DeepSummary
The podcast episode features a discussion on the American Opportunity Index, a collaborative effort between Harvard Business School, the Burning Glass Institute, and the Schultz Family Foundation to rank Fortune 500 employers based on their ability to foster upward mobility and career advancement for workers across socioeconomic backgrounds. The index evaluates companies based on various metrics, including hiring, pay, promotion, parity, retention, and advancement from within.
The guests, Matt Sigelman from the Burning Glass Institute and Rajeev Chandra Sekharan from the Schultz Family Foundation, explain the importance of the index in providing transparency and data-driven insights into employer practices that facilitate economic mobility. They highlight key findings, such as the wide gaps between top and bottom performers across sectors and the relationships between measures like promotion and parity.
The discussion also touches on the potential policy implications of the index, the use of data to empower workers and job seekers, and the ongoing refinement of the methodology to capture a more comprehensive picture of upward mobility. The guests emphasize the importance of understanding and replicating successful patterns that enable workers to navigate their careers effectively.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- The American Opportunity Index is a collaborative effort to rank Fortune 500 employers based on their ability to foster upward mobility and career advancement for workers across socioeconomic backgrounds.
- The index evaluates companies based on various metrics, including hiring, pay, promotion, parity, retention, and advancement from within.
- Key findings highlight wide gaps between top and bottom performers across sectors, as well as relationships between measures like promotion and parity.
- The index aims to provide transparency and data-driven insights to empower workers, job seekers, and investors in making informed decisions.
- The initiative emphasizes understanding and replicating successful patterns that enable workers to navigate their careers effectively.
- The methodology is being refined to capture a more comprehensive picture of upward mobility, including the introduction of the "parity" metric.
- The index has the potential to provide valuable feedback to employers and inform policy discussions around workforce development and economic mobility.
- There is a vision for companies to disclose data related to upward mobility and career advancement, potentially rendering the index obsolete in the future.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “We've held briefings with more than 25 companies diving into their performance on the index thus far, and with some of them there are certain metrics, certain categories where they don't perform as well as they had hoped. And in the confidence of some of these off the record discussions, they have, as we've delved in more, they've actually said in some cases, you know what? We're not thrilled that we have this score, but actually it does comport with some of what we know about how our business is operating or areas where we need to do better.“ by Matt Sigelman
- “We introduced this year a pretty radical new dimension of the index, which is measuring what we call parity, not just whether people are moving ahead, but whether people are moving ahead together, whether black and hispanic workers are moving ahead at the same rate as others, whether women are moving ahead at the same rate as men.“ by Rajeev Chandra Sekharan
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Episode Information
HBS Managing the Future of Work
Harvard Business School
12/27/23