 I'm Dan Moguloff from the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs and I'm really pleased to be joined today by Eugene Whitlock, our new, as of August, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Human Resources. Again, just to remind everyone, you have index cards on your seats. If you have questions now, fill out the card, hold it up, they'll be gathered. And also during the course of the conversation, if something occurs to you, please fill out a card and they'll be gathered during the course of the conversation. So just a brief introduction. For five years, Eugene served as Vice Chancellor for Human Resources, as well as the General Council for the San Mateo County Community College District, a district that serves 45,000 students across three different colleges. While there, he led the district's equity-focused recruitment operations or programs which resulted in the increased hiring of staff and faculty from underrepresented backgrounds. He championed professional development opportunities for employees, developed workshops and training on harassment and discrimination, and led efforts to support faculty and staff in order to enhance the employee experience. In 2017, Eugene's work was recognized by his peers, who selected him for the Progress in Diversity Award that was given for, quote, outstanding achievement in support of diversity in the higher education community. In his role, parallel role to roles as General Counsel at the district, Eugene advised the district on, among other things, general litigation, privacy and data security and HR rules and laws. He also led the district's international student program, and during that period focused on growing the program's enrollment of students from Africa and South America. Prior to joining the community college district, Eugene's professional background includes legal, investment banking, and project management roles in the U.S., Germany, Japan and Venezuela. He has a strong affinity for academia, that seems pretty obvious, and learning that brought him both to the community college district and now to Berkeley. Here comes the difficult part, Eugene obtained his undergraduate degree in biological sciences from ... Sanford. All right. I see a couple of people in here wearing red. And earned his law degree from a somewhat better place, University of Michigan. He's also a fluent speaker of Spanish and German, so Guten Tag, Buenos dias. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit more about yourself and what brought you to Berkeley? Thank you. So I'm excited to be here, and I'm very happy to see my fellow HR folks who've packed the room with friendly faces, because I am a little bit nervous, but I'll get going. So the most important part about my life, and for those of you who've met me before or heard me speak, is my family. So I have three little kids, a five-year-old boy, Dante, a three-year-old girl, Seychelle, and a one-year-old son, Ellis, and my wife, Romina. And my wife is from Argentina, so we have a multiracial family. And when I think about the diversity that exists in California, it exists in my own house. And so when I think about why do I do human resources, which is probably one of the questions. Maybe I jumped the gun a bit here. I think a lot about what sort of experience are my kids going to have when they grow up, and what sort of workplaces are they going to encounter? And so when I look at the work that we do here at UC Berkeley and the work that we can do, I think we have an opportunity to be a model, to set the example for what it is that other workplaces do. So if we get it right here at UC Berkeley and other people pay attention to us as much as they always do for the bad as well as the good, then maybe that will influence other organizations and how they think about the experience that their employees have. So that when my kids and your kids get older and go to work, that they'll have a better experience than they would have today. That's it. Should I add to that? In my free time. So I will talk about this if you're opening the door for me. So I'm a rabid sports fan, so I do like college football. So this is big game week. So as we touched upon earlier, this is an important week in my life. Honestly, in my life, it's an important week. But I grew up playing all kinds of sports. Now I watch sports a lot on TV, and I play tennis once a week, and I ride my bike pretty often for a long bike ride, like five or six hours at a time. And for those of you who are familiar with road biking, a couple of years ago I did a death ride up in what they call the California Alps, which was a 12-hour bike ride, 125 miles in the mountains. And I survived. So there you go. Obviously in an appropriate physical and mental condition around HR at Berkeley. Yes. So on that front, let me ask you, in all seriousness, why HR? I mean, you have a law degree, experience in finance, traveled the world, and we know the stereotypical image. People say HR, and there's always like a roll of the eye. And in many places that I've worked, and I think many of us have worked, it's not held in the highest esteem. Why HR? So I haven't seen a whole lot of eye rolling when people refer to human resources. But in the places where I work, so I worked in a corporate law firm on Wall Street, I did the banking, and so HR was just sort of an ancillary function. So I didn't think much about it in my prior jobs. When I was working for the county of San Mateo, one of my clients was the community college district, as well as a lot of K-12 school districts, and I got involved in a lot of employee relations and labor relations things. So I was on the outside looking in a little bit for HR. But then one of my clients at the college district retired and they said, hey, why don't you apply for his job? We think you can do this HR thing. And I said, I'm a lawyer. I said, what do I know about HR? Don't worry about it. You'll figure it out. And so when I look back at my experience, I ultimately realized that I did do a lot of stuff that was related to HR and that a lot of it you can learn if you're interested in it. And for me, I like doing human resources because of the people support, the employee engagement. I like psychology. I like sociology. So those things are interesting to me. So when I think about the kinds of things that we can do as an employer to make the employee experience better, and how do we make choices, how do employees make choices about things they want to do or don't want to do, I find it just very fascinating. I like to read a lot of the research around employee experience around the role of the employer. So for me, it's a lot of fun and it's very interesting. And then the opportunity to have an impact on people's lives. You come to work. It's a job. It's about getting paid. But we as an employer really need to think about what's the impact that we can have on people's lives? Because what we do to you here affects what you're able to do when you go home, when you're with your families. So if we make you happy here and make you feel satisfied here, how much more is your life going to be improved when you go outside and do things that are much more important than work? So you've been here since August, not that long a time, but long enough to get some initial impressions and just always curious somebody who's new to campus, what's consistent with what your expectations were, what surprised you, and where do you think we are right now in the human resources realm? In the human resources realm. So consistent with my expectations, I would say is that people are very, very smart and very committed. And so I met, you know, Berkeley has this wonderful reputation. And when I applied, I went through probably what a lot of you experience, am I good enough for Berkeley? I certainly had that conversation with myself. Even after I was selected for the job, I was telling my wife, well, the letter hasn't arrived yet. They could always change their minds. Do they really, really want me? And I got it and I