Conference Explores Ways To Encourage Workplace Diversity

By Alvin Powell

Contributing Writer

About 100 Harvard academic and administrative officials reaffirmed the University's support for creating a diverse workplace and shared ideas about how to reach that goal during the University's first Work Management Conference on diversity last Thursday.

The five-hour conference, held in the Kennedy School of Government's Taubman Building, featured speakers from across the University and included top officials such as Provost Harvey Fineberg and Medical School Dean Joseph Martin.

Speakers discussed strategies to reach diversity goals, including using outreach and internship programs to recruit minority candidates and ensuring top officials and the people actually responsible for hiring have similar concepts of diversity.

The Central Adminstration announced several initiatives, including a structured series of recruiting events and a Diversity Resource Recruitment Guide that provides a list of resources for people seeking minority candidates.

Conference attendees agreed that meeting diversity goals will require a unified effort from many areas and that the conference itself is a good step toward that goal.

"You have to be pretty intentional about diversity," said Deborah Prothrow-Stith, associate dean for faculty development at the School of Public Health. "Having this kind of meeting is one thing that is very intentional and a good step on our part."

Conference organizers came up with the idea while developing the 1998 Affirmative Action plan. Over last winter, the Office of the Assistant to the President and Herbert Vallier, director of strategic staffing, met with senior officials of each school and various administrative areas to develop a strategy to strengthen Harvard's role as an "employer of choice" in the community.

During that process, organizers realized that different schools at the University had come up with different Affirmative Action strategies that would be helpful if shared University-wide (see related story inside).

"If everyone could take a piece of what everyone else is doing, we'd have the whole picture," said Mela Martorano, director of equal employment opportunity and compliance in the Office of the Assistant to the President.

Assistant to the President and Associate Vice President James Hoyte said he was pleased with the free-flowing discussion, which touched on race differences, perceived class differences, and problems in hiring and retention, as well as strategies to diversify the Harvard community.

"People clearly felt comfortable not only talking about personal situations, but also probing what does and doesn't work," Hoyte said, adding that the difficult work of changing words to action still lies ahead. "It's always a particularly difficult challenge to go from a broad theoretical framework to a practical one."

Martin kicked off the conference by framing the diversity question as one of quality rather than of social or legal justice. As a university preparing youth to work in an increasingly diverse world, it is important that they experience a diverse world while at Harvard.

This is particularly important at the Medical School, he said, where doctors need to learn that culture affects patients' attitudes toward medical treatment. Physicians have to understand a patient's background to understand how they can influence their behavior and willingness to follow a doctor's instructions, he said.

"A more diverse medical community practices a higher quality of medicine to better serve the broader community," Martin said.

Martin continued by setting a goal of adding 12 new minority employees each year for the next two to three years.

Speakers from a variety of offices outlined challenges ranging from recruitment of outstanding minority applicants to retention of minority employees, and talked about ways to meet those challenges. They agreed that continued leadership from the top will be critical and that recruiters must actively seek qualified minority candidates, not just sift among those who come in the door. Strategies include:

-- Advertising openings in publications and professional journals circulated among the minority community.

-- Attending job fairs and recruiting from schools and colleges with large minority populations.

-- Creating internships and cooperative programs that identify promising young people and establish ties that could lead to Harvard.

-- Linking managers' pay to performance, one element of which is progress toward diversity goals.

-- Better coordination of recruiters from different offices so they can share resumes of candidates who might be a better fit in a position other than the one they applied for.

-- A variety of diversity-related events, including informal lunchtime sessions at the Office of Personnel Services to share candidate resumes and case discussions at the Kennedy School, where staff, students and faculty discuss moral and ethical issues involving diversity.

-- Teams that include both high-level school officials and supervisors responsible for hiring, to ensure everyone shares the same understanding of diversity goals.

--Increasing awareness that hiring practices can overemphasize personal references, which can prompt hiring of people from similar social, racial, and economic backgrounds.

-- Beginning training and education programs that can prepare promising young and low-level workers for higher-level positions.

-- Creating permanent committees with representation from staff, faculty, and students to examine diversity issues and act to implement changes.

The conference presented participants with a lively discussion of the issue, but Fineberg said it is important that those attending take the next step and act on what they learned.

"I think there's a very clear consensus that we not lose the momentum generated by the discussion we've had here," Fineberg said. "The question we should take with us is what will each of us do next."