How Does ISS Unlock The Potential Of Employees? With Margot Slattery

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Speaker A: Hello and um, welcome everyone to this week's installment of the Talent Blueprint. I am your host, Sultan Sydoff. And today I am delighted to welcome Margo Slattery, the global head of diversity and inclusion and social sustainability at iss. Margot, thank you so much for joining us. Please tell us a little bit about your role at ISS and uh, what got you there in your career so far.

Speaker B: Sure. And thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to join you this morning. Sultan. I lead global diversity, inclusion and belonging and social sustainability at iss. ISS is a Danish organization, a Danish based company, been around for nearly 125 years and we provide outsourced facilities management services for companies all over the world. We employ about, give or take about 322,000 uh, people globally in 30 plus countries. What's very exciting about ISS is that it started with this lovely Danish sense of equality in its heart and it's always kept that to the core. We make great places with great people and uh, it's an exciting business to be part of what got me here. M. Long story, I'll try to give you the shortened version. I started my working life and my career as a chef, so a long way from what I do today. But I suppose the thing that's common is about passion. I got into that because I loved food and I was really interested in the food services industry and moved through various roles in food service, um, in hotels and food service and eventually got into a management role, went back to college, trained in hotel management whilst I was working so at nights and started working and advancing my career as a manager into a senior management role and a global role, uh, with an organization called Sodexo, whom I was with for nearly 30 years. And I eventually went on around 2011 to become the CEO of that company for Ireland and Northern Ireland. And it's something I'm very proud of because I was the first Irish person to do that and the first female to do that as well. I did that until around 2018 and the role elaborated into a role as country president because we took on more businesses. So my role expanded, um, which was fantastic experience. And I guess the reason and the move to diversity, inclusion and belonging was the joining together of my very personal and private life, becoming more public, my job and my passion, and the opportunity to combine both. I had been very lucky with Sodexo to get a lot of support around the fact that I was involved externally in a lot of things around inclusion. I was, I would say, an activist. I'd been for a long time in Ireland, fighting and pushing about things from female rights, reproductive rights, particularly around LGBTQI rights, and generally, you know, a person who felt strongly about equality. And in the years preceding 2015, where we had marriage equality and a referendum, I'd been involved with a group called Glenn, who were the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network. It was just called Gay and Lesbian Equality Network then. And they had been one of the bodies that was, uh, involved in, if you like, pushing for a referendum with the Irish government and the European courts as well. I went on, prior to the 2015 referendum to become the co chair of Glenn, which was an honour. And, uh, I guess all of that and my earlier activism led me to feel very passionate about change. And 22 May 2015, when Ireland people voted in this country to allow people like me to get married and to legally be able to, you know, bring our status to a different level, then, um, something for me just changed. And I thought the ability to work in this area and to make for change is just something else. And I was infused with such a passion to take that to the next level. And I had never stopped doing my jade job because I was doing this as part of that. But as I reflected, uh, after May and into the next couple of months, I was going, okay, so what's next and where do I go? And I was probably at a stage of my life as well, kind of trying to think about that. I was heading towards a big birthday and I decided to explore what roles there might be. I'd been very involved, and again, so much thanks to Sodexo for that formation for me. I'd been very involved in our early work in diversity inclusion. And an amazing lady called Rohini Inan, who's in the US was a mentor and a supporter for me, and so were so many of our CEOs, et cetera. I kind of found out that Rohini was intending to retire, and our CEO said, was I interested? And I got the opportunity to become the Chief Diversity Officer at Sodexo. So it was a kind of a case of I was looking for the next phase of Life and change. They were looking for somebody to fulfill that role and they wanted somebody with the right passion and care and to give somebody an opportunity. So it came together. I had the wonderful opportunity to do that role in sodexo from late 2018 into 2019. 2021. So true Covid. And then a very interesting offer and a call with a uh, headhunter about an organization that was based in Denmark that were looking to do a similar piece of work. And I had a couple of conversations with the then CEO, Jakob Arp Andersen and Corinna Refsgaard who was the Chief people officer. And I was very intrigued about ISS and what they wanted to do and I decided to take a leap of faith and I left my company of nearly 30 years and my job of nearly 30 years and started with ISS doing this. And I've never lived to regret a moment of it. And I now work for a lady called Liz Benison. She's our current chief people officer. Very inspiring lady. And Caspar Fangl, our CEO and very supported about what I do. So I guess that's, that's how I got here. And that's the short version.