signed it within 10 minutes. I said, it's too late. But that's the impression and the reputation. And since I've been here, that's turned out to be quite true, especially the folks that I've been able to work with in human resources. They're very, very smart, very committed. Without saying negative things about where I work before, the people were committed there, but it was good is good enough. Here, good is not good enough. The people I work with are like, how can we make it better? And people aren't waiting around for me to come in and say, do this differently, do that differently, make it better. People come to me and say, Eugene, here's an idea. Let's try this, let's think about that. And that makes it exciting for me to come to work every day. And so when I go home after my day at work, I'm talking to my wife on the phone in the car and I'm telling her about 45 minutes talking about these things that happen. This crazy thing happened and she's like, do you want to hear about my day? It was good too. So I have to balance that. What surprised me a little bit is that how much Berkeley has suffered because of budget. How much the employees have suffered losing their friends. People losing their jobs and just how we're asking people really to do more with less and it doesn't feel to me like it's been completely dealt with in terms of the aftermath of having to cut back all of those employees and also what are we going to do now to sort of make people feel good again about working here. People feel good about working here but there's more that I think can be done. So one of the things you've done, we've been talking about human resources, you're in process of changing the name of your department. What's the change and why is it happening? So we're talking about changing the name to people in culture and it's going to happen unless somebody makes a very loud objection. But we've gone and we've talked to different stakeholders about this idea and the idea is I think human resources, the eye-rolling human resources is compliance, it's a black hole. This is where you go to because you have to get papers filled out or it's a roadblock or we want to do this but HR might say no. And we in HR, before I got here with Joe McNess and the team in place for the last couple of years they've been trying to change that reputation by how they do work, the programs that have been developed and so calling ourselves people in culture is really to make it clear both internally and externally that we're an organization about supporting the people and developing the people who work here. Yes, there are those compliance aspects to it but that's not the focus of it. And some people say it's just a name but there's a lot to a name. The name does make a difference to how people perceive us and hopefully it should make a difference in terms of what people expect from us so that people can hold us accountable. They say, well you're people in culture now treat me in a way that matches that name. And I also think internally for the folks who work on the HR team they want to be more about focused on people, more focused on culture and less on compliance. And so I think that's also recognition of what it is that a team wants to do going forward. So what's the state of the UC Berkeley workforce? I read comments you offered at a recent town hall. You talked about an engagement survey in 2019. How are we doing? How are people feeling? What are the areas we're doing well and what are the areas that you see that need to be addressed? So this will be just based on the employment engagement survey that went out system wide in April and May of this year. And so it surveys only staff who aren't represented. So it's not Berkeley as a whole. We also have our poll survey. But what the engagement survey tells us is that 96% of the employees here at UC Berkeley are proud to be associated with the brand. 77% of our employees feel like they can be themselves at work. 87% of the employees feel like they have a good work-life balance. So those are the highlights and those are great numbers. When you look at a company in the private sector like Google that has oodles of money and can sort of pay to make problems go away or pay to make people feel good and really they can afford to do that. Their numbers on employee engagement are in the low 90s. What does that mean employee engagement? So do I show up at work? Do I feel like I have a purpose? Do I feel like I'm committed to the work? Am I doing the work? Am I doing not necessarily more in terms of quantity but do I feel like I really make a difference here in the workplace? As opposed to disengage employees that's the person who's just punching the clock. And so those are the highlights but when you look at the opposite so 77% of the employees say they feel like they can be themselves at work. 23% don't feel that way. And when you disaggregate the data that 23% women, people of color are lower paid employees. And so if one in four to one in five of our employees don't feel good at work that's a big number. So yes, 77% is good but I'm more worried about and I said this at the town hall those one in four, one in five who don't feel good at work because that's not really a question of money. That money isn't gonna make you feel better at work. It's about how people treat you at work. So you're saying that regardless of levels of compensation, because I think it's often reported and discussed here on campus that many of those who are on the university staff are paid less than peers in the private sector. That that is not the deciding factor in terms of how people feel about working here. It's not a matter of compensation or long commutes that there are other factors that are more important. So I don't know what the answer is for UC Berkeley because we don't have the data analyzed in that way. But when you look at research on employee engagement in general, purpose, so do I have a purpose comes out as one of the main drivers of employee satisfaction and then what kind of relationship that employee has with their supervisor. People quit jobs, not because the work isn't interesting. People quit jobs because their supervisor doesn't treat them well. And that's not a question of money. So I'm gonna mix in a little bit some of the questions that are coming from the audience. Keep them coming. Just try to write legibly, please. There's one here. I'm gonna struggle with it, but here's one. Thanks for being here. What's the latest with the work to expand, create actually, baby bonding leave for new parents, both birth moms and the parent who did not give birth? Sure. So there was a working group that I wasn't a part of, but there's been a working group over a long period of time that made recommendations to the chancellor carried those recommendations just last, maybe two or three weeks ago to the council of chancellors. So that's for all of the chancellors of the UC campuses. And they agreed there that yes, this is something we want to do. The question is, how do we do it? Not if we do it, but how do we do it? And so I think the next steps in the process are for the vice chancellors of administration throughout the system to meet and discuss the finance and the mechanics of how we can do it. So I think it's something that there's definitely a will to do. And I wanna thank all of the staff, especially who spoke up and said, we have to have this because that really helped push things forward to bring it to that level where it's getting the attention that it needs. And so I can't give you a time horizon, but it's something that eventually I believe should happen. Here's another one, welcome to Cal. Number one, managers are often elevated based on individual performance, but not given the tools to manage. What are your views on 360 management training needed by our leadership? At 360 reviews and management training needed by our leadership. So just some input what you're feeling about that. So I can't say that every manager needs training, but what I'll say is this, that there's a