Diversifying Corporate America Training And Hiring Quotas Haven’t Provided The Answer

A decade ago, diversifying work forces may have seemed relatively simple. Companies set quotas for hiring minorities and women, then filled them by holding job fairs, recruiting at black colleges and adopting inner-city schools. They assigned the new hires to mentors, and gave them special training. They offered flexible hours for working mothers. For good measure, they put the old guard through prejudice-awareness workshops.

It would only be a matter of time, the companies reasoned, before the best and the brightest of their new employees moved up the management ranks.

Fat chance. As it turned out, hiring more women and minorities was the easy part. Setting up an even playing field was the real test - and one that many companies have failed. Blacks and women still complain that they are left to languish as white male colleagues are promoted; white men complain of opposite treatment.

Clearly, the remedies that were heralded a decade ago have not provided a total cure. Indeed, diversity-training seminars are increasingly derided as window-dressing, and hiring and promotion quotas are under growing attack as unfair or counterproductive.

But if training and quotas do not work, what does? The answer for a growing number of companies is a carrot-and-stick approach of leaning on management to promote minority employees up the corporate ladder.

AT&T, for example, requires managers to submit written plans for increasing the representation of blacks and women in management. BankAmerica Corp. authorizes lower-level people to carry out their own ideas for promoting minorities. Xerox asks women and minorities to identify issues that need addressing - and tells its top managers to act on them.

And Harvard Pilgrim Health Care makes executives’ records in promoting minorities a factor in their performance reviews and bonus calculations.

Varied as they are, these programs share some traits. They focus on changing behavior, rather than on trying to create a racial harmony that may not be attainable. And they set clear, objectives and make managers accountable.

“If white guys are still favoring white guys, the numbers are where it shows up,” said Edward N. Gadsden, director of diversity at Texaco, Here’s what some companies are trying to do:

AT&T: A Rude Awakening

The statistics looked pretty good at AT&T back in 1993: The share of women in its work force had increased to 38 percent from 31 percent nine years earlier, and the representation of minorities to 18 percent from 12 percent. “We seemed to be making tremendous progress,” said Emilio G. Egea, director of diversity programs.

Then, in the fall, “the incident” happened. Focus, AT&T’s in-house magazine, ran a drawing illustrating the cultures of different continents. For Africa, it showed a monkey.

The hue and cry among AT&T’s African-American employees was deafening.

The incident prompted AT&T, which these days is spinning off its communications-equipment and computer divisions, to take a hard look at itself. Its work force was liberally sprinkled with women and minorities, but something was keeping them out of management ranks.

The company announced a more aggressive strategy. It pulled people from different departments into teams, each led by a senior executive and charged with seeking ways to move minority employees and women along. It compared hiring and promotion patterns with those of competitors, and with statistics on the race and sex of graduating college seniors. It told each division head to come up with a plan for increasing blacks and women in management.

Since the program began, AT&T says, the number of women and minorities in its senior ranks has doubled, to about 12 percent each.

Harvard Pilgrim: Not Just Talk

Three years ago, Harvard Pilgrim, a Boston-area managed care company with 8,500 workers came to a disturbing realization. While an increasing number of its customers were women and blacks, women were underrepresented in senior management, and people of color didn’t make it to middle management.

So the company told its executives they had to work together to move more minorities into seven job categories, and more women into senior management.Each executive’s bonus now is based partly on whether minorities and women have actually moved up, and partly on whether employees, in an annual survey, say they feel the company has become more welcoming to diversity.

Xerox: Finding ‘Champions’

This year, Xerox chairman Paul Allaire sent a memo to every manager, stressing that he held each one of them accountable for promoting minorities and women into management. And he has appointed some of his senior executives as “champions,” with the power to act on concerns expressed by Xerox’s women, blacks and ethnic minorities.