The company I work for scores highly on ESG metrics, which indirectly means we adopt DEI policies. What that means in practice is that we take a lot of training sessions about discrimination, harassment, etc.
It ticks a box and gives us +X points in someone’s spreadsheet. Absolutely no one thinks the training has any effect other than to waste time and annoy people. But the company is happy because we show up on various lists demonstrating we’re a diversity-friendly company, and the consulting firm that produced these useless seminars is happy to sell them to us. The training takes perhaps 0.2% of our time and so it mostly doesn’t show up on the books. It’s not the most wasteful practice of ours.
The good companies don’t need training or special policies. They avoid hiring racists or sexists in the first place, and get rid of them quickly if they make a mistake. And the bad companies that are already filled with racists or sexists aren’t going to be helped by these things–but the window dressing might help their public image.
Mandatory training sessions probably don’t do anything. They definitely don’t do anything if they’re run like most workplace mandatory training sessions. But there’s a heck of a lot more to “DEI practices” than just mandatory training sessions. At the very least, there needs to be some means in place for employees or customers to report discriminatory practices, and some process in place to resolve such issues when they arise. And it needs to be an effective process: If the penalty for one offense is the manager saying “Don’t do that”, and the penalty for twenty offenses is the manager saying “Don’t do that” twenty times, that’s not going to work, either.
I would think it would have to do with the training. Telling people “don’t do that” every quarter is ineffective and frustrating. But maybe the problem is that the training methods are not the best means of reaching the audience.
Part of DEI is alerting employees to not be afraid to speedy speak up, and available methods to bring issues to light.
I also think training needs to be addressing the concept of false reporting and how that makes the system less effective.
Yes, there are training tools that do have benefit. Teaching about not remaining silent when you see bad behavior, and nonconfrontational methods of intervening are useful, in my experience. They’ve helped me in a couple of situations.
It’s not just about hiring racists or sexists. I work in merchandising, with a lot of entry level positions and high turnover. We have a lot of teens and early twenties employees, people just entering the workforce. They need a lot of guidance about professionalism and work appropriate behavior. Responsibility, phone usage and theft of time, topics of conversation not appropriate for the breakroom. And how to respond if someone else’s behavior makes you uncomfortable.
Good companies didn’t stumble on best practices on their own. They developed them based on desire on how to treat employees. They share the practices and seek feedback on them.
And also consider that corporations are often run by old people whose corporate practices and expectations are shaped by the time they were young employees. They may not have bad intent, but can learn about social changes in employee expectations and improve their own companies by learning best practices.
Environmental, social, and governance. It’s a way to measure how the company’s products and practices contribute to a sustainable business.
Training alone isn’t effective. Personally, I’m pretty sure nearly ever single worker understands what sexual harassment is. In most companies, the problem is that management doesn’t effectively deal with harassers. And when they fail to deal with the harassers, they will often find a judge is unsympathetic to the fact the company had annual training about the issue. Annual training alone without effective policies and procedures for dealing with harassment is just a company checking a box.
I should check what my company has in public-facing documents but a lot of our DEI training and conversations center around how we recruit and how we make our workplace accessible. I have zero pressure in my hiring decisions, but we do make sure we’re not just sticking to the networks of a bunch of white male engineers when we recruit. I don’t see how that could be controversial — we’re missing out on talent otherwise. We add alt test to images. And some of my neuro-spicy colleagues are more comfortable and productive with different work flows and environments than what works best for me.
But I don’t have a good sense for what other companies are doing. I see some people feel discriminated against by their training:
That article requires registration, but I saw other articles discussing forms of anti-harassment training. It was described there were certain forms of anti-racism training that are slanted against white people. They cast all white people as inherently racist, and single out white people for criticism. I can see those are problematic, even breaking the values they claim to be teaching.
If it’d be of use: ‘In August 2020, De Piero says he was required to watch a presentation captioned “White teachers are the problem.” During a breathing exercise the same year, De Piero claims White and other non-Black faculty were told to hold their breath longer than Black faculty members so they could “feel the pain.”’ … In January, a federal judge in Pennsylvania allowed De Piero’s claim to proceed, writing the trainings “discussed racial issues in essentialist and deterministic terms — ascribing negative traits to white people or white teachers without exception and as flowing inevitably from their race.”’
It was supposed to read “virtue” signaling. Which appears to literally be what an ESG rating measures.
I did a quick Google and while a high ESG score is desirable, the ESG methodology is often perceived as flawed, and it was inconclusive whether there is any correlation to financial performance or investor sentiment.
I also recently ran through one of our required DEI trainings around harassment and respect in the workplace. It seems like a good thing to me. Basically the company clearly sends a message that certain behaviors are not tolerated in our workplace. So anyone who engages in those behaviors can’t say “I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to do that” and people who experience those behaviors know what to do. As @Chronos pointed out, they only matter if they are enforced. But if they aren’t enforced, it makes it easy for an attorney to ask “so why haven’t you been enforcing your written policies?”