able to do that because my employer at the time was a progressive thinker and I just don't think there's many of those people, I just don't think they were around at that point and that was the luck part.

Marcia: And that person, Nan Williams, is the chief executive of the company I currently work at and have been working at for 20 years. And she knew the value of working mums, which I think is missed by many businesses. I think that's a big group, that lots of businesses ignore.

Sudha: Yeah. My kids were probably of a similar age and younger age. And I remember really struggling and having to step back a couple of times in order to be able to juggle home and work. Often I had to sacrifice, to stop working to be able to look after. And also you mentioned that you move from being an accountant to being a people person.

Marcia: Yes. So, I mean, the central service functions are always quite interlinked. I haven't got any really strong IT skills, so I won't claim anything there. But I think, the group finance director and myself, Patrick Kwok, we work very closely. I've literally just come off of a call with him and we have maybe three or four calls a day when we're not in the office together. We work very closely to make sure everything's going well across the business. And because I've already got the financial background. It's easy for Patrick to speak to me in ways that maybe it wouldn't be for others. So it's just the way it's gone really. So yeah, again, luck.

Sudha: And that be shouldn't be the case. But thank God for that. What would you say are your biggest learnings from that journey? Something that you can share with aspiring women leaders, especially from the global majority, black and ethnic minority.

Marcia: Yeah, I think one of the biggest learnings for me, and because I experienced it, was not to judge others for their lifestyle choices. So I know in the past that I was judged because I was a black single mother and people had their own preconception of what that looks like and what that would be. And I think, although I have been able to carve a pathway, it has hindered me in other ways, other opportunities at other organisations.

Sudha: Yeah. That's very unfortunate. And I can imagine at that time, especially, nobody even thought about how it was impacting.

Marcia: No, if I tell you a really bizarre story. I remember working somewhere and I had to drop my daughter to school before I came to the office and then there was something happened on the tubes and everything went wrong. And I was hurtling up the escalators at a tube station and broke my toe on the escalator groove. And that was a turning point for me where I'd sort of mentally said to myself, I'm going to just take it easy when I get there is when I get there, rather than break my neck, literally, to try and get to work. And I think a lot of working parents go through, similar type of epiphany, I suppose, where they get to a point where they say, look, X is more important than Y.

Sudha: Yeah, it can be so traumatising, this whole thing. Absolutely. So you've been around for some time. Has the role of HR transformed in the past couple of years? And what according to you are the biggest challenges and opportunities. Not trend, I wouldn't say trend because everyone is doing it, I'll do it.

Marcia: Yeah. I think a lot of businesses would have found that one of the largest opportunities has been the ability to hire talent from all over the country/world. The ability to do that has given a lot of businesses a step forward where the hurdles arrive, now the challenge, would be to get those individuals to come to an office space for mandated days. So yeah, the opportunity has also created the challenge, if that makes sense, in the past couple of years of how the workplace looks like.

Sudha: And do you think that , workplaces of the future are going to be hybrid?

Marcia: Well, I think because our industry, the communications industry as a whole in the UK have now got staff going in the office for two or three days mandated. I think the shuffle of staff between agencies might not be as extreme. So there's that. So hopefully it will stop the churn of people going and coming. But as a whole, I do think hybrid might be here for a while longer, but I don't know because now we're going into winter here and COVID might show its face again and we might go backwards before we go forwards.

Marcia: So it's all a bit up in the air because obviously the home working or remote working and hybrid working were sort of forced on businesses because of COVID. And so we may have to come to a conclusion as a country at some point that it's sort of like a seasonal thing rather than something set in stone. I don't know.

Sudha: So, you're, talking about that the flu may come back and we may need to take similar sort of measures, you know, and you're talking about seasonality. COVID did a lot of bad, but it also helped us to reimagine how we could live work and play, as I say often.

Sudha: So what do you think is now the future of work for our industry? Where you are looking at increasingly intergenerational workforces. You're looking at, different cultures, you're looking at a lot of diversity and you're looking at people, who want different things from the workplace. And especially when you look at millennials, or you look at over 50s, where they are not willing to compromise, unless they have a great pension, of course, , don't have a pension, let me say, they're not willing to compromise on certain aspects of what they hold dear.

Sudha: So what according to you would future work look like? I mean, nobody can predict it actually things evolving so fast. It's always changing, but maybe two or three things that you think?

Marcia: I think there's a lot of prongs to this because some businesses may feel that they could, not renew their lease on their premises and have some other form of office space, a rework type situation. But then I know the government have been actively encouraging people to come back to London, to keep London Limited functioning. But so all the shops and the other businesses that are around there, but there's been an increase in footfall for the high street since people have been working from home.

Marcia: So it's sort of swings and roundabouts and businesses, although they're independent and can do what they wish, there are some limitations. So for example it took a long while for train companies to offer other seasonal train tickets. Because historically it's cheaper to buy a weekly ticket than a daily ticket on public transport. But if people are only going to the office two or three days a week, what does that mean? And so there's lots of different... tangents to this. It's not simply just a business deciding they want to do X and it'll be fine.

