Happiness Through Humanism: workplace diversity

Showing posts with label workplace diversity. Show all posts

Harmony in Diversity and Diversity in Harmony

I had the great pleasure to talk ethics with my friend Masroor Lodi, he founder of ‘The Entrepreneurship School’ in India. The context was a program on how to teach teachers to teach values in the classroom. I met Masroor Lodi on a trip I took to India where I spoke at a Happy Workplace Conclave put on by my friend Mukund Trivedy.

Here is a link to the program so you can see what we talked about: http://humanisticmanagement.international/teaching-teachers-to-teach-values-masroor-lodi/ That page includes links to the resources we discussed and a downloadable copy of his presentation.

One of the things Masroor talked about that really resonated with me was about creating harmony in diversity and - diversity in Harmony.

Moral Imagination

He said that one of the ways to move forward with diverse groups and help them build cohesion is by accepting different actions as different ways to express shared values.

Values like – respect – are expressed as different behaviors in different cultures. For instance, looking at someone and making eye contact vs. looking down and avoiding eye contact. It’s the same value, just expressed as different behavior.

Part of the way to help create harmony in diversity is to talk and discuss and learn from each other. And the best way to do that is to start from a point that everyone is moral.

I love this as it is consistent with my way of being as a Humanist. Being a humanist to me means, treating everyone with dignity and understanding that they are moral beings, even when I don't understand their behavior.

Imagine how much easier it is to deal with conflicts when you start by assuming the other person is behaving in a way they think is moral. And then, instead of treating them as if they are immoral, asking them questions to understand the morality that is driving their behavior. I know that's how I want to be treated.

To do this well he encouraged us to increase our moral imaginations and to look at people's behavior, as moral and to try and understand their morality.

Primary Values:

Another way people have trouble with diversity, is that they value different things. This is especially difficult in work groups. Everyone has the same values, but what is the primary value? This can vary from person to person or from workgroup to workgroup.

I related to this because of a personal experience I had when working at a tower company. At one point we purchase the towers from Motorola. With that purchase came employees. And this is where we had a primary value clash.

What was valuable in a tower to Motorola, was not what we at our company valued. To fix this, we had to be explicit about what made a tower valuable and to discuss the competing ideas of what made a tower valuable until we came to a shared understanding.

Don't ever assume that everyone is on the same page. Explicitly discussing values and what is valuable in a work setting, helps create harmony in diversity. No one has to feel like their values aren't valued. That's the beauty of these conversations. Everyone's values matter. But if we listen respectfully, we can create consensus on what values we value the most in a given work situation.

This can be done explicitly and should be done explicitly. Get in the habit of discussing what values are being invoked in decision making. You will find staff more engaged and more openly moral.

Moral Code Switching:

The final thing he talked about that I want to share here has to do with moral code switching. Behaviors of values may differ in different context. This is code switching.

Examples might be things that are acceptable in personal life, not be acceptable in the workplace and vice versa.

Again, the solution Masroor Lodi suggests, is to be explicit about the problem and re-affirm shared values and expectations in the given situation you find yourself in. In a work environment, having a conversation about the moral values helps employees bring their personal values into the work environment and that in turn, should help people, behave more ethically with each other and see the morality of colleagues more clearly.

I want to thank Masroor for taking the time to discuss explicit ethics with me and the idea of using ethics to create harmony in diversity.

Diversity v. Inclusion - what's the difference?

Just because you have diversity - doesn't mean you have inclusion.

Diversity means you have variety. In the workplace - you could have a variety of people of different genders. You could have a variety of people from different ages. You could have a variety of people from different income groups. You could have a variety of people with different skin tones. A variety of people from different religions. Think of diversity - as variety.

There is a reasons companies like to recruit in diverse people. And it's not just that they don't want to get sued for discrimination. It's also because that diversity is great for critical thinking and decision making.

You don't know what you don't know. Diversity gives you a better chance at uncovering the things you don't know so that you can plan for them and adjust your strategies so they are more likely to be successful.

In order for diversity to benefit your organization though - it's not enough to have diversity - you must also have inclusion.

What good is having a math wiz - if you never ask them to do math for you? What good is it to have a epidemiologist during a pandemic - if you don't take their advice? What good is it to plan for education during a pandemic if you don't include teachers in the planning discussions? Not good at all.

In order to benefit from diversity - you have to make sure people with diverse knowledge and experience - are included in decision making process. Otherwise, you are making decisions in the dark and that's exactly what were trying to avoid by recruiting in diverse people.