cultural around training here that mandatory is a dirty word. And that if you try to make people do something they're gonna resist. And I don't, we can call it required, we can say it in nicer ways, but there is some training that needs to happen. Caveat being that I've only been here two and a half months, so I don't know everything or I know very little. But in other organizations where I've been, when you become a new manager, you get trained on being a manager. That's just part and parcel. So you show up your first day of manager as a manager, here are the classes that you're gonna take on how to manage. So that we equip you to be successful. Nobody really comes to work and says I wanna be a bad manager. I wanna mistreat my employees. That doesn't happen. But if we don't give them the skills so that they're prepared to manage to the best of their ability, then they're gonna have, people are gonna have uneven experiences. And while we as a managed person might experience something that's obvious, what kind of an idiot would do something like that? No, it's not always that obvious when you're a manager and as a manager, you're thinking about a hundred different things and a hundred different people, you may not know this, what to do in certain situations unless you've had that training. So I think we really need to decide, do we want to train our managers in a way and let them all get trained so that they all understand what the expectations are and there's consistency across the campus. And if we're gonna do that, then we have that training actually of the Berkeley people management program. Managers take it, the feedback has been fantastic, but not everybody does it. So second question along these same lines from the same person. What are your expectations of how our senior managers behave in the workplace? And what is your feedback on how to bring workplace bullying to light? So obviously behind this, some concerns about how staff are treated by senior managers and about some of the human relationships that I'm sure impact the engagement you spoke about. So what do you expect and do you see that as a challenge for us? Okay, so somebody's trying to trick me into going off script. So I would say I expect all managers, including senior leadership to model behavior, model the behavior that it is that we expect. One of the first things I would like to see all of the senior leadership do is go to training. If there is a program on bullying prevention that we have, what better statement to make about how important it is than if all of the senior, everybody in cabinet went to that training. And then they can go and they need to put, they need to require of their managers, go to the training. And it's much easier to say, for me to say, for example, Tommy, Tommy, go to that training. I went, you need to go too. Do as I say and do as I do. And it's also, I think by participating in this training, you learn a lot in these sorts of training programs. I've done all kinds of training. I'm a believer in training, but it also helps you empathize a lot better with employees who are experiencing bullying. And in terms of being bullying to light, I send out an email. It was bullying prevention month in October, announcing some training classes around that. But again, when we're talking about required training, I guess I should back up. I don't think there's a few couple of trainings that should be required. Really the way I would imagine it as a new employee here, perhaps also as a new manager, your first week, we don't expect you to work. You show up on day one, and here's a list of all of the different kinds of training that we as a community have decided are important. I think bullying is an important thing. Things around diversity, equity, and inclusion that you spend your first week, you do your campus tour, you go to Nero, you get a certain set of training so that as an employee here, you have a common understanding of how we treat each other. So yes, it's senior leadership, but it's also everybody's senior leadership can set the example. And also related to bullying, we have statistics. How many people have seen the bullying data? We don't talk about it a whole lot. We have the data. We need to share the data. If we are going to hold ourselves accountable, what are we gonna hold ourselves accountable to if we never tell anybody what's really going on? So now we're gonna keep you off script here. That was not bad for ad-libbing, by the way. And that's another set of relationships, and that's the relationship between staff and faculty. I mean, this is an interesting workplace that reminds me of my time at CBS News. There were two categories of employees. There were those who were on the air and the rest of us. And there was different pay scale, different patterns of deference, different relationships. What are your expectations? And a question just came in, what role can faculty or do faculty play in creating a culture of employee engagement? What does your experience teach you about those relationships? What do you hope to see? What should expectations be? And what's your sense of what's happening at Berkeley now? So I have anecdotal information and sort of data information. So where I worked before, it was always, staff came after faculty and the students. And I've heard that here anecdotally as well, and I'll hear stories from time to time about how a faculty member was disrespectful or went off on a staff person. But I just came out of a presentation where we were looking at some data, asking staff about disrespectful encounters, I'll call it like that. And it wasn't primarily faculty who were doing these things, it was other staff. And so I think there's a lot of the stereotype or the myth of the faculty who are obnoxious to staff. Some of it is true as in any organization, but it's not always true. But when you look at who faculty say treat faculty disrespectfully, it's their fellow faculty members. And when you ask staff, it's their fellow co-worker. So I don't know how much of a problem it is that there's a faculty to staff. But what I do think is that when we have situations where faculty are managing staff, I think what we run into is a problem of people who weren't prepared to be managers. You're an expert, you're world renowned in whatever field it is, and you've worked your way up the ranks. How many stops along the way have you made to get trained on how to manage people? And do you actually see yourself as an employer? Do you see yourself as a leader of people? I don't know that we place that expectation on people. And because we don't place that expectation, people don't engage in that way. So this brings to mind something else you brought up in your town hall. And just to, you said that you want us to be people-centric. We want us to have a people-centric workplace. What does that mean to you? And if we're not already people-centric, we are what-centric at the moment? So I would say we are mission-centric. Our mission, public service, research, and teaching. And so when we make a lot of our decisions, how does that affect research? How does that affect our teaching mission? We don't ask the question very often. Again, I'll do the two and a half month caveat. How does this decision affect the people? Or when we were making decisions because of budget cutbacks and we had to make a layoff. How is that going to affect the people in the department? How are we explaining this to them? Are then we going into the department to talk to the people who are left? How much, when we are having meetings at cabinet or at the senior levels and when we're saying this is what we need to do or that is, does somebody say, what are people going to think about it? How is this going to make people feel? Again, as I said beginning, how we act as leaders affects how people live their lives and I don't know that that's the narrative here. I don't hear people talking like that. That's not common in other organizations either, but I think in higher ed, because the mission is so important