Speaker A: Well I would love to uh, spend more time on the longer version Margot, because you are an incredible champion for diversity, inclusion and the sustainability topics which I'm excited to get to in a moment. And as you know, one of the reasons I'm super excited to have you here is because this is a topic really uh, important to me as well. You know our mission at Bimari is to create equal access to work and it's something that I think has um, taken on a really interesting renaissance in terms of the scope and impact that uh, it's having in organizations and how these themes are cross cutting. You've given some background on some of your underlying passions for uh, this space and what led you here. When you think about how to drive this at ISS and in the couple of years you've now been there, what have you thought about as instilling the passion across the organization? You clearly have support from an amazing leadership. How has the journey of creating uh, your passion for uh, inclusion and belonging translated into your time at issuing?

Speaker B: I would say that um, from my perspective I think the role in ISS and the mission has really surpassed my expectations and certainly met most of what I set out to do. And that's been because we've had such fantastic support from leadership, resourcing and putting something behind the words. The challenge always is just like most organizations who work in particularly in outsourcing and support services. We work in a low margin business and the budget is small and we've got to do a lot with little and therefore it's a challenge to do everything you want to do. But truly it's happened. But one of the things that's really made it different is that the board have got behind it from the beginning. The exec have got behind it and there was such an appetite with the people to want to bring this along. So if I give you an example, on Tuesday this week we did an internal DNI conference in social sustainability as well. And at any one time we had 800 people live on the call and you know, people are working in sites and everything that will be recorded that uh, will go out to thousands of people. We will cut all the bits into different sections and then many more thousands will watch that. So for me that's, you know, the work is finding its way. We know that when we've had a recent survey, engagement survey, the whole concept of belonging and feeling psychologically safe has scored really highly. It's up in those 80s as a scoring from our people. We've had a 54% response to our engagement survey, which is quite good from a point of view of the amount of people who actually undertook it. And for the first time we actually did a D and I part of the survey which we asked some questions. It's still going to take time because people are getting used to that and asking questions that might for instance have self ID on it or whatever. It takes people time and not everyone chooses to do that and it wasn't mandatory. So Sultan, I think we've been able to make a lot of change quickly and it's been impactful and it's most definitely something tangible. We see improvement in people being promoted, the kind of policies that we're able to promote. And then around our strategy we see social sustainability being given an even higher straight into the future. So I think that's very strong evidence

Speaker A: of the impact and you touch on belonging. I think one of the amazing things about how you speak about the culture at ISS is that diversity, inclusion, sustainability, belonging aren't just initiatives, they are core to the culture. I've heard you just speak about how it's the cultural ambition to be a global company of belonging. Could you unpack a little bit about how uh, the culture at ISS really makes belonging at its core and what the nuances are between the focus on belonging versus diversity inclusion and how those connect?

Speaker B: Yeah, and I mean I'll give an example that Kind of might give it a bit of, um, color here on this one is that I spent my very early career when I go back to being a chef, I remember what it was like when you're in sites, when you're in a customer site. So even though you work for this big company, there's you in a site, and sometimes you might be the only person, sometimes there are others. And the thing that really differentiates the experience for you is how your own organization makes you feel. So does someone call you and say, how you doing? Does the area manager drop in every so often and know your name and be able to, you know, find out a little bit about what's happening in your life? And having had that experience and I'd worked for different companies, and then when I had an experience where that happened, it really led me to believe that that sense of somebody knowing your name, checking with you and making you feel like that you belong is just intrinsic to engagement. And so when we were in ISS discussing how did we build on, um, diversity, inclusion, and not just have it as nice words or topics. We are a diverse company. We want to be even more inclusive. But what's the kind of. What's the holy grail of where we want to. And the most important thing we would want to do is make our people who are out in our sights feel they belong to an organization that cares about them. Now, we can be a little cynical about this. Any of us and anybody listening might say, well, that's nice. The. But that means that you have to go that extra mile. You have to try harder. You can't just say, you know, that's a cleaner or a chef there and they don't matter. You must engage. And so we're putting some harder work on our own people as line managers and leaders to understand that they have a part to play around that. And we say becoming the global company of belonging, because we know this is a journey and this is going to take time for us, this is an ambition to really ensure that over a long period of time, this will grow and grow and develop. When we think about diversity and inclusion in its core, you can work very hard. And we've certainly, as I explained a minute or two ago, we have a huge amount of diversity. And particularly at our frontline, we have people from all over the world, all races, cultures, orientations, age, generations of many, many different things. Inclusion is practiced, I would say, fairly well in the organization, because no organization is perfect at it. But we know that we had to do something more to build on that. So that's why we've chosen to go further. And lastly, for organizations like ours, you have to have a strong ambition, a dream. It's that I have a dream moment. And we looked at doing some big moves that would, I suppose, build that change. So one of them, for instance, has been around working towards giving living wage to people all over the world that work for us. So that's something we're working on currently. And uh, then giving qualifications to people who may not have had them. And alongside that is that sense of them working for a company where they feel they belong and appreciation. That's the journey we're taking.

