Broadly speaking there were three main areas associated with HR: Compliance, Recruitment, and Benefits. When companies started diversity and harassment training decades ago it was largely to cover their own asses and while that’s still something of importance, diversity programs also exists for recruitment & retention of talent as well as improving the opinion clients and customers have of the company. A lack of diversity can discourage good candidates from applying and it can drive talented employees away and most companies want to avoid that even without the threat of lawsuits.
That was largely why Personnel became known as Human Resources a few decades ago. And it worked for a few years until courts caught up. Having policies against discrimination, harassment, retaliation, etc., etc. does not shield a company from lawsuits these days.
I can promise you that the corporation cares about turnover. Turnover is expensive. And if that lady in accounting decides to go to another company because her boss is a misogynistic jerk she’s taking some institutional knowledge with her and it’ll cost the company money. How many other talented employees has this misogynistic manager cost the company?
Presumably my boss and at least a couple of coworkers would know that I’m out of the office and would be able to tell the warden that when he or she calls my name.
Right. And my boss and a couple of coworkers can tell them that I went home. There is no need for me to stick around there. That’s my point.
If your two coworkers and boss decide to go home too and don’t carry your little message to the warden and all four of you get sacked for not following the protocol, how will that make you feel?
Or for that matter, how would they know you went home? Just because you told them it’s what you’d do in a real fire, how would they know you actually succeeded in getting out and going home?
You’re going to have to find your boss or coworkers to tell them that you’re not dying in the building, but are home instead. Thankfully, there’s a conveniently located spot outside the building where you can expect them to be after an evacuation. .
The point is not about you individually, it’s about you collectively. The fire department needs to have some clue who is and isn’t left in the building, and the only way to reliably do that is to have everyone in the building at the time of the evacuation meet somewhere outside the building.
Congratulations. Many people are a lot more capable of responding correctly in an emergency situation once they’ve received minimal training; often, untrained people panic and make the situation worse. I’ve been in the receiving end of an imbecile who couldn’t keep his cool in what was in fact a pocket emergency despite having received training (what should have been a few seconds to solve and a few minutes of paperwork turned into more than ten minutes to solve, then half an hour to calm his lordship down, and several pieces of equipment destroyed); after that circus it was clear to me why nobody in the factory respected him.
Yeah, I can’t imagine why your company is holding diversity training.:smack:
Another one of those “sounds like you need the training” sentences. I can’t think of a time in my life when I’ve become exhausted by my efforts not to suddenly blurt out something offensive. If your normal speech is such that it requires constant policing, that’s a good sign that either you’ve got a bizarre workplace (how often do you even need to refer to someone’s race, gender, religion, disability, sexual preferences, or whatever at work?) or your normal speech needs some self examination.
Yes. Don’t you?
Yes, all the time. Just wondered if he worked at my place and I didn’t know it 
Sorry, I’m a contractor. I don’t have to follow half the regulations they have at my work since they wrote them to only apply to “Government employees”
I can go home any time I want, I just have to charge my time card to PTO if I’m not at work. If I left 5 minutes before a fire drill or an actual fire, I don’t have to notify anybody. That’s the beauty of being a contractor!
I think I want to be your kind of contractor instead of my kind then. Because none of that is true for me. I am usually held to the employer rules for employees too. And I take the training as required.
I am usually, but some are written explicitly to be “employees only”, which they don’t consider me. That’s why I have to go through a metal detector every day and have my coat and wallet scanned with an x-ray machine, and the “employees” don’t.
Until they fix that, I make it a point to see what applies only to “employees” and what applies to everybody and simply refuse to do anything that only applies to “employees”.