archive link This should be a reminder that there is no reason why progress must continue to move in one direction. Many liberals talk about how "history is on our side", but why? It may be that...
"True systems-change work associated with DEI programs everywhere are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020," a leader of the team wrote in an email sent to thousands of employees, which was viewed by Business Insider.
The email states the team was eliminated due to "changing business needs" as of July 1. It's unclear how many employees were affected.
This should be a reminder that there is no reason why progress must continue to move in one direction. Many liberals talk about how "history is on our side", but why? It may be that future generations are far more rightist than we are today. There's no reason to believe things couldn't move in that direction for decades or centuries to come. Nothing is granted.
Also, remember that corporations are only your friend as long as that friendship is profitable to them. If rightist or bigoted viewpoints become profitable long-term, don't think for a second that your favorite brand won't trip over themselves to embody those values.
Basically all research shows that diverse companies are more profitable, innovate more, make better decisions, are more likely to grow market share, more likely to capture new markets, and attract...
as long as that friendship is profitable to them
Basically all research shows that diverse companies are more profitable, innovate more, make better decisions, are more likely to grow market share, more likely to capture new markets, and attract better and more talent. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 It's a bit of an irk of mine when people talk about DEI as not being profitable or justifying something being cut because an executive decided it wasn't making them money because those are objectively incorrect statements, it's just that most business isn't run by purely objective individuals. They cut DEI because they didn't like DEI, not because it was costing them money.
Being profitable is an important part of it, but it also requires leadership who knows how to actually calculate ROI or factor in the ways in which it is profitable. It's not easy quantify soft metrics like "more likely to grow market share" and it's also really easy to write off bad profits as a bad quarter without figuring out why that quarter was worse than other quarters, especially when it's a reflection of worker engagement and sentiment driving productivity (engagement and sentiment are directly influenced by worker diversity and disparities between demographic groups).
I read Michelle Silverthorn's book Authentic Diversity a while back, and she makes a pretty good case that although diverse companies are more profitable, they won't achieve real diversity gains...
I read Michelle Silverthorn's book Authentic Diversity a while back, and she makes a pretty good case that although diverse companies are more profitable, they won't achieve real diversity gains if their DEI work is purely profit motivated. It boils down to the fact that real diversity means seeing people's real needs and making meaningful changes.
This is pretty uncomfortable for a lot of people with privilege, so I think true change is only possible if leadership truly believes in it and can push for top down change. Unfortunately, it seems like people who rise to these leadership levels seem either lose that vision, become warped by power and money, or succumb to external pressure (stockholders or boards). I think the pattern is even stronger in fields dominated by privileged folk (tech, finance), probably because change is even more uncomfortable and there's a bigger echo chamber working against it.
I think it's fair to ask, though, whether DEI programs actually help increase diversity. As this review writes, I think overall it's a pretty fair review.
I think it's fair to ask, though, whether DEI programs actually help increase diversity. As this review writes,
We note that scholars of diversity training, when testing the efficacy of their approaches, too often use proxy measures for success that are far removed from the types of consequential outcomes that reflect the purported goals of such trainings. We suggest that the enthusiasm for, and monetary investment in, diversity training has outpaced the available evidence that such programs are effective in achieving their goals. We recommend that researchers and practitioners work together for future investigations to propel the science of diversity training forward.
Oh, absolutely, but DEI is not the only kind of program or team which can exist without being effective. It's not an issue that is specific to DEI. It is fair to point out that DEI is still a new...
Oh, absolutely, but DEI is not the only kind of program or team which can exist without being effective. It's not an issue that is specific to DEI. It is fair to point out that DEI is still a new field and many companies just didn't want to be left out of the potential gold rush of opportunities that diversity can bring to a company and don't understand themselves how DEI can be effective let alone increase diversity or employee engagement. I think the authors of that article make a good point, as well, that DEI programs haven't been around long enough to have fine tuned which ideas and executions have the most effect in a company, but unfortunately I'm not sure that research will be able to figure this one out because I suspect a lot of it has to do with how willing the company is to invest in these policies, to remove red tape for these teams, to allow them to advise on internal policies such as hiring practices and to advocate for employees which are currently being suppressed by the system.
