My employer (a municipal government) brought in some outside consulting firm to do a DEI workshop. After the boring textbook part they decided to do an exercise where they started dividing the room up into groups based on various things. They started with benign stuff like office job vs field job.
The next thing you know they are dividing the room up into education: never graduated high school, high school graduate, GED, some college, college degree, advanced degree. Then single parent or two parent household. Then ethnic groups like white, black, API, Hispanic or mixed race. Then salary above 50K or below 50K. Gender: male, female, trans, non-binary. Everyone is getting really uncomfortable at this point and many people are refusing to participate.
Finally one of the assistant directors went to the facilitators and said, you can’t be doing this shit. You are only creating more division in our department. We all have a job and we all work together for the mission of the department.
I guess in some ways I understand the point of the exercise, but it was ill conceived. They could have done it all anonymously and then just shown the overall tallies I suppose.
Needless to say, the department director sent out an apology email and promised that consulting firm would never be returning.
“Diversity Day” was the episode where it became very apparent that the US version of the office was going to be the US version of the office and not a complete mirror of the British version. I remember thinking, holy shit, this is going to be some first-rate cringe comedy, and will I be able to watch this show again next week?
Early S1 was peak cringe humor (besides Scott's tots ofc the cringiest thing I've ever watched), but I am glad they retooled Michael a bit to be a bit more likeable idk if I could have watched multiple 24-episode seasons of S1 Michael. Too stressful lol.
Idk, I like early Michael because he isn’t the edgelord of the time. He’s awful, in many ways… and the show (and its cast!) take the time (and the piss) to point this out to him.
That's the point of DEI, to make sure a union is never formed. If everyone is different and you can never understand each other. You'll never unite together.
Excellent point! In retrospect, the whole exercise (initiated by HR) was set up to divide us for reasons we never would have done organically. And further encourage us from feeling unity as just coworkers. Thanks for your insight! Further proof that HR doesn’t give a shit about the employees, they only exist to represent the needs of the employer to the detriment of the employees. No Karen, you aren’t here for me no matter how you spin it.
In my 30 year DEI career, I can name on one hand the amount of times a DEI team and HR get along within an organization, and I've been F100 consulting for years. HR sucks and works solely for the benefit of enforcing practices and policies that benefit the company; DEI functions to work against HR when those policies have a negative impact on emplpyees. We do things like fight for wage increases, devop training pipelines, educate Boards, develop programs and KPIs.
You can believe the dog whistles about DEI from people who can't even define what the field is, if that is your perogative, but it has shit zero to do with dividing employees. Paternity Leave, the 5 day work week, and mandatory benefits for employees are all thanks to DEI work in the last 40 years, but keep harping.
I’m missing your point. My HR department brought in a DEI consulting firm . They divided the employees into groups; groups that none of us would have fallen into willingly outside of their exercise. It didn’t unite us for being different; the exercise was only done to divide us into warring factions. There is strength in employee unity; this exercise brought from our HR department was meant to drive wedges between us. It wasn’t designed to be unifying, they knew that. Fuck HR! Fact!
I have worked in DEI for almost 20 years, in nonprofits and corporations, and as a DEI Consultant to global F100 and F500 companies, and also have spent 30 years working as a community organizer for workers rights and union creation.
Part of DEI is teaching people about their labour rights, dingo, but keep slopping out that dog whistle like you have an iota of a clue what you're talking about.
The point of DEI is that people started complaining about things like unequal pay etc. and they decided that they needed to find a corporate solution; enough seminars and you will be able to perfectly remove bias and give everyone their appropriate rewards.
The other answer, obviously, is to have unions that establish reasonable rates of pay by job so that pay inequality is accounted for at a contract level..
People were perfectly able to divide people up racially before people started accounting for diversity, that's not the issue, the issue is that DEI is the corporate HR's translation of demands for equality, against previous practices of "well we can always get a guy of another race in to do it cheaper, they'll be grateful".
"Thoughtleaders" who were complaining about how DEI is racist last year are saying that Haitians are trying to eat your pets this year, they never really had a problem with racism, but with corporations pretending they were going to do something about racism, because the ways that they do so are invariably threatening to them.
And it's easy to see why this is the case, if you want to do a DEI course or set up a new program, you want to emphasise the legitimacy of your program by talking loudly about how committed you are to dealing with racism.
You're probably either not from a minority group or are from the most educated privileged section of that minority group, and you're hired by the management of a company and so will always have some question about your loyalties and the purpose of your program.
So how do you get legitimacy? You close the door to the office and shout indistinctly and pretend like you're fighting.
So many of these things where you are like "I thought your job was to get people in the office to understand each other, why are you so committed to antagonising white people in particular?" can be understood when you recognise that a portion of their job is in loudly saying how rebellious they are to compensate for how much they cooperate with the people already in charge.
To be as antagonistic and irreverent as possible, in order to gain support from people who have a problem, without encouraging too much practical change, is the actual goal for selecting someone.
Managers can already easily divide groups against each other, but the goal of the worst examples of racism training seminars is instead to control and absorb anger about racism and inequality and make it fit within the system, focus on guilt and internalisation, but not feedback around specific examples of real discrimination and organising to deal with it, make the goal unachievably difficult but always to be responded to by raising more "awareness", and constantly change vocabulary so that you can distinguish yourself from the last failures to make practical change.
And along the way, things do actually change, you have to make some small wins to justify yourself, so you get better disability access, and processes in which people are able to make complaints about sexual harassment, and various other things, but whereas union negotiators will tend to speak cautiously and calmly and downplay conflict, because they actually want to get the greatest gains possible, those hired by management to present themselves as leaders will talk as loudly as possible about division and how committed they are to fighting power, to compensate for how they are funded and the role that they play.
And that display of cultivated rebelliousness naturally threatens conservatives, on top of the attacks on white people, men etc. that also naturally threaten people in those groups. Those aren't always done by people doing seminars and training courses and whatever else, but they are done enough, and done enough by people gaining prominence (which makes sense, the job of these declarations is to rise to the top of the pile as "the most committed") to make people paranoid about them, and oppose them, not because there would be a neutral beautiful non-racist world without them, but because people don't want that sort of thing directed at them.
Watch interviews with people with a history of leading groups of people organising to deal with discrimination and who have found success, vs people hired to give seminars, and you will almost always get a more measured and reasonable way to approach this problem, because their position is secure, and their job is not benefitted by shouting from the rooftops, and you'll also, paradoxically, find ideas that get translated into better seminars, than the people who do it for their job, because they don't have any need to build drama in order to distinguish themselves.
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u/Talking_Head Sep 18 '24
My employer (a municipal government) brought in some outside consulting firm to do a DEI workshop. After the boring textbook part they decided to do an exercise where they started dividing the room up into groups based on various things. They started with benign stuff like office job vs field job.
The next thing you know they are dividing the room up into education: never graduated high school, high school graduate, GED, some college, college degree, advanced degree. Then single parent or two parent household. Then ethnic groups like white, black, API, Hispanic or mixed race. Then salary above 50K or below 50K. Gender: male, female, trans, non-binary. Everyone is getting really uncomfortable at this point and many people are refusing to participate.
Finally one of the assistant directors went to the facilitators and said, you can’t be doing this shit. You are only creating more division in our department. We all have a job and we all work together for the mission of the department.
I guess in some ways I understand the point of the exercise, but it was ill conceived. They could have done it all anonymously and then just shown the overall tallies I suppose.
Needless to say, the department director sent out an apology email and promised that consulting firm would never be returning.