CMC retailing Catherine Cassell
CMC is a global retailing organisation headquartered in California that buys and sells women’s and men’s fashion in retail outlets throughout the world. The company CEO, Caitlin Stephens, is one of the few female CEOs in the industry and is renowned for taking a pro-diversity stance and particularly for encouraging women to move to managerial positions in the company. Given her pro-female stance, she regularly features in the business pages and features sections of newspapers across the world, where CMC has retail outlets. Recently, the company has had a major reputational hit in that a group of female employees in Australia have accused the company of sex discrimination arguing that women with children have been discriminated against and are being paid less than men. Needless to say, the high profile case in an Australian court has also meant that Caitlin’s life has been investigated in depth by journalists seeking to find more ‘dirt’ on CMC and its seemingly exemplary feminist CEO. Caitlin wonders how her company could possibly have got into the situation where they could have been involved in such discriminatory processes. The company values of diversity are inclusion are taken very seriously and all employees have to go through some form of diversity training as part of their induction to ensure that these values are engendered into everyday practices. She is aware that in different cultural locations diversity needs to be addressed in different ways. For example, in a recent expansion of the company into the Chinese market she has been keen to ensure that the values and commitment to diversity are promoted as being located within traditional Chinese notions of inclusion. She is aware that some policies do not easily translate. However, to be found guilty of discrimination in Australia presents her with a puzzle. Her Australian Director of Operations has suggested that the issue has arisen because of local management practices that will be dealt with, but given the significance of the incident for both the company and her own personal reputation, Caitlin decides to visit the Australian head office to meet with key staff and discover more about why the incident has occurred.

At a meeting with the Australian Director, Matt Sparkes, Caitlin asks more about how such discriminatory practices can occur. Matt expands on his view that the crucial issue is local management. At all of the retail outlets staff have the right to access work–life balance programmes that include flexible working. However, during the recent run up to Christmas, which is the busiest time of the year, Matt has been aware that different managers may be implementing these policies somewhat differently. Caitlin is committed to a no-blame culture so is keen to discuss the issues and problems with the policies openly with the managers concerned. Hence a random selection of local managers are collected together to meet with Caitlin for an open exchange of views about their experience of the policy. During the discussion a number of issues with flexible working become apparent. First, it is clear that the commitment to flexible work arrangements can be problematic for store managers. For example, one manager reported that they had had little direction from their regional line manager about how to deal with staff who wanted a variety of flexible working arrangements. Moreover, they felt under considerable pressure to keep these arrangements to a minimum because of the impact they had on the operation of the stores. The manager described how with a variety of women working different and flexible shifts, managing the operational needs of the business was an ongoing challenge. One female manager said that as a woman without children she felt that flexible working initiatives were often divisive and that she had to work hard to stop resentment towards women who worked flexibly in their department. In order to compensate some disgruntled male employees she had offered them extra overtime, one of the causes of the discrimination case in another outlet.

A second issue that emerged was that different managers were interpreting the flexible working policies in different ways. As the busiest time of the year the pressures of managing staff working patterns became even more challenging. In some cases this would lead to individual managers making more informal arrangements with staff to discourage the uptake of more rigid, formal, flexible working policies. However, the informal nature of these arrangements led to accusations of favouritism from other staff. Caitlin was surprised to discover that rather than flexible working policies leading to a more happy and motivated workforce, in some cases they had instead led to resentment and a confrontational culture. Caitlin realised that despite the efforts that had been made to instil values of diversity and inclusion throughout the company internationally, what was just as important was how managers operationalised those values in practice. She realised that more thinking was needed about CMC’s diversity and inclusion policies. Therefore she decided to institute a new diversity task force to evaluate the company’s diversity and inclusion strategy with a view to ensuring that the positive company values are translated into practice. Her intention is that as well as evaluating the policy, the task force will produce a list of actions that will ensure that the company delivers on effective diversity management internationally.
Questions
Imagine you have been allocated the role of Chair of the new diversity and inclusion task force at CMC.
1 What steps would you take to evaluate the company’s current diversity and inclusion strategy?
2 What interventions do you think might be useful in this case?
3 What plans would you make for evaluating your proposed interventions?