When I first started working for China’s largest news broadcaster, CGTN, they had a problem.
From the point of offering a foreign candidate a job, to them actually working took approximately 6 months. The length of time is a combination of the bureaucracy related to a large organisation and Chinese visa red tape.
And yet despite this massive investment in time and effort by both CGTN and the candidate, on average foreign employees stayed for only 18 months.
The retention rate was atrocious.
CGTN’s answer to losing so many international journalists?
Recruit more!
As the Chief International Editor of CGTN’s Digital news I realised that this strategy was not sustainable.
That is why I have become obsessed with employee retention and so far the average time international employee stays with CGTN is three years and rising.
And when I say “obsessed” I really do mean obsessed. I read everything I can on the subject and take personal pride when international staff renew their annual rolling contracts.
Right now when it comes to increasing diversity British broadcasters are suffering from the same issue, staff retention is possibly the biggest problem.
If you look at the statistics from 2016 the rate Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) staff leave the BBC outstrips their white counterparts, and has been increasing every year.
In 2016 14.6% of people leaving the BBC were BAME.
In 2017 14.9% of people leaving the BBC were BAME.
In 2018 16.4% of people leaving the BBC were BAME.
In 2019 18.4% of people leaving the BBC were BAME.
In the same four years disabled staff have also left the cooperation at a faster rate than their able-bodied counterparts for two of the four years.
I use 2016 as the starting point because that was the year when it first became obvious that the BBC had a serious problem with several high profile BAME senior execs leaving. The situation was so bad in 2016 that the BBC’s own Radio 4 Media Show even had an item exploring the issue and The Times ran the headline “Black and Asian executives quit ‘snowy white peak’ BBC”.
And yet despite the alarm bells ringing in 2016 the numbers leaving the BBC have continued to rise.
Now I am always nervous about singling out the BBC, and I only do so because of all the British media organisations they collect and publish the most comprehensive statistics. But talking to friends working in HR and diversity at Channel 4, ITV and ITN anecdotally it would seem the BBC is not the only organisation struggling to retain BAME and disabled talent.
The response of so many media organisations haemorrhaging “diverse” staff is similar to CGTN’s initial response, and that is to increase staff recruitment. You see British broadcasters doing this in numerous ways, including outreach recruitment schemes, mentoring schemes, a focus on how to make work experience more diverse and constant talk about “improving the pipeline”.
But increased recruitment can never make up for a lack of retention.
This is for three fundamental reasons:
1. An organisation will never be able to increase diversity in leadership positions if they can’t hold on to diverse talent to grow their careers.
2. Older staff create the culture of an organisation. If you cannot retain diverse staff the culture remains "un-diverse", this means you do not get the true benefits of diversity. Plus if the culture stays the same the younger diverse staff will not stay. It’s a vicious cycle.
3. Recruiting new staff to make up for lost staff is very expensive; advertising, interview time, training, losing institutional memory etc. It all adds up.
There is a lot of literature on staff retention in general and even on retention of diverse staff specifically.
But there is one aspect that is rarely discussed, which I have found essential in retaining staff - Honesty.
And this became abundantly clear last week when I was attending the Edinburgh Television Festival when three things come together:
First, Channel 4's head of Current Affairs, Dorothy Byrne, gave a blistering MacTaggart lecture, the festival’s annual keynote speech, in which she talked about diversity.
Second, despite the amazing speech nearly all the BAME and disabled people I spoke to at the festival were either apathetic or downright negative about the industry’s ability to increase diversity behind the camera.
And third, I sat next to the head of programming at Al Jazeera English who had lived through apartheid South Africa.
Now let me begin by talking about the second point - apathy.
As a manager apathy is the biggest danger sign that a member of staff is about to leave. We all want highly engaged, enthusiastic staff. But according to the literature, the second best staff, surprisingly, are angry staff. When a staff member is angry it normally means that they believe that the situation they are in can change, their anger is part of that process of trying to make their job situation better.
Apathy on the other hand means they have given up hope and have lost faith in the organisation and that their situation will improve. Nine times out of ten apathetic staff are surfing job sites and updating their LinkedIn profile.
And even if they are not actively looking for another job their performance goes down and then the exec does not renew their contract because in the words of one senior exec I spoke to “it’s got nothing to do with them being disabled, they just didn’t seem engaged.”
So why should diverse staff be feeling apathetic when people like Dorothy, and almost every senior television executive, are espousing the virtues of diversity?
That is when it struck me, talking to the South African Al Jazeera executive.
When it came to the end of apartheid it wasn’t enough for people to simply say; let’s move on.
What was needed was a processes called “Truth and Reconciliation” where people who had been in positions of power during apartheid talked about what they had done wrong and victims of apartheid could also talk about their experiences without fear.
Now I am not suggesting public show trials where TV execs confess everything they have done wrong in the past, (although Endemol if you’re reading and want to pitch this as a new format, let’s talk).
What I am suggesting is that broadcasters need to acknowledge their mistakes of the past. There is a need for honesty.
The television industry has been rolling out different diversity schemes for over twenty years, and yet for most under-represented groups they have had very limited success, and in some cases numbers have even declined.
Despite their obvious failure I have never heard a single executive, who announced the rolling out of any of these schemes, admit in the following years that they had failed, and more importantly WHY they failed. There has been a lack of honesty
There has been no “truth and reconciliation” on how the media industry has failed its diverse staff.
I believe that until broadcasters and media organisations own up to their mistakes of the past and are transparent on how they will learn from their mistakes people will remain sceptical about the effectiveness of any announcements about wanting to increase diversity. And apathy will be the order of the day.
Which brings me back to working in China.
The biggest lesson I learnt at CGTN in how to retain staff is to be as honest as possible.
There are cultural and social issues that can be challenging for someone working for a Chinese organisation and living in Beijing. The strategy before I started working at CGTN was for the management to simply brush these problems under the carpet and extol the positives. However I found that as an executive if you simply ignore the problems they don’t go away. Instead your staff will talk about them without you and usually not in a constructive way. By addressing the issues honestly, and where management has gone wrong previously, you build trust and together you can come to solutions.
No longer are staff apathetic on the verge of leaving - they feel empowered.
If we want to retain our diverse staff let’s be honest, admit our mistakes and listen to our diverse talent. In other words let's have a truth a reconciliation moment.
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