From advents in automation to the realities of a distributed workforce, a new era of work has dawned—and with it, a new style of teamwork. This is part of a series exploring Deloitte’s Modern Teams methodology and the nonlinear, diverse, multifunctional teams that put humanity at the center to drive meaningful business outcomes.
Human society has long had a lengthy list of equity problems. For centuries, our institutions and systems have been built in ways that marginalize certain groups, intentionally and unintentionally: School districts often don’t meet the needs of families dealing with poverty; healthcare ecosystems tend to fail communities that don’t primarily speak English; poor internet access in underserved communities can prevent people from accessing critical day-to-day resources. In 2020, the harsh realities of COVID-19 threw many of these inequities into overdrive, massively amplifying the gaps between advantaged and underrepresented communities. If your life was already hard, it may have gotten harder.
Even in the best of times, such equity issues are particularly hard to solve for in large part because of their deep-rooted and interconnected natures; lack of universal acknowledgement across various communities complicates the situation further. But as conversations around terms like accessibility and diversity, equity, and inclusion have surged over the past decade—and Covid forced long-overlooked inequities to the forefront—organizations and teams around the world are starting to chip away at change.
Many of these groups are finally acknowledging that the best people to look to for help solving these problems are the exact ones traditional power structures have long been leaving out. It’s simple, isn’t it: You can’t solve an equity problem without first looking inward. That way of thinking is at the heart of Deloitte’s modern teams methodology—and lately, it’s helped organizations as small as emergency contact centers in Virginia and as large as the White House to understand and solve critical community issues.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law: Closing the digital divide
If the pandemic changed the way society thinks about tele-everything (-work, -health, -conferencing), it also rapidly increased our understanding of how reliant modern life is on an individual’s access to digital connectivity. From limited access to healthcare resources to an inability to apply for jobs, quarantining without adequate internet access was dangerously isolating for vulnerable populations.
That gulf between those who have fast, affordable, reliable internet at home and those who don't is called the digital divide, and it has become a problem so large that it might be one of the only issues that can still unite American political parties. The Biden administration's recent Bipartisan Infrastructure Law proves that: As part of that deal, Republicans and Democrats signed on to deliver $65 billion to address it. A piece of that sum will go toward powering select providers to provide low-budget, high-speed plans for underrepresented populations; much of the rest will go toward building internet infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas.
The potential benefits of improved or newly available internet access for these populations would be huge: job opportunities untethered from pricey residences near corporate HQs; small businesses reaching nation-wide clientele; people furthering their education from anywhere. The ultimate success metric might be the only thing bigger than the language of the law itself: 100% of Americans having access to reliable, affordable internet at home. But when you view digital connectivity as the human right it’s practically become, that goal feels as urgent as it is intimidating.
“You really need to start with the premise that access to affordable, reliable, high-speed internet is a basic necessity,” said Angela Thi Bennett, the digital equity director at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). “Then, while we are focused on the technical aspects of broadband, we don’t lose sight of our purpose: the people. The Internet for All initiative will meaningfully address the fundamental economic, educational, social, and health-related inequities in our country by connecting all Americans, particularly the members of our communities who have be excluded by design. Because the reality is, if we connect 100 percent of Americans to reliable, high-speed internet, and do not improve their quality of life, then what have we really achieved?”
Angela Thi Bennett
Digital Equity Director at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)
Listen to a conversation segment between Dan Helfrich, Chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP, and a team member.
Dan: “So Angela you’re new to this role and I think it’s the most interesting and cool, if I could use the word cool, titles of anyone I’ve spoken to which is the Digital Equity Director. What is having that title and the corresponding responsibly mean to you and how have you thought about the responsibility of essentially building this new [he slipped up on this word if you could cut to his correction please] role from scratch and setting the stage for the people that will come behind you.”
Angela: “Having the title is one thing, particularly for our communities. So often we see digital equity directors or DE&I digital inclusion directors in lots of organizations and often those titles and those positions come without any funding and influence or opportunity to influence policy. Why the community is so excited in this instance is there’s now a position but that position is also funded, that enables it to influence policies and help drive sustainable, transformable change amongst communities. To me, it’s extremely humbling to be in this position because it’s an opportunity to scale what I was doing locally do be at a national level so that charge I take very seriously because this is such a unique opportunity to observe my local community and the country at its greatest level”
One way to achieve that is by uniting a diverse collection of entities—state governments, internet service providers (ISPs), advocacy organizations, and strategic consultants with experience in large-scale transformations and internet deployment like Deloitte. All parties are leaning heavily on community-based experts with real experience living in areas without adequate internet access to make sure local needs are considered on a state-to-state basis.
"The plan that works for Rhode Island is going to be different than California," said Kevin Gallagher, a senior advisor on broadband for Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. "So the most important thing we did was require that the people (states) consult with those who have the experience of living disconnected ... not just someone who advocates on behalf of that population, not an organization who works for that population. Ultimately, no requirement is more important than sitting down with people who have the lived experience."
Yes, local governments should—and will—seek the technical know-how of the ISPs in-state and the guidance of industry collaborators. But to participate in the federal funding, states are required to bring individuals and individual communities to the table—and that’s a unique and intentional feature for a big federal initiative like this. Rather than simply generating top-down solutions, NTIA and others involved with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law want new ideas and unique state and local grassroot perspectives to inform the path forward. And if done right, it should create a much more equitable connectivity landscape.