Speaker A: Well, I think the piece that you touch on that it's not just an element, uh, of caring and being nice, but actually meaningfully creating an environment where people not only feel they belong, but can connect to their own personal journeys and the impact they're having on clients is, uh, such a hard problem for many companies to solve. The qualifications piece you mentioned at the end, I know you've talked a lot about your passion with, within, uh, the organizations and all of these themes is also to help people find their own journey and become uh, the people that they want to become. Uh, how do you think about the unlock of people's potential and the development of people within the organization within the context of these broader inclusion and belonging initiatives, the skills that people have and how people are uh, recognized alongside those

Speaker B: qualifications, first and foremost, both for me personally, because I've had that experience where I joined an organization and somebody unlocked my skills and my opportunities. I think it's fundamental. It's so important that we think about that all the time. And ISS is made up of so many people who have moved up through the organization or moved to different roles who started in a very different way. And the beauty of our industry, and particularly in the service industry, is you create just so many opportunities for people. So I love that it's not an industry that defines you forever. You know, my starting as a chef is no guarantee of my future. It was up to me, but the organization also saw that I wanted to do that and you know, provided the sauce to help me or uh, the journey or the aisle or whatever we want to call it. I think in our organization we know that career path is really important. Giving people that faith that there is that chance and you know, being very open to it and to talk about it and then to encourage leaders to be the flame for that catching of that opportunity for people. Because what happens for most of us is that somebody says to you, you know, and this happened to me because I always kind of put myself up and say, you know, I had that chance. Somebody one day said to me, you know, you could do more than this. This is something else you could do. Have you thought about that? Did you think about going do a course? You could develop your management career in this company. Have you thought about putting your hand up for this? And it was just that somebody said that to me. And I think I have a duty and so does everyone else in our organization to create those opportunities for other people. And maybe lastly, I will say this is something I'm super passionate. I think organizations lose people. I've seen this so much over my career. People leave organizations and quite often they leave bad managers and bad employers and they go to another organization. And I've heard people being spoken about so and so's not doing very well and then they go to the next organization and they drive. So I think there's a lot of not seeing the potential of people and not sort of unlocking that enough. And I think organizations need to be much better at that.

Speaker A: Well, that's the crux of what got, uh, me into building Bimray just over 10 years ago. As you know, the focus on skills over degrees and looking at how to identify potential and unlock it. And so these themes of how to connect the, uh, talent centric choices of development to the environmental ones. How do you consider potential not just in terms of people's individual skills, but the environment? And how do you help people unlock that potential by making them feel like they belong and giving that support. I know these themes also connect, uh, to the broader environmental factors that you're passionate about in the organization, including social sustainability. How does that connect to some of these belonging and potential initiatives? And what does the social sustainability mean for you and at iss?