and we're all here for the mission, we're focused on that. We don't think of ourselves as an employer and so we don't ask those kinds of questions. So Eugene, I'm struck that just in the first 15, 20 minutes talking we've touched on some really big cultural issues that's kind of go to the heart of how we're set up here and how we operate and a lot of what you're talking about represents change so I'm curious what your style is. How in your past positions have you gotten things done? Have you brought sort of people to your vision? How do you operate in the workplace? So I've learned a lot over the years about my style because my style wasn't necessarily the best when I first started particularly in my last job at the community college. So I'm a lawyer and part of how I interact with the world is as a lawyer. And so I tend to be very direct. I'll ask a lot of questions and there wasn't a whole lot of finesse to my game, let's say. And so I actually had 360 feedback in my prior job and one of the things is that Eugene always sounds angry in his emails. And I said, but I'm not angry. You know, I'm trying to do a lot at once and so somebody would send me an email with a question and I'd write back yes or no. And they'd write three or four sentences and there was a question at the end, yes or no. I'm not angry, I just answered your question. And so I learned that that's not necessarily the best way to interact with people. I need to take a little bit more time and slow down and acknowledge people and interact with people and have conversations with people rather than just talk, talk, talk. So I've learned that. Now what I try to do more is to be more of an engaging person and part of this is I've learned this from my 360. I've learned this in training and just also watching how other people interact and building those relationships and taking the time to get to know people. And I'll add to this because what I've observed here is that because people are so busy and their schedules are so packed, it's actually very hard to take the time to get to know people. And so I've had a couple of conversations with folks over the last couple of days where if I just wanted to grab lunch with somebody, that's almost impossible to do because either I'm booked or they're booked, even if I wanted to just pick up the phone and call somebody to get their opinion on something, that's really, really hard to do. And I think we need to question, are we busy and we want to get all of this done, but at what price? And at the price of building relationships. And I think if we were to be more conscientious about how we schedule our own time and schedule time for ourselves during the workday but also schedule time to interact with our colleagues, we might be more productive as we go about our jobs and I'm pretty sure we'd be happier as we build those relationships. I mean, we have the, we have different research centers on campus, I'm blanking on the good science. Great, thank you. And they do a lot of research around happiness in the workplace and when you look at that, part of it is are people building relationships and making friends at work? It's important and do we have the time to do that? And I would say again, some of us do do rocket science here and some of us do do brain surgery but not all of us are doing that and some of the things that we do can probably wait an extra day or two so that we can take the time so that we have time to interact and build those relationships. And we talk a lot about the Berkeley community but don't raise your hands but how many people here actually feel time, feel like they have time to engage with the Berkeley community? All right, so I'm pretty sure this next question came from one of your direct reports who wants to help you out a little bit. All right. Who will win the big game? Well, what's the spread? Because I'm taking all bets with points because I think Stanford's a dog this year. Here's another personal one. That was an actual question. Do you mispracticing law, do, I'm sorry, do you feel it's more limiting or more freeing? Do you feel that, does HR feel like it's more limiting or more freeing than working as a lawyer, PS go blue? All right, so I do not miss being a lawyer. I mean, we get in HR, the compliance piece, there's a little bit of practicing law every day but doing the HR piece of the job just is much more creative and much more engaging of the part of my brain that is the right side of my brain. Just trying to figure out how to make things better and having these sorts of conversations around how to build something, something that's better is much more exciting than writing for me at least. There's other lawyers in the room who I've seen than writing a brief for making an argument in front of the Supreme Court. Things that I participated in, which can be fun but this is just so much better. I'm not quite sure what this, I'm hoping you know what this next question refers to. What are the campus plans for responding to the Senate bill which makes late payments illegal? This is Senate bill 698 which as of January, as of January 1st, 2020, people can sue the University of California if you don't get paid on time. So University of California is exempt from many of the parts of the labor code because it's a separate constitutional entity in the state of California and so prior to this, private institutions could get sued from not paying people on time but UC and other public entities were exempt. So what is the response? So Rich Lau and the compensation of benefits team is working with a group of people to identify the root causes of why people aren't getting paid on time. Some of it's human behavior where we're not providing information enough in advance to enter it into the system so people get paid on time. Some of it is systematic errors and Rich has identified as of a couple of weeks ago, Rich and the team, a list of 29 different reasons for why people are getting paid late and they're going through that item by item to try to figure out, okay, what can we do to address all of these different sorts of things? So there is a plan in place and it's getting worked on because we really don't want to start getting sued on January 1st. Another question from the audience, taking us back to something we were talking about before a little bit of a follow up. What is the actual plan for change and training, for change and training better supervisors and creating leaders slash mentors versus bosses? Yeah, so this is the, are you my manager or are you my coach? So one of the big components that we're doing around this is the achieve together program. Most of you, if not all of you, probably heard about it. Now we're changing how we do performance management. And so instead of having an annual meeting every year where your boss looks at your goals and says, great, and here's some competency, we're changing it so that your boss, your coach, will have four conversations with you over the course of the year. Ideally, you would be talking with your, oh, three, I'm getting the sign, three. Three conversations, there should be four. So ideally, and this is again based on research, your supervisor would be having a one-on-one with you every week. The employees feel most engaged, have that conversation every week. And it doesn't have to be an hour sit down. It can be 15 minutes where you discuss what are your priorities? How can your supervisor support you? What can your supervisor continue to do? Or what should your supervisor do less of that's hindering you from accomplishing your goals? But this is a start in that direction to having these three conversations because again, we haven't really prepared our managers to just all of a sudden go from manager to coach. So this is the entry into doing that and having those regular conversations with your employees and also getting employees used to having these regular conversations. Because it is not as if every employee wants to have that conversation with their supervisor. It's a little about changing how