Lisa Gelobter, SquawkAlley Interview
CEO of tEQuitable discusses
diversity in the workplace
and holding companies accountable
diversity in the workplace
and holding companies accountable
Interview Transcript
In honor of black history month we at CNBC are continuing to highlight key players making an impact. Our next guest is a former media executive and now heads a company aimed at creating more safe, inclusive and equitable workplace cultures. Joining us now is tEQuitable CEO Lisa Gelobter, former head of digital products at BET and a member of the Hulu Launch Team.
Lisa, thanks so much for being with us this morning. I want to start off by just asking you to explain how tEQuitable works and what it is that you do with your corporate clients.
Thanks so much for having me, Julie. Happy to be here with you. So tEQuitable is really trying to use technology to make workplaces more equitable. Our mission is to help create companies that are going to create a work culture that works for everyone. We've created this third party confidential platform to help companies address issues of bias and discrimination in the workplace. For example, if my boss makes up sexist crack, that's not the totality of who he is, or if he tries to touch my locks, I'm not going to go to HR for that because that's the nuclear option. I'm not trying to get him fired, but I would like those behaviors to stop. On the other hand, if I feel like I'm being overtly discriminated against and harassed, then I want the company to take immediate action. What tEQuitable tries to do is help the employee in either of those situations figure out what their next steps should be and how they can move forward. Simultaneously, companies really don't have a great sense of what's happening on the ground in the day-to-day of their culture. So we try provide data and insights back to them on that.
For us, it really is about providing a sounding board from employees where they can come get advice, explore their options and figure out their next steps to give them back some agency. Then we use data that we anonymize and aggregate to identify the systemic issues within an organization's culture. We create a report for the management team with actionable recommendations. We work on both sides of the equation because then it keeps driving change.
So Lisa, it's so interesting because Twitter just made this commitment that 25% of its executives would be from underrepresented minorities by the year 2025. What do you think of that kind of commitment? Is that the kind of thing that works? Is that something that other companies should consider doing?
Absolutely. Yes. There's no question. You know, one of the things that we’ve all heard is, oh we can't find black folks. We can't hire them. Just hire them. Just do it. It can be done. I will say one of the things that's been really interesting to me is so since there have been laws that have been passed around around minimum requirements for underrepresented folks on boards, magically, folks have been able to find people and to find really excellent, remarkable, great, fitting candidates. It really is about making that commitment and making the effort that counts.
Lisa, great to have you. I'm not a corporate lawyer, but if I were, my first question would be when there's a lawsuit, what happens? Do an employees contacts with tEQuitable show that the company should have known something was going on? Or do you have to tell the employee that reporting something to tEQuitable isn't the same as talking to HR? Do I somehow get protected by the idea that I proactively sought data and engaged with this platform? What happens?
It's a great question and I don't even play a lawyer on TV but I have, actually been able to satisfy these kinds of inquiries from the greatest legal minds. We're actually based on the model of an Ombudsman. Ombudsman have been around for well for centuries really. Within the US they have been around since about the 1960s. There's a really thick book by Chuck Howard which is basically a legal guide to setting up an ombuds office. We're building on established practices and models. Ombuds are in fact independent not beholden to the company's management structure but also confidential. We won't even acknowledge if somebody has spoken with us or not. We are also impartial and neutral. We don't take the side of the employee nor do we take the side of the company. We really try to provide and ensure fair processes so we are very specifically, informal and off the record. We don't even collect personally identifiable information. We have all kinds of mechanisms in place. We shred notes, we, do data purges and we don't retain those records.
Yeah, I was gonna say given the way you're framing it, what does it say about traditional HR efforts to read the sentiment of their workforce through employee surveys? Is that sort of just a dinosaur step at this point?
I think doing an employee engagement survey, or pulse survey, can be a great way to get a baseline and to have something concrete that you can measure year after year against. The disadvantage of employee engagement surveys, one, you have to worry about survey fatigue. But two, oftentimes employees don't feel like the information they send in goes anyplace, right? There's no active feedback. It's why one of the things that tEQuitable does is provide a learning platform, so when something's happening in the moment we can actually help you figure out how to handle it as it's happening.
Lisa, this is such important work. We appreciate you joining us to talk about it, especially as companies really understand the value to their corporate organization and having a more diverse workforce. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you. Appreciate it for sure.