Speaker B: It's a great question, Sultan, in the sense that if you take about sustainability in its widest, I think at the moment the easiest way is to think about esg, because it's environmental, it's social, and it's the governance. And those are bedrocks of most of our organizations. And we're all having to work in that way. I guess we're all very, you know, whether we want to admit it or not, we're very aware of climate and the geopolitical situation and the shifting sands that are happening in the world. And as organizations we have a huge responsibility. Yes, we provide employment, we are for growth, we generate finances. You do, you know, everyone works in their organization to try and Give more opportunities and more jobs and create profitability because that's the world of work. But also employers have to be good corporate citizens. For us in iss, it's been a scenario of thinking of the work that we've been doing around diversity, inclusion and belonging, building that culture of belonging and saying, well, how do we take that further? You know, how do we go to the next phases? How do we then incorporate that into things that we're already doing in many cases and build that into a wider movement, so to speak. So, um, we're part of something that's moving and building. So we looked and said, okay, you know, in some countries we do amazing work to help people who are, uh, refugees. And by the way, iss, like many of our competitors, we employ thousands of people every year who come to countries they might not be able to speak the language. They've literally just landed. Maybe they're just about legally able to work, but they're finding their feet. So we become the employers of those people because taking a job cleaning, catering, gardening, whatever it might be, is often a job that somebody feels comfortable when the language and other things are yet a journey of discovery. And so we have this amazing opportunity in communities, in cities and where people are coming together. Often, you know, people from all over the world, very different backgrounds, and then we help them to build that community as well. Then in our work, what we were finding was that many of our countries, so if I take an example, ISS Spain, they were employing people from all over the world in Spain they were employing lots of refugees, they did a lot of work with people with disabilities. They were employing a lot of people who, for instance, for the first time, who maybe hadn't a qualification but were getting the opportunity to upgrade, we were working. I'll give you another example. We're working with the team in the Netherlands and they do a fantastic thing called House of Hospitality where they help young people who haven't gone through the usual college or university system and who've maybe lost out for various reasons. And they help them on a three year program supported by some of our customers, where they get developed and get an accreditation that helps them have at the end, uh, a qualification and then they become managers. So much so actually that they quite often go and work with our customers. So we were looking at these various things that are happening around the world and we said, how do we bring that together? And um, you know, for us it was social, it's sustainable, it's part of what we're doing as an organization. So we're really adopting that and taking that to the next level. And I spoke to you about the qualifications piece of work we're doing. That's a global piece of work. So 100,000 qualifications by the end of 2025. And we have an ambition to take that much wider and deeper and similarly the same around living wage because we know that when we increase people's salaries and we give them some opportunity to go beyond subsistence living, then they're in a situation to have a home to feed their family and perhaps send them to school. And therefore those are social changes we know we can make.

Speaker A: And you're touching on how data driven you are and have to be in that environment. Whether you're thinking about qualifications or even the way you're tracking the impacts of belonging. When you think about the scale and scope of these programs, what's been the evolution of the role of technology and how you're thinking about technology and data insights supporting your programs and your decisions.

Speaker B: Well, I think it's very interesting because you're probably speaking to a person who's the least technologically. I'm possibly not the most educated in technology but what I've learned is that first and foremost we've had to get information. We need to know numbers, we need to know data, we need to know how that evolves. You know, it's not just a once and done. We've had to know how do we use technology to get the connections with people in all the different countries and how do we use technology to be able to do more with less. Even just simple things like using AI tools to help you to minute a meeting and build a uh, scenario planning, et cetera. But most importantly, as we now are going into this measuring of this work and looking at say for instance the amount of people who, if I take an example, who are refugees who work for us at iss, we need to measure, we need to be able to connect with countries. And it's not just giving me a number. I have to be able to take that number, understand, you know, how long they've been working with us, how do we make sure they're, you know, they're refugees, it's not just migrants, you know, understanding that and being able to use the things like bi to really kind of analyze the information as well. So for me it's really vital. I think, you know, I'm seeing that it's going to be more and more and more I can't do this job now without technology.

Speaker A: It's uh, definitely something that's seeping into even the smaller pieces of understanding your decisions, your employees. A big part that uh, has been central to us in connection to these themes of inclusion belonging has been understanding the measurement of skills based decision making to reduce bias. And those types of things are obviously cross cutting across uh, a lot of your initiatives at iss. When you think about the overall impact of these programs on the organization and how it's performing and perceived, what have you been proudest of when it comes to sort of measurable things that have started, uh, to be visible across the organization in the last couple of years?