we do things and then giving it time. Maybe after the first conversations, there are gonna be a section of the populations who say, well, what was the point of that? That didn't feel very good or we could have just waited until the end of the year. It's not gonna be a magic where you're going to feel, oh, all of a sudden I can understand and I'm so much more engaged at work. Things don't work like that. We're learning on both sides about how to use this process and that's where we're gonna evolve. And in terms of training, as I mentioned before, I don't have a plan where I'm going to say and partly because it's not the Berkeley way. As of July 1st, everybody has to get trained. Not for something, other things maybe I would say that, but not around how we do management training. That's gonna require me to spend more time on campus, getting to know more people, getting to know what our capacity is to absorb training as well as our capacity to provide training. And the same person is wondering whether there's a role for how we recruit and specifically ask, how do we train people in recruitment to have more or recruit more emotionally intelligent applicants? Do you see, is that part of the process and plan too? So I don't know if we have an issue recruiting emotionally intelligent candidates. So I can't really speak to that. Even if we don't have an issue, does recruitment also play a role in terms of how we build not just the workforce but the supervisorial workforce? Yes, it does. The workforce in general, so excuse me, so if we wanna change the culture here or get people to treat people in different ways, part of that is setting that expectation for people who join the organization. And that starts with what do we say on our website? What do we say in our job announcements about the kind of community that we are and what we expect from people? So we have several searches going on in HR, particularly in the employee and labor relations. If you have friends who are looking for jobs, tell them to go to the website. But we change the about Berkeley section for that because before I wasn't, you know, Berkeley is the number one public institution in the world. We're great at this, we're great at that, we're great at the other things that everybody knows. And so I changed that to say, no, Berkeley is looking for this kind of person, a candidate who is this, a candidate who is that, who can engage with people, a candidate who supports the equity mission, you read the strategic plan, read the principles of community. If you feel that those things resonate with your own personal values, then apply for a job here, right? So we set the expectation and then part of it is having in place, now you come for orientation and it builds on that expectation. So that's how I envisioned sort of making that shift in involving training, part of the hiring process that I wanna see change where I was alluding to earlier, I might say as of July one, is that so in the community college system, if you wanted to serve on a screening committee, you had to have training on the benefits of diversity and unconscious bias, it was the law. And so when I got here, I thought, oh, they must do the same thing at UC Berkeley, because Berkeley's the big brother. Nope, not at all. Well, do we do this at all? It's optional. And I was stunned by that. And I've told folks and I will say it here, I don't want that to be optional. It's too important. If you look again at our strategic plan or principles of community, it talks about diversity and equity. Are we teaching that to people? We want you to endorse these ideas or at least have an understanding of why they're important. We want you to understand unconscious bias. Have we taught you about it? If we haven't, we should. And it should be a requirement because again, we want, especially when we're hiring people, we want the bias, we're all gonna have biases. There's not a cure for it, but we wanna be aware of those when we're making a decision. We wanna understand why diversity matters, why it works, what is equity and what does it look like and how does it work? Works so that when we're selecting candidates, we have that in mind, but also this training is beneficial for us as a community. Because it's not only how I behave in a screening committee, it's how I behave every day when I show up to work, how I treat my colleagues, how I make them feel. We've opened up the subject. You've talked at some length about diversity. We've also talked about recruitment. The chancellor has made clear that one of her key priorities is enhancing and increasing the diversity of all the various campus populations. One has to assume that to some extent that's been on people's mind in the past. There are laws that limit what we can do. What can change there? What are the things that we can do within the context of the law? And I'm talking now specifically about staff to meet the chancellor's goals, priorities and objectives in that realm. So I have had the opportunity to talk with the chancellor about these things. During my interview, she raised these issues around staff and diversity in the strategic plan. And I've spoken with her and the executive vice chancellor on a couple of occasions about this. So I know that these are very important issues. And the chancellor has said to me, what can we, you know, one of her interview questions was around, how can we engage staff better? So I know this is something that she's thinking about. She's reminded me about it since I've gotten here. And she has her own ideas. And so one of the things, you know, she's excited about the sponsored tuition program. So these are things that she's definitely thinking about. And so the expectation is clear that we're gonna be doing some of these things. And so I don't think the law, Prop 209 is a barrier, but Prop 209 has been around for 25 years and we've figured out lots of things that we can do that have no implication with Prop 209. So I wouldn't use as an excuse for why things look the way they are. Even when it, you know, I'm speaking a little bit out of school here, but even when it comes to recruiting students, Prop 209 is there, but it's not the big barrier that people tend to think it is. And so when we do our recruiting and our outreach, we can do targeted recruiting and target outreach. I think we need to leverage our ethnic staff and other identity-based organizations to help us do the recruiting. But part of what's gonna be doing, help us to do the recruiting the best is for those people in the marginalized groups to have great experiences when they're here, then they become our champions, right? And I can envision a website, a recruiting website, where we have people who represent all of the sorts of variety that we have here at UC Berkeley talking about their Berkeley experience, why they chose Berkeley and what they've experienced when they got here so that people, no matter sort of what your walk of life is, when you're coming and you're flipping through our website and you're looking for somebody like you, because you're wondering, as a lot of us do, as I did, how am I gonna feel when I show up there? Am I gonna be able to be myself? I can show you the engagement survey data and there's a 75% chance that you're gonna feel like you can be yourself. But we need more than that. People wanna be able to talk to somebody who's living that experience already. And so I think that's how we do it. So we met about a week ago when we talked about some of the subjects we'd be talking about today. You mentioned an uncontestable fact that the sort of higher you go in this particular hierarchy on campus, the less diverse it is. And so do you see that as being a major issue and challenge? And if so, how does that get addressed? So I don't think it's a major challenge, it's a major issue. And I think part of it, when I talked about accountability, so my guess is a lot of folks are aware of that, maybe anecdotally, or they can feel it, but most folks haven't seen the data. So one of the things that