Meet the Women Leading Two of America’s Greatest Workplaces for Women

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020, many industries stalled operations resulting from journey restrictions and lockdowns.

One of many firms that took successful was Entry DMC, a vacation spot administration and licensing firm that has been round for over 5 a long time. As an organization, Entry plans and coordinates skilled conferences and occasions throughout the nation.

Again in 2018, the corporate was bought and Chief Gross sales Officer Jennifer Miller, who beforehand served as Entry’ gross sales supervisor and regional president, was appointed as the corporate’s first feminine CEO. However when COVID lockdowns started 20 months later, nobody was taking journeys or planning massive group occasions.

As enterprise got here to a halt, so did investor assist. As soon as these buyers divested from the corporate, Miller and two of her colleagues determined to purchase the corporate and rework the enterprise.

“The day we purchased the corporate again from the buyers, the 2 issues we determined instantly was we have been going to maintain the corporate values and discover significant methods to drive them, and we have been going to create a best-places-to-work surroundings,” Miller advised Newsweek.

Entry is featured in Newsweek’s 2024 rating of America’s Best Workplaces for Girls, compiled in partnership with knowledge agency Plant-A Insights Group. Greater than 142,000 working ladies have been surveyed to determine the important thing indicators that create a optimistic work surroundings for feminine staff—together with honest hiring practices, belief and transparency from the corporate, aggressive salaries and wholesome work-life steadiness.

The rating options 1,000 firms unfold throughout 78 skilled industries, together with well being care suppliers, in addition to client, monetary and enterprise providers. Over 100 of the businesses featured are led by ladies, in line with Plant-A, and 55 of these achieved a ranking of 5 stars, the very best ranking accessible.

In keeping with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, ladies made up greater than half of the workforce in 2023, however, for perspective, solely 41 of all S&P 500 firms have a lady on the helm, per a current Bloomberg report.

Entry is among the many small firms on Newsweek’s Best Workplaces for Girls listing (which means these with 500 to 999 staff) to earn a five-star ranking and to even be led by ladies.

The chief of an organization units the tone and expectations for workers. Researchers at Columbia Enterprise College discovered that placing ladies in positions of energy can rework organizational tradition, and corporations that rent feminine CEOs and board members usually tend to rework the best way a corporation makes use of language, to be extra inclusive and fewer dangerous to ladies.

At Entry, an organization with an 87 p.c feminine workforce, Miller now serves as co-CEO with Entry’ Chief Inventive Officer Danielle Phippen and Chief Occasions Officer Heidi Brown.

“In the present day, the corporate, by the management of the three of us, is larger than it is ever been,” Miller stated.

Since changing into a women-owned and -led firm amid the hospitality business shutdown in 2020, Entry has grown from zero to $175 million in income and has expanded from 5 to 1,500 staff in 40 areas throughout the nation, Phippen stated.

Whereas the variety of feminine CEOs has elevated typically lately—there have been 22 ladies main S&P 500 firms in 2016, earlier than the rise to 41—ladies nonetheless face structural boundaries when climbing the company ladder.

Girls are likely to drop off that ladder as soon as they start having households. As Sandrine Devillard, senior associate at McKinsey Canada, famous final 12 months, many ladies are passed over for promotions of their childbearing years resulting from biases and misconceptions about ladies’s skills to guide when balancing work and household duties.

The co-CEOs of Entry have skilled lots of the similar struggles their staff face, and attempt to function fashions for a optimistic work-life steadiness. In keeping with Phippen, “there’s not a job within the firm” that she and her fellow CEOs haven’t finished—whether or not it is writing proposals or holding an indication on a road nook directing purchasers to a big occasion.

“We have finished all of these jobs, and we’ve all finished life as ladies,” she stated.

Due to that, the three CEOs say they need their feminine staff to really feel supported as they advance within the firm, whereas additionally fulfilling household and different private obligations.

For Gina Drosos, one other CEO, transformation has all the time been part of her profession.

She is the CEO of Signet Jewelers, which encompasses a number of smaller jewellery companies—together with KAY Jewelers, Zales, Jared, Blue Nile and Diamond Direct—and is among the massive firms on our listing (these with 5,000 or extra staff) to realize a ranking of 5 stars.

Drosos is not any stranger to becoming a member of an organization and, in a short while, taking it to new heights. She began her profession at Procter & Gamble, rising within the ranks to cosmetics, the place she reworked Olay as group president of world magnificence from a $200 million enterprise to a $2.5 billion enterprise by the point she left P&G.