In short the entire problem comes down to a combination of culture and buy-in. If you create some DEI positions and hire people into them because you don't want to be left out, but you are still effectively only paying attention to what simple/direct metrics improve your bottom line in the short term and are skeptical of whether DEI is going to do something, chances are your DEI initiative isn't going to work and it may have been a waste of money. Certainly it will seem a waste of money to you because you're likely not capturing second order metrics which affect employee output. Even if you are paying attention to the most commonly observed second order metric of employee engagement, you're likely unable to think outside the lines of what a large firm like Gallup or Workday can easily serve to you and you likely don't have a plan to tailor those programs to make their insights actionable and are likely just instructing your managers to improve their scores which will serve to do nothing but pad your scores and obscure your workforce's actual decreased engagement.
I think the biggest issue with DEI, as it currently exists, is not a reflection of inefficiencies or unknowns about DEI itself so much as it is a reflection of how DEI itself exists as a second order mechanism. That is to say, the difference between an effective DEI program and an ineffective one has less to do with the people and the levers they act on, and more to do with the culture and engagement of the company itself. If your intention is to actually make your workforce more diverse and to respect the wishes and the needs of the employees, DEI will be successful in exactly the same way that having these intentions will just naturally create systems similar to DEI which serve to accomplish the same goals - elevating the voices and concerns of the workers and giving them actual weight (we can see this issue is clear in sentiment polling when you ask workers what they are searching for in a company, in addition to desires to work at a diverse workplace and other issues DEI often focuses on). Other notable and important work of DEI is to recruit and engage cultural groups in the use-case of your business. For example DEI may advocate for community managers who directly interface with communities which your business serves and through listening and prioritizing this communities needs can increase engagement which leads to referrals through word of mouth and existing community organizations. In short, DEI is just a handy way to systematize what naturally flows from an engaged company that cares about the humans involved in the system. It's not necessary for the engagement, but the engagement is necessary for it to be effective.
In short the entire problem comes down to a combination of culture and buy-in. If you create some DEI positions and hire people into them because you don't want to be left out, but you are still effectively only paying attention to what simple/direct metrics improve your bottom line in the short term and are skeptical of whether DEI is going to do something, chances are your DEI initiative isn't going to work and it may have been a waste of money.
Every time someone's like "corporations only care about money and another won't do X if it's not profitable" I want to scream that corporations don't do X if they don't want to think it's...
They cut DEI because they didn't like DEI, not because it was costing them money.
Every time someone's like "corporations only care about money and another won't do X if it's not profitable" I want to scream that corporations don't do X if they don't want to think it's profitable. Corporations and their leaders will say and do stupid shit because of their own biases. They're not rational actors. And they're as prone to their biases about what "is profitable" about any particular decision. Because when the DEI committee wants to do more than a Juneteenth picnic and have real conversation about equity in the workplace... They're doing too much and making people feel uncomfortable. (And I personally think there's so only many perceived "grifters" in the DEI area because people think outsourcing a fundamental integral part of doing business is fine. No shit, I should go into consulting too. )
A diverse workplace is not the same as having a DEI department with a chair. DEI absolutely costs money and things that cost money get cut. The only reason companies still employ tech support is...
A diverse workplace is not the same as having a DEI department with a chair.
DEI absolutely costs money and things that cost money get cut. The only reason companies still employ tech support is not because they want to, but because they can't do without.
I think it's fair to say that for most studies saying the DEI increases profitability you're likely to find one that says it does not. One of your citations is McKinsey. My country is currently...
Basically all research shows that diverse companies are more profitable, innovate more, make better decisions, are more likely to grow market share, more likely to capture new markets, and attract better and more talent. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 It's a bit of an irk of mine when people talk about DEI as not being profitable or justifying something being cut because an executive decided it wasn't making them money because those are objectively incorrect statements, it's just that most business isn't run by purely objective individuals. They cut DEI because they didn't like DEI, not because it was costing them money.
I think it's fair to say that for most studies saying the DEI increases profitability you're likely to find one that says it does not.
One of your citations is McKinsey. My country is currently considering implementing gender quotas for boards of large state companies and I happen to be friends with a guy who sits in a government expert committee for analyzing the potential main and side effects of proposed laws (his field is economics and regional development). As part of his work on this proposal he talked to one of chief consultants at McKinsey who told him that whether specifically gender diversity brings any positives with relations to profitability and better decisions is unknown and unprovable, the data as a whole does not point significantly either way.
If I recall correctly, the actual numbers that McKinsey publishes reflect this, though for some reason not the conclusion that their DEI consultants write based on the data.
I do not know anything about other types of diversity, like ethnicity, since my country is very ethnically homogenous and this is not a topic here.
CEOs these days aren't exactly regarded as objective visionaries c. 2020's, so I didn't take it like that at all. Basically, whatever vibes the CEO has drives the company. be it laying off all the...
It's a bit of an irk of mine when people talk about DEI as not being profitable or justifying something being cut because an executive decided it wasn't making them money because those are objectively incorrect statements
CEOs these days aren't exactly regarded as objective visionaries c. 2020's, so I didn't take it like that at all. Basically, whatever vibes the CEO has drives the company. be it laying off all the developers to hire more sales people, or buying twitter and deciding you don't need thousands of engineers to manage the (formerly?) largest site on the internet.
Eh I think it’s safe to say that the approach of appointing DEI teams and councils has yielded pretty weak results at actually advancing the intended goals. I don’t know what Microsoft’s...
This should be a reminder that there is no reason why progress must continue to move in one direction. Many liberals talk about how "history is on our side", but why? It may be that future generations are far more rightist than we are today. There's no reason to believe things couldn't move in that direction for decades or centuries to come. Nothing is granted.
Eh I think it’s safe to say that the approach of appointing DEI teams and councils has yielded pretty weak results at actually advancing the intended goals. I don’t know what Microsoft’s experience was, but my personal experience has ranged from these mostly being wastes of time that created a bunch of new metrics to track with no evidentiary backing, or style guides based more on vibes than anything else.
Not having a dedicated DEI team doesn’t mean you’re not doing the thing, but I think the goal works better if it’s folded into the company’s routine procedures and teams. And that takes people intimately familiar with the team’s issues and challenges rather than a consultant who answers to senior managers only.
Because people generally assume that the future will trend toward being better than the past. The ones that believe we have a future, at least. There's many points to make for and against the...
Many liberals talk about how "history is on our side", but why?
Because people generally assume that the future will trend toward being better than the past. The ones that believe we have a future, at least.
There's many points to make for and against the assumption, but that's why.
I mean, that quote has always been a bit tone deaf and arguably extremely western centric. The VAAAAST majority of history has been somewhere on or near the scale authoritarian conservatism for...
Many liberals talk about how "history is on our side", but why? It may be that future generations are far more rightist than we are today.
I mean, that quote has always been a bit tone deaf and arguably extremely western centric. The VAAAAST majority of history has been somewhere on or near the scale authoritarian conservatism for the subjects of their respective states. Especially when you get into the definition of if liberal then counts as liberal now.
That's not what the aphorism means. It means that history will show them to be right/good. It's not that the past is on their side; it's that the future is on their side.
That's not what the aphorism means. It means that history will show them to be right/good. It's not that the past is on their side; it's that the future is on their side.
I think when they lay off a whole team, that says the priority is quite a bit lower than "business critical." It's more like "maybe we'll try again someday, with a different team." Or possibly...
I think when they lay off a whole team, that says the priority is quite a bit lower than "business critical." It's more like "maybe we'll try again someday, with a different team." Or possibly there's someone else doing that work.
I think the concern is that DEI teams are often bomb throwers rather than builders that advocate for effective systematic changes. It takes a whole lot more than adding a new HR team to promote...
I think the concern is that DEI teams are often bomb throwers rather than builders that advocate for effective systematic changes. It takes a whole lot more than adding a new HR team to promote diversity at every level of an organisation. There are also plenty of DEI grifters that push nonsense conferences and learning materials that don't help (and are sometimes worse than nothing, somehow).
I've seen talk lately of "quiet firing" as a counterpart to the quiet quitting we were hearing about during lockdown. Basically, the company makes changes that cause x% of the employees to quit -...
I've seen talk lately of "quiet firing" as a counterpart to the quiet quitting we were hearing about during lockdown. Basically, the company makes changes that cause x% of the employees to quit - like forcing return to office. They may have to pay unemployment, but they won't end up paying severance.
I wonder if this might be a next step in that direction.
archive link
This should be a reminder that there is no reason why progress must continue to move in one direction. Many liberals talk about how "history is on our side", but why? It may be that future generations are far more rightist than we are today. There's no reason to believe things couldn't move in that direction for decades or centuries to come. Nothing is granted.
Also, remember that corporations are only your friend as long as that friendship is profitable to them. If rightist or bigoted viewpoints become profitable long-term, don't think for a second that your favorite brand won't trip over themselves to embody those values.
Basically all research shows that diverse companies are more profitable, innovate more, make better decisions, are more likely to grow market share, more likely to capture new markets, and attract better and more talent. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 It's a bit of an irk of mine when people talk about DEI as not being profitable or justifying something being cut because an executive decided it wasn't making them money because those are objectively incorrect statements, it's just that most business isn't run by purely objective individuals. They cut DEI because they didn't like DEI, not because it was costing them money.
Being profitable is an important part of it, but it also requires leadership who knows how to actually calculate ROI or factor in the ways in which it is profitable. It's not easy quantify soft metrics like "more likely to grow market share" and it's also really easy to write off bad profits as a bad quarter without figuring out why that quarter was worse than other quarters, especially when it's a reflection of worker engagement and sentiment driving productivity (engagement and sentiment are directly influenced by worker diversity and disparities between demographic groups).
I read Michelle Silverthorn's book Authentic Diversity a while back, and she makes a pretty good case that although diverse companies are more profitable, they won't achieve real diversity gains if their DEI work is purely profit motivated. It boils down to the fact that real diversity means seeing people's real needs and making meaningful changes.
This is pretty uncomfortable for a lot of people with privilege, so I think true change is only possible if leadership truly believes in it and can push for top down change. Unfortunately, it seems like people who rise to these leadership levels seem either lose that vision, become warped by power and money, or succumb to external pressure (stockholders or boards). I think the pattern is even stronger in fields dominated by privileged folk (tech, finance), probably because change is even more uncomfortable and there's a bigger echo chamber working against it.
I think it's fair to ask, though, whether DEI programs actually help increase diversity. As this review writes,
I think overall it's a pretty fair review.
Oh, absolutely, but DEI is not the only kind of program or team which can exist without being effective. It's not an issue that is specific to DEI. It is fair to point out that DEI is still a new field and many companies just didn't want to be left out of the potential gold rush of opportunities that diversity can bring to a company and don't understand themselves how DEI can be effective let alone increase diversity or employee engagement. I think the authors of that article make a good point, as well, that DEI programs haven't been around long enough to have fine tuned which ideas and executions have the most effect in a company, but unfortunately I'm not sure that research will be able to figure this one out because I suspect a lot of it has to do with how willing the company is to invest in these policies, to remove red tape for these teams, to allow them to advise on internal policies such as hiring practices and to advocate for employees which are currently being suppressed by the system.
In short the entire problem comes down to a combination of culture and buy-in. If you create some DEI positions and hire people into them because you don't want to be left out, but you are still effectively only paying attention to what simple/direct metrics improve your bottom line in the short term and are skeptical of whether DEI is going to do something, chances are your DEI initiative isn't going to work and it may have been a waste of money. Certainly it will seem a waste of money to you because you're likely not capturing second order metrics which affect employee output. Even if you are paying attention to the most commonly observed second order metric of employee engagement, you're likely unable to think outside the lines of what a large firm like Gallup or Workday can easily serve to you and you likely don't have a plan to tailor those programs to make their insights actionable and are likely just instructing your managers to improve their scores which will serve to do nothing but pad your scores and obscure your workforce's actual decreased engagement.
I think the