we've talked about since I've been here and even before I got here was making this data available because how are we going to hold ourselves accountable if nobody knows what the numbers look like? So we've talked about and we've got blueprints for a diversity dashboard and other data as well so people can see what it looks like. And so to Dan's point, so our hiring basically as you join the organization reflects the community around here in terms of ethnicity. But when you look at who gets to go from the sort of entry, middle level positions up into higher management, it falls off a cliff for all of our staff of color. And so I don't believe that staff of color look at themselves and say, I'm not qualified for upper management. I don't believe women say, I don't wanna do that. In the community college, it was the same way. You would get faculty and especially in the faculty and deans, but not the senior leaders. And so what I think happens is we have to look at the people who are making the hiring decisions. This is where I want training for hiring committees around that because it's ultimately the people who make the decisions, also around mentoring. So a lot of the ways that you get sort of up in an organization is somebody who's already up already sees you and says, you remind me of myself when I was younger, come let me take you under my wing and I'm gonna help you advance the organization. I'm gonna give you tips here, tips there. That doesn't work because it's random and it depends on that person being benevolent and identifying you. And quite frankly, people tend in those circumstances to identify with people, remind me of myself when I was younger. If I am an African-American male, which I am, I typically do not see an Asian female and remember myself when I was younger. That's just human nature, right? And it's not because I'm biased or racist, it's just where is my natural affinity? So that's where we have to have programs in place that make sure that the mentoring and the sponsoring, which requires more affirmative action, is actually something that happens by design, not by chance. So we're talking a lot about change. I'm going back to a question from the audience. And so how do you see change trickling down, and you might contest the presumption in the question, but how do you see change trickling down across campus? So many employees work in units so far removed physically and culturally from the central campus climate. So I'm going to a little bit, kick this one to the side. So I've heard that Berkeley is very decentralized. There's all of these silos, things up. How do we do something all at once? I don't know that we need to do something all at once. Like this is the Berkeley way. This is the Berkeley culture. There are certain things that we should, values that we should all have in common. But I haven't thought enough about the decentralized aspects of Berkeley and how to implement change. But what my guess is that probably throughout the campus there are people who care about these issues. And so if we can identify who those people are and empower them and support them by policy or by senior leadership taking a position. So for example, I want to implement mandatory training for higher committees on diversity and unconscious bias. If senior leadership, Chancellor, Executive Vice Chancellor come out and say, this is very important. Now when I'm out there on the ground level trying to do this, I can say, this is part of the strategic plan. The Chancellor supporting this, it's more easy to accomplish that by the same token of other people hear me talking about certain things and then they're going out to their departments or division, Eugene was talking about this. We want to do this. It makes it easier for you as opposed to being that lone voice for change. Two questions around the same subject. And let me read them both. What is Berkeley's, you see Berkeley's response to high employee turnover rates in certain departments. One, two, how do you feel about the staff turnover rate? Are there analytics around the full cost of turnover? This is a softball. So I have a presentation to cabinet in a couple of weeks on the issue of turnover because the Chancellor wanted to understand this because again, we've had conversations about the staff experience and she's aware that there is turnover and so they asked me to present it. So at UC Berkeley turnover is at about 15% which is consistent with the national average for higher ed but what I say is where Berkeley, do we want to be average? Probably not. And when you look at what that costs us about $100 million per year. So there's the hard costs of staff time trying to fill a position but there's also the cost and burden of now instead of having three people in the department there are only two. So now these two people have to do that other job. The morale has a negative impact and maybe they're gonna quit as well. And now there's only one person. So in human resources, as many of you know employee and labor relations has experienced a lot of attrition and every time somebody leaves it makes it that much harder for those folks left to feel good about doing the job and then somebody else goes and you can't blame them. And so the solution to turn over again part of it is compensation. We have to take a serious look at how we do compensation. Can we get more for compensation? That's not just the chancellor or two or three people saying we're gonna pay everybody more. It doesn't work like that. A lot of what we're able to do depends on what the Regents say that we're allowed to do and the Regents have the entire UC system that they're concerned about each of the campuses but our interests aren't always aligned. So we have to look at some alternative ways to engage employees, some of the things that I've talked about now. We have a high number of voluntary separations among the 15% turnover. Again, why are those people leaving? We don't have an exit survey that we've yet implemented. Part of that is because UC system-wide has said we have an exit survey that we're going to implement. Don't do your own yet. So we've been sort of waiting for that. But that will provide good information about why are people leaving. Anna, don't let me know if people are leaving for more money. What are the other reasons? What are the levers that we can really push to say, okay, you wanna have a sense of purpose in your job or more flexibility around your work schedule? Yes, maybe you get to leave at five, but do we let you work at home two or three days a week so that you don't have to sit in your car and commute every day? These are the sorts of things that we should be thinking about. And when we have the discussion about employee turnover, that's again where you asked about people centric. It's like, this is where we need to think about what are people are experiencing that's causing them to leave? So some of what you said touched on a question that came in. Actually, one of the first questions that came in early and I apologize, there's parts I'm just having, I'm struggling to read here, but I think I've got the gist. Are there any plans to change the merit program for policy covered staff? The 3% pool doesn't allow for meaningful rewards and recognition. And also goes on to talk about how it has to come out of the unit's budget. And just generally the question here notes a number of areas of what the questioner believes to be sort of insufficiencies and in terms of both the amount and the burden it places on departments to really reward outstanding employees to the extent that they might be justified. So a couple of thoughts on that. Since the time that I've been here, I don't think anybody believes that the system is adequate the way it is or sufficient nobody's surprised that people are dissatisfied with the compensation or the merit system. I'm not aware of a plan. People are constantly talking about what can we do? Definitely what can we do better? But I'm not privy to a plan that is about to take place or something different