The Vaccinate Virginia Contact Center: Answering a call for all
Perhaps one of the few consistencies in Covid response across states was the implementation of contact centers. They became essential for providing local information on topics ranging from where to get vaccinated to the latest community guidelines. And in the two years following the onset of Covid, Deloitte had become a key player in this space: the consulting firm had not only made a social impact supporting one in five Americans through the pandemic, but it had helped build 20 such contact centers across the U.S. along the way.
So when leaders of the Commonwealth of Virginia realized that the state needed help improving low vaccination numbers, they reached out to Deloitte for help instituting contact centers of their own—and within six weeks, the team had helped the Commonwealth of Virginia climb to rank eighth in the nation in terms of vaccination rates for its population.
But in setting up these contact centers, these teams found a flaw. “We had turned the corner together,” says Marc Mancher, principal at Deloitte. “And that’s about the time we met Eric—and learned about the 50,000 residents and workers who were not being served.” In other words, the approach would uniquely disadvantage a specific group of vulnerable residents: the deaf and hard of hearing community.
“There’s a general lack of awareness for the needs of the deaf community,” said Eric Raff, director of the Virginia Department for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. “Hearing loss and deafness is an invisible disability. You can look at someone and you won’t notice they can’t hear. That’s unlike many other disabilities.”
Covid accentuated many healthcare inequities, and those faced by the deaf and hard of hearing populations were no exception. A 2021 study from the National Library of Medicine found that adults who are deaf were 4.6 times more likely to report difficulty accessing Covid-related information, with 36.6% reporting that the information they needed was not available in American Sign Language (ASL) and 26% reporting that the information was hard to understand.
Which brings us back to the problem with contact centers. First, some background: When a U.S.-based deaf or hard of hearing person calls an 800 number, they frequently use a video relay service (VRS) that allows them to interact with customer service. With a VRS, a deaf caller uses a video phone to communicate with an ASL interpreter who then acts as an intermediary between the customer and the contact center. The shortcoming here is that not only does this indirect setup lead to calls that take three or four times as long, but more granular or localized information—like streets or nearby businesses—might be misinterpreted because the VRS interpreter isn’t necessarily familiar with the caller’s area or the contact center’s business. And the dangers of Covid turn that fundamental problem into a much larger one: that very real scenario in which such misinterpretations could have dire consequences.
To help ensure accurate—and potentially life-saving—information would be accessible for the state’s deaf and hard of hearing population, Virginia worked with Deloitte’s contact center consulting team and the ASL Now department of the nonprofit Communication Service for the Deaf (CSD) to implement CSD’s customized solution. With just three weeks of prep, the Vaccinate Virginia Contact Center rolled out dedicated and local ASL staffers working a consistent schedule so deaf and hard of hearing residents could get important information directly through a visual hotline interface.
Over the course of four months, five ASL staffers were able to help nearly 800 deaf and hard of hearing callers in Virginia. “Some individuals had tears streaming down their faces when they realized the service was available,” said Ryan Bonheyo, a senior account executive with CSD. “They never had that opportunity before. They were so used to being connected through an interpreter.”
Implementation of this empathetic technology has also helped solve for another fundamental challenge: a contact center’s ability to track how many deaf or hard of hearing people they actually serve. Typically, because the translator is the one who makes the phone call, it registers as such—meaning that unless an organization is consistently making note of these phone calls, that data likely goes uncollected.
“I’ve operated multiple contact centers, and in a typical world, we have no idea how many members of the deaf and hard of hearing community are reaching out to us. There’s a lot of unmet demand and a lack of awareness overall,” says Casey Martner, contact center transformation senior manager at Deloitte. “Within the first day, we received eight calls from the deaf and hard of hearing community. That may not seem like a massive number, but that’s eight calls that would have gone untracked.”
Eric Raff
Director of the Virginia Department for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Virginia was the first and only state to provide real-time ASL Covid support in this way—and it only happened because the state government was wise enough to realize it needed help from a diverse and multifaceted team. By bringing together the contact center industry knowledge of Deloitte and the firsthand ASL communication experiences of CSD, Virginia offered a unique and modern solution in an area where standard resources were exclusionary.
“Eric had the passion to make this happen, and Casey and I found the pieces to make it happen,” says Mancher. “It’s a coalition of the willing who want to get something done.”
The Virginia contact centers and the federal government show what it can look like to solve for local issues of vastly different scales. Both groups eventually discovered that achieving their goals to any extent was impossible without multi-faceted teams that understood that systems designed to benefit most can still disadvantage the people who are most vulnerable. For both, the secret to solutions was looking toward perspectives outside of their own scopes: If you want to build systems that don’t exclude entire groups of people, you can’t limit yourself to an exclusive team, either. It’s equity—for all.
“You need to go outside your normal traditional network of people. You need a willingness to be uncomfortable and go into uncharted territories,” as NTIA’s Bennett puts it. “You need to show up in these spaces—not as a savior, because these communities don’t need to be saved. Go in being respectful and willing to defer to them, to listen. Everyone must want to come together and learn.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Deloitte.