So - how to ensure people that are diverse create positive collaborative work groups where everyone is included and everyone can contribute equally? That is literally - the billion dollar question that seems to defy solution.

It turns out we humans are really tribal. We don't trust others and if we don't trust - we don't collaborate. Also - some people have learned that - they can get their way if they just - exclude those pesky others who have different ideas.

In order to create a culture of inclusion- you have to simultaneous build up trust and get rid of the people who dominate through bullying and other obnoxious behavior. This is why my book - The Bully Vaccine - is subtitled: How to inoculate yourself against bullies and other petty people. https://humanistlearning.com/the-bully-vaccine-book/

Recruiting in diversity is actually fairly easy once you decide to do it. The harder part is how to make sure those diverse people are nurtured and included so that they can be their best and contribute to the organization - instead of being marginalized by your other employees.

To help you with that - I offer a variety of training programs that teach you and your staff - how to stop bullying using behavioral science and how to manage humanistically - so that you can finally - have that inclusive supportive organization you always dreamed of. Details at: https://humanistlearning.com/programsoffered/

Creating an effective diversity program

I teach how to stop harassment in the workplace using behavioral science as well as implicit bias that affect diversity.

There are several reasons why diversity trainings fail to create diverse work groups. So it’s helpful to think of processes that prevent diversity – rather than training to encourage it.

The research on the efficacy of diversity training is that – it really doesn’t matter the methodology of the training. The training will raise awareness of diversity issues, but is unlikely to result in behavioral change. The reason why is – behavioral change requires behavioral conditioning which is a process that takes place over time and is impacted by real events in the workplace. A training is a great way to start that process, but it’s only a start. If the processes don’t support diversity – the initiative will fail because – the pro-diversity behaviors will not be rewarded if the processes aren’t changed.

To create diverse workforces, you have to accomplish 3 things.

1. Eliminate bias in personnel decisions

2. Eliminate social exclusion/bullying

3. De-escalate conflicts to create social cohesion

If we don’t eliminate bias in personnel decisions than our hiring, promoting and development programs will socially exclude people. It’s just a fact of life. There are things we can do in hiring to promote diversity by eliminating bias for instance. Salary negotiations can be eliminated and salaries normalized. These can all help improve the diversity coming into an organization through new hires AND ensure that everyone is treated equally in the organization – at least within the employee development system

If we don’t eliminate social exclusion through bullying/harassment – we will continue to have diversity issues. One person has the ability to kill a diversity initiative if we don’t shut down bullying. A good diversity training must include a harassment/bullying program that teaches people how to actually shut down the unwanted bullying behavior to create space for the targets to actually stay and thrive instead of being driven out by small minded people committed to racism/sexism/whateverism. This sort of enhanced harassment training is important because – as long as we people are socially excluded from groups for being different by bullies, your organization won’t be able to create diverse yet cohesive workgroups.

Finally, creating cohesive work groups are hard because, people with diverse backgrounds often disagree. The challenge of creating a cohesive team out of diverse people should not be under-estimated. Helping people learn how to de-escalate conflicts so that they can engage in dignity based disagreements is essential.

My ideal diversity program would first, analyze the processes and tweak them to eliminate bias.

Then my training program would include bias elimination, diversity awareness, behavioral based harassment/bullying elimination training and a training on how to de-escalate conflicts effectively and ethically. I would start with management and then move on to staff. And I would have a plan for what to do about managers – that – turn out to be anti-diversity.

You can read my white paper on: Combining philosophy, science and education to create more diverse workforces – here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SAQXj5aogXTA44QZtOQfI_y74e_m9d6L/view?usp=sharing

Hire More Women

The solution to sexual harassment problems is simple. Hire More Women. NO seriously - that's the solution.

Don't believe me? Here is what Harvard Business Review has to say about all our efforts to date - and why sexual harassment training doesn't work, but hiring and promoting more women does: https://hbr.org/2017/11/training-programs-and-reporting-systems-wont-end-sexual-harassment-promoting-more-women-will

To help drive home the point - here is a song.

There are many reasons why women aren't represented in the numbers they should be in companies - but one of them is that they are harassed out of the company and leave. Yes - that is what the Harvard research shows.

If you want more women - and you totally do since many different reports show that companies with women in position of power perform better than male only management teams - then you need to protect the women in your workplace so that they a) stay and b) rise the ranks to management.

PS - here are some links to the research on companies with women in management:

But really - the best thing you can do - is when you find a guy who has been harassing people - fire him and replace him with a woman. Corporate culture is determined by the last person promoted. So stop promoting harassers and start promoting women who have the courage to speak up.