that's going to change. One of the things that I would say is, okay, so we have a 3% merit pool. And again, this is based on reach is that a lot of managers tend to sort of, I don't wanna make anybody mad. So I'm gonna give everybody kind of the same thing. And you don't reward your star performers because you don't wanna upset people. The way distributions work and the workforce and sort of in the world in general is that you have a few star performers and a lot of people down here in the middle, you have to reward your star performers like they're stars and not worry about how it's gonna make you look. Cause if you wanna keep your stars, you have to treat them like that. And it's not a pat on the back isn't enough. So we have guidelines that we give but people always end up doing sort of this normal distribution where most people fall in the middle when the fact is work performance isn't where most people fall in the middle. It's more it goes, let's see from your point of view like this. And I think as managers, we need to think about having more courage about rewarding based on the star performers rather than just trying to spread it out and keep everybody a little bit happy. Yeah, but if we do that, if there's a bell curve, a lot of the people that we wanna be centric about might be in that group that doesn't get the, don't get the highest merit raises. And in terms of engagement, that would also might have an impact. We want those people, we want everyone to feel engaged. But if there's that sort of differentiation, doesn't that conflict with some of the other goals that we have? I would say if our engagement depends on compensation, then we're never gonna have engaged employees. Okay. And that's based on what? Is that, have you seen that in past places where you've worked? Was that true in the? It's just based on research. Compensation is not the biggest driver for employee engagement. And when you think about probably most of the employees who came here, they knew they were not going to get paid top dollar, but it's the mission of the university, right? And the promise of doing work that matters. And it's a real promise, right? The work we do here matters tremendously. That's what lures people in. And then when they're here, treating them the way they want to be treated. That's what's going to tackle retention. People, if we pay people 20% more, but we don't treat them well, they're still gonna leave. And so what's the message then to, you know, it's really interesting what you're bringing up and it will represent a profound change. Cause I think that's true in a lot of units, the sort of leveling off, everybody gets the three or whatever. So what's the message then? As change happens in that arena to those employees who suddenly they're getting two or one or maybe none when they've been used to for many, many years getting the standard three or as many years as we've been giving 3% annual raises. So I wouldn't just all of a sudden show up the next merit cycle and say, we changed it, right? This is a communication. And so this is me sitting here today after a two and a half months telling you based on research the way it would work. Does that work here? I don't know. I've had conversations with Tommy about it. And we've theoretically discussed it, but this would be a larger conversation. And certainly as a manager, if this is something that you think you'd want to do, you should understand why you're doing it. Don't do it because I just sat here and said so. You really need to understand the data behind why you would do that. And then you have to communicate it to your team. And so I would say, I wouldn't implement it this cycle, but maybe the next cycle, if this is what you want to do and you've had these conversations and you really understand the research why and you can explain it to your team and people can understand, then maybe you think about doing that progressively, but not just all of a sudden you show up and say, I was at the campus conversation Eugene told me to. Moving back to another area about cultural change and the member of the audience asks, if what we're looking at is cultural change to people's centrism, what can I do as an individual contributor to help make the change? So one of the things that we can all do and it's very challenging, so as I sit here, so understand that as I say this, I understand it's hard is that when you see something people engaging with somebody who's inappropriate, don't just be a bystander, be a bystander who actually intervenes. We talk a lot about that around sexual violence and sexual harassment, but extends to just simple kindness, where we've all read an email or heard somebody or overheard something where somebody was just unnecessarily nasty or harsh and everybody sort of agrees like, wow, I can't believe they said that or they did that, but nobody circles back with that person who said that and said, hey, you know what, maybe next time you could have had a conversation differently. I think that would be the biggest change is that if we become more comfortable holding each other accountable for that behavior, not in a confrontational way, because I don't want people coming out like, you jerk. Why did you say, no, that's just escalating things, right? Calling each other jerks isn't gonna get it done, but just in a kind way, being able to have that conversation privately with somebody and say, maybe you could have handled that differently. You know how that other person might have received this. There's a question, hoping to clear up a little organizational confusion and where is it right here? What is the relationship between campus shared services and central HR? It is confusing for middle managers. Is that like the third rail or something? So, so it was very confusing for me during the interview process. I was convinced there was something I did not understand. I was reading the website. I said, if they asked me about this, I'm not gonna be able to answer these questions and it is confusing. So, and because the HR structure has changed, there was shared services, there was fourth street, everything was centralized and then was put out to the regions. But the way I think it should work and what the conversations we're having now is that we want as many HR related decisions to be made locally as possible. But we want them to be talking about Berkeley being decentralized to be consistent from region to region department to department. And so that requires is again training. So once we decide, we're in the process of deciding with the regions, okay, what should that structure look like? What should the workflow be when somebody has an HR related question? Where do they ask that question first? And then how does it get escalated? Which ones actually get escalated to central human resources where we provide not necessarily approval or disapproval, but advice where you consult with us. So we just had a meeting yesterday where we started talking about it. So there's some folks working on that. So once we figure out that workflow and what things get escalated, it should be a much better experience for people in terms of at least time for getting a response and getting things resolved. Because once we empower people locally to make more of those decisions because now we've said you can do it and we've trained you and we told you how to do it, it should be a much better experience for all of our clients and employees. A simple but complicated question. Will we ever have staff evaluations of management? So I can't promise anything here, but I think it's tricky because staff evaluations of management often end up, and this isn't attributing anybody personal, again looking at research, complaints. My boss was me, it's not a developmental thing. We want all evaluations to be developmental to help somebody to perform better. Again, I think people come to work wanting to do the best they can, same holds true for managers. And so if we just open it up and say, tell us what you think about your supervisor, how many of those comments are actually gonna be developmental in nature? And so when we do, we do do some 360 evaluations here, but it's developmental in nature where we talk to the people who are gonna provide some of the 360 feedback and explain what it is and why it is and how it's supposed to work. And then when that person receives the 360 feedback, they're with a coach to help them navigate the information. Again, so I did a 360 feedback and some of the elements that I described were part of it and so I read a lot of it and I'm like, why do these people hate me? Right, and I was mad and defensive, but some of it was good, but there was a coach there with me to say, in every 360 there's the people who are just mad about something and are gonna blast you. And to help me understand it. And so once we scale up in human resources and have more people who are trained and equipped to do that, then we can think about rolling that out on a larger scale, but I think part of the way we address this as well is with the Achieve Together program and these conversations. The conversations are supposed to be two-way where the manager should be asking you, what can I do to support your work? That's one of the guided questions that we have that we want all of the managers to ask. How can I support your work better? Again, that's not for you to say, stop being mean to me, this is more about providing developmental feedback for your manager. And so creating a culture of where we do give feedback and constructive feedback and being okay receiving it. It's some of the training that you'll hear out there around candid conversations or crucial conversations that's somewhat related where we equip people with the skills to have tough conversations about difficult subjects with each other, not only to initiate it, but also to be capable of receiving it. So part of it is Berkeley, a lot of people like to speak up. So people will say exactly what's on their mind, but how they say it matters, right? Here, I don't know that there's really a culture around how we say things to each other. I've been here two and a half months, but I've had enough experience, they hasn't heard enough stories where people will say what they want, but how isn't so important? I got it off my chest. Yeah, but did you get what you want at the end of the day? Probably not. And so there's, I think some work that can be done around that as well. All right, we only have a few more minutes try to get through these last few questions. Yeah. In regards to turnover, do you have plan to monitor for higher rates in particular departments? How you deal with the leadership in those high turnover units? Yes, we do have a plan to look at. So the turnover data that we have is very high level, but we can do it at lower levels. And actually this past week I had a conversation with an unnamed department about higher than average levels of turnover. And so we just had a brief initial conversation about it. But I think what we would like to do is be more proactive about those sorts of things. And as I said, we were gonna have a data dashboard of diversity issues, but other things as well that we will be looking at so that we can then come in and say, hey, we've noticed that there's been a change here, a bunch of people left or they're leaving this department. And so we can call and have a conversation because what happens a lot of times is as a manager, you're doing a bunch of different things. And people are leaving, people are coming, and you don't really notice that in a year 25% of the people have left because you're just kind of always hiring and you don't know. And that's where I think we as people in culture can be proactive about reaching out to that manager that, hey, did you know you're at 25% this year? No, I didn't. Well, let's have a conversation and see if we can dive deeper into the data and see what's going on. Two more if we can get through them. How do we support our senior staff that have been here 10 to 15 plus years who wanna stay and so they won't be replaced by younger inexperienced staff because this person believes we're losing a lot of good people as a result of this. And so I don't know that we're losing more senior staff at a higher rate at the very senior level. So below vice chancellor, but above that turnover rate is the same as the entry level folks turnover rate. What I do notice about that is that they're more voluntary departures at that level. And for those, for what we understand it's more about compensation. So now I have a great set of skills and I'm very senior and one of these rich tech companies around here wants to pay me another $100,000 a year. That's a lot of money. I don't know that there's a whole lot that we could do to have those folks depart. And I detect a little bit of bias in the question around the younger, more inexperienced staff. And what I would say about experiences, experience doesn't mean everything. And so there's some people who will work five years in a job and do barely anything and we all know people like that. We also know people who in that same period of five years do a ton. And so just to say that somebody has a certain years of experience isn't very meaningful. The other thing I believe is that people might come in for a job without particular industry experience or some other kind of experience, but they're highly motivated and they're intelligent. We need to be hiring for talent and then train them with what they need to know to get the job done. Not just say, oh, they haven't done this before. Now we need to think about if we wanna get those talented people here, what can we do to make sure that they're successful? Again, that's thinking as an employer and not just people should be happy to be here. So the last sort of wrap up all-encompassing question here. I mean, it's really remarkable the number of subjects we've covered and the ambitiousness of the agenda that you have and the things that you have on your plate. What do you think the biggest challenges are? And what level of confidence do you have that they can be surmounted to achieve the sort of vision that you've laid out for us today? Oh, I don't think any of the things that I've suggested are challenges that can't be surmounted. I think from the people I've interacted with, people want to see change and improvement. Again, people come here wanting to be their best selves at work. So I think there's a lot of buy-in and just more of the question is, who's gonna lead us? How are we gonna do it? Where can I pitch in? So I won't go to say it's easy because I've also heard that Berkeley's like the Titanic. It takes really hard to change it. But part of it is, people say that, but I refuse to believe it and I won't work with that sort of mentality. Maybe I'm naive enough to believe that things can change and I will continue to behave in that way until somebody tells me, no, we can't do it. And so what will it take to do it? It will just take people who believe in doing it, speaking up, telling me, telling your colleagues and showing support for things that you think are important. So when we send out a survey, a poll survey or any other kind of survey, asking what you think, people need to answer the survey because then when I go to my boss or somebody else and say, this is what employees say they want, what do they always ask? How many people respond it? Oh, only 25% respond it. Well, we don't know if that's really true then, right? It's a one-minute survey or any other kind of thing. People need to take the time to do it. I talked before about having limited time and so on, but this is part of it. And it helps, enables me when I go and make the argument to get things done. So before we wrap up, just to note that the last campus conversation of the semester will be on December 18th. Thank you, LaDon, with none other than Chancellor Carol Christ. I look forward to seeing you all there and just want to thank Eugene for a truly excellent, detailed and kind of inspiring conversation. Thank you very much. Thank you.