Marcia: Because we've also got to think about employees, the cost of living. There's so many different elements, but I, do feel there will be some businesses who will decide against having permanent premises.

Sudha: Yeah. And Marcia, do you believe that , again, if we talk about in a post COVID world, purpose suddenly became something that everyone wanted to talk about, right? Do you believe that HR should drive purpose and culture in an organisation? Or HR is well placed to drive purpose and culture in an organisation?

Marcia: Well, they need to be working with the C suite of businesses, but HR, yes, should definitely drive the purpose and culture of the organisation. There should be policies in place to ensure that the culture is diverse and the business has a purpose definitely.

Sudha: Yeah. And what does that mean when, organisations say they have an inclusive equitable culture? What does that mean? And how does one go about creating it? Because it's not like you mix a couple of ingredients and it is done.

Marcia: I think businesses need to be committed to an equitable culture.

Marcia: Because, there's no point the C suite or HR implementing an inclusive environment if those working with the diverse staff on a day to day basis are not aligned. So it's a really important thing to educate the current staff to make sure that they understand the direction the company is heading in and that , they're bought into it and so they see the benefit as well or understand what the benefit would be. So yeah, how do we go about creating it? We at Four, we have a redacted CV process, as one of our main strands. So somebody would apply for a role and that CV is only seen by people within the HR team and the CV is then redacted before it is shared with the hiring manager and only when the hiring manager says they want to see person X will they get the full CV. So there's no preconceptions or unconscious bias, a place if people see someone's name or where they were educated or what additional languages they may speak or what additional countries they may have lived in.

Marcia: So the HR team actively read the CVs and don't just carte blanche, blank out information, they read it. If it's something that is needed and wanted, obviously that is kept open, but some information is actually redacted. So we hope that that.... well it is helping us improve our diversity stats.

Sudha: And you can see the improvement?

Marcia: We can actively see the improvement. Before we started doing that we found that a certain group were very, very diverse, and that group were the central services team, which incorporate the finance, the IT, the HR, the office teams, reception, because I generally interviewed those people. The client facing teams, however, we were at a different percentage of diversity. So to improve that we implemented the redacted CVs and we went from 14, one, four percent of diverse client facing staff to 24 percent within a two year period.

Sudha: Wow, that's good. Well done on that.

So how important, Marcia, are fair pay and representation for building an inclusive culture in order of priority?

Marcia: I think they're all think they're all of equal priority, to be honest, because they're all interlinked. You cannot have an inclusive culture without fair pay and representation. It just wouldn't happen. So they are all of equal priority and importance. I think that's quite clear to me, anyway.

Sudha: And pay transparency?

Marcia: So we're not yet at a point where we need to publicly publish our ethnicity or gender pay gap, but we have those figures. We're very strict on the pay brackets for job titles, and so if somebody is ex job title, their pay will be between A and B range, and that's quite clear. So yes.

Sudha: That's a good way to ensure that, you're not, just making decisions because you feel like it.

Marcia: Absolutely, we don't want to restrict the management, but we do want to give them particular boundaries to work within. Because, it's human nature, they'll have favourites, they'll have this, they'll that.... but this helps us look at it, with clear eyes and make sure that nothing silly is going on in the background.

Sudha: Yeah, that's true. Goal setting and measurement, how critical are they for the success again for culture change program? And would you have any examples of what success would look like, what goal are you setting at, when you're talking about an inclusive culture, or when you're talking about transparency, or who you are as an organisation, all of this is not like a one time thing.

Sudha: It's something that you need to do continuously. So how do you measure and what is that goal that you're moving towards?

Marcia: Yeah, so because we are a business that has offices not just in London, but in the north of England and Wales and across the Middle East, we set each of the teams, a different target for diversity.

Marcia: So that's a hard target that we've set them. We've also got soft target on gender because, we're 60 percent female fundamentally, so where teams are lacking, they've got different targets to others. So we are quite strong on that, and we also implement the Rooney rule which is an American thing where we would make sure that somebody diverse is in the top three or five candidates that people want to look at for roles, even if they haven't pre selected them, we would ensure that they are in there. So we do things in the background to make this happen for us, but the teams themselves, all the directors of the teams know their targets and we have a company target on top of that.

Sudha: Marcia it seems like a fairly simple thing that, when you're doing something on DEI or DEIB as you call it, it should be embedded within your business purpose and where you're going as a business. And if it is done separately because, people are looking at you and sort of asking you what you're doing you're likely to fail.

Sudha: Do you believe that you as an organisation have done that, it's embedded within your business purpose and that it is aligned to your objective to be a profitable business, but an inclusive business?

Marcia: Yeah, I mean, the fact that we've been awarded a B Corp status actually also proves this, but as a business, it definitely is embedded. We've got a very varied workforce in age and gender and disability and ethnicity. We've got a very, very varied workforce because in our industry, we believe we couldn't serve our clients, rightly and correctly if we didn't have diverse staff. And so it is very important to us to have that and to act on that.

Marcia: And an additional thing that we do at Four is that rather than rely on recruitment agencies, we have a recruitment bonus, for...