Drosos advised Newsweek that she “by no means wastes a disaster” as a result of each challenge creates alternatives to develop and acquire aggressive benefits.

On the time she signed on to guide Signet, in 2017, the corporate’s web site wanted enchancment. Drosos started an initiative to bolster on-line jeweler consulting and construct sufficient of a digital presence in order that by 2020, on-line gross sales elevated throughout the COVID-19 pandemic—a “tumultuous” time for jewelers and your entire retail world, Drosos stated. In keeping with Signet, the corporate’s market capitalization quadrupled from lower than $1 billion initially of the pandemic to $3.9 billion in the present day.

When she joined Signet, Drosos launched into “Gina’s listening tour,” wherein she hung out in shops and traveled to totally different U.S. and international amenities, headquarters and factories.

“I went and I listened to what the folks within the group have been saying, and what they have been saying was that they felt they have been being held again by our hierarchical tradition,” Drosos stated, including that the corporate was spending an excessive amount of time attempting to get routine duties finished and never sufficient time driving innovation within the enterprise.

Drosos credit her success as a frontrunner to being inclusive, setting a imaginative and prescient and agreeing on which methods to deal with and hiring nice expertise, whereas breaking down boundaries that get in the best way of employees doing their jobs efficiently.

“I got here in at a time when Signet was a really troubled firm and, with an important group, with nice expertise, with a brand new tradition, with a extra distinctive technique and getting our monetary well being into form, we have been in a position to rework this firm,” she stated. “And that is nice, however generally it is more durable to begin from a deficit to try this than it’s to begin with one thing nice and make it larger. And I feel that’s one thing ladies, percentage-wise at the least, face extra usually than males.”

Below her tenure, Signet elevated feminine illustration on the highest ranges of the corporate.

Drosos stated the important thing to eliminating the “glass cliff” is to create extra pathways to senior administration positions for ladies, so feminine staff will be positioned in “essential roles” earlier. (The “glass cliff,” a phrase coined by researchers on the College of Exeter, refers to when firms appoint ladies to positions of management when the group is failing or dealing with disaster, setting ladies up for failure.)

“Giving ladies [management] alternatives earlier of their profession provides them visibility, provides them extra teaching and growth,” she stated. “Should you’ve created an important pipeline of very versatile ladies in your group who’ve labored on rising a enterprise and fixing a declining a part of the enterprise, they are going to be extra ready for that high job.”

When she joined the Signet Board of Administrators, she was solely the second girl to serve on the board. Now the board is 42 p.c ladies. Moreover, almost 60 p.c of individuals on the director stage and 75 p.c of retailer assistant managers are feminine. There are additionally enterprise useful resource teams to assist totally different demographics, together with feminine, Hispanic and Black staff, in addition to coaching programs to beat private biases to stop discrimination within the office.

In the meantime, over the previous few years at Entry, Miller famous that the management group has labored to not solely rent and practice tons of of individuals, but in addition construct the infrastructure for the enterprise to maintain up with the speedy tempo of development, and assist the subsequent technology of feminine leaders.

Miller stated that there are ladies who’ve labored at Entry for 10 or 20 years who’ve gone by “a feminine lifecycle.” She provides that within the span of three years, there have been 27 infants born to staff. These ladies are in a position to develop their households whereas advancing by the corporate, Miller stated, which means they do not have to decide on between having a baby and getting a promotion.

Protecting ladies within the workforce longer permits them to achieve extra expertise and tackle extra duties in order that they will naturally transfer up into senior administration roles.

Profession coach Nikki Harmless stated company government jobs include plenty of expectations—together with working hours that aren’t set as much as assist “multifaceted ladies” who juggle many duties.

“We have to reform what management and C-suite management appears to be like like to permit for these ladies with these different points of their lives, that is probably not seen as their job, are literally the issues that make them invaluable of their management,” she stated. These expertise, in line with Harmless, embrace empathy, flexibility and open communication, permitting each senior employees and their staff to convey their full selves to their jobs.

“The flexibleness and the inherent belief that you just’re searching for a corporation to have in you and what you are in a position to do, what you are in a position to produce, is extra vital than precisely the way you’re in a position to produce it in the best way that, like, Joe and Jim and John did earlier than you,” Harmless stated.

As these 4 CEOs show, implementing insurance policies that profit each step of a lady’s profession can result in extra success—not solely when it comes to revenue, however in firm tradition as properly.

“We attempt to mannequin for everybody [that] we work loads, we make investments loads in management coaching, in sharing our values, in dwelling our values and rewarding folks,” Phippen stated. “We’re reaching enterprise success, however we’re not doing it on the expense of our folks.”