Speaker B: Well, what I'm really proud of, and I know our CEO as well, is when we're able to demonstrate to our customers and our people and probably both in tandem, um, with that we're not just speaking something, that we're actually doing something and we have proof source. That's what I'm proud of. Because the danger in this work, particularly in diversity inclusion, and this is where I think things don't stick, is that we can talk about a lot of things but we can't measure and we're not always able to demonstrate that it's impacted. From my perspective, it's being able to say this is truly the impact, this is the numbers of people, this is how we've been able to do it. And then to translate that into things like engagement scores, we know that people are attracted, we hear and get feedback. Now we're measuring this, for instance, in our talent attraction. We get feedback that the work we do on social sustainability and diversity, inclusion and belonging is an attraction factor for people to join our organization. It's a retention factor for the people who stay in the organization. And um, it's often the thing that keeps people a little bit longer when perhaps they may want to leave. So I'm very proud that we've made a difference in that. I'm very proud that it isn't just rhetoric. I'm very proud that it's got some stickiness to it and I'm very proud that the organization is continuing to invest in that. And going back to what you said, and I think this is an important point, it's using the data to help us to make decisions. So it's also helping us to make decisions. I'll give you an example now as we're looking at the next phase of investment and we're in the next week going to announce internally some of our strategic stuff to 2030 for our CEO and for our uh, Excomm, it's really important to understand, okay, what worked well what didn't work so well, you know, in countries, what has been particular impact. So that information helps me to be able to give a vocalization to what, uh, what, what is that? And that's, that's incredibly important.

Speaker A: As you say, often hard to get buy in on some of these longer term initiatives. And transforming culture for an organization with hundreds of thousands of employees doesn't happen overnight. I imagine you've also had some setbacks in trying to drive change of this scope and, and scale.

Speaker B: I mean I think the biggest challenge is that I would want to do so many things and sometimes you can't do everything. And I've learned that it's very good to focus and stay focused and try not to do many things. So for example, one of the things that was already in play when I joined ISS was a desire to increase the gender balance and particularly the female representation at senior management level. And we're making good progress on that. We'd set out a target and it had been there before I joined a 40%. I'm not sure that we'll get there by the end of 2025 because we had come from quite a low level and you know, you have change and you have things happen, but we're getting there. And we're about 36, 37% at the moment. But I in my head thought that by now I might be able to have a strong number around representation, particularly around ethnicity and race and to be able to bring more people from underrepresented um, groups into the next level of management. But the truth is having the gender target and some of the work we've been doing, we haven't been able to do that yet. And that's because we can't do everything. So I've learned that you can only do certain things at a time. Each one will happen, but it's going to take time.

Speaker A: Well, this brings us nicely to uh, a question I wanted to ask you. As somebody who's been through such an amazing and inspirational career and is now giving back in an area you're so passionate about, what advice would you give for people who are earlier in their careers who have an interest or passion for these topics of diversity, inclusion, sustainability, what advice would you give for how they can think about applying these passions or interests either in HR or in other roles in their organization? Given the scope and scale of these

Speaker B: challenges, my advice would be to make sure that everything you do is anchored in the business or uh, in a business role function. Because to just say to somebody, well, I'm interested in diversity, inclusion, belonging, but I'm not quite sure where that is. Or whereas if you can do that as part of what you do or the function you're in and you can prove that it makes a difference and that it adds value to the business, then I think you'll quickly find that the role or the next growth part around that will happen. And it's incredibly important to make sure the work we do adds value to a business. Otherwise it doesn't have its feet of play and it falls over very quickly and the person becomes disengaged and disappointed and perhaps frustrated by it. Whereas to make sure it's very anchored in the business. And I know for me, because I was in a CEO role first and I was used to running operations then, I always see everything we do as well. Why would we do that? What's that? And you know, it's got to have some resonance with the business. And I think for people coming through to the next part, it's really good to volunteer to put yourself forward, join resource groups, networks, whatever. Do something that shows you up well. And I don't mean for a, uh, tick box exercise, but, you know, put some effort in, get experience, take some of the good and the bad, have the setbacks, but learn from it and become somebody that people trust because you've done the work. Whereas if you just talk the talk, but you haven't done the work, trust level can be low and perhaps your opportunities in that are going to be limited. Whereas if somebody really builds credibility, I think that's important. So that's how I found has worked well.

Speaker A: Well, thank you, Margot, for sharing your amazing story and for closing out with, uh, such wonderful wisdom. It's been such a pleasure having you on the show.

Speaker B: My pleasure as well. Thank you, Sultan. The talent blueprint is brought to you by Bimari, the leading AI talent platform. Learn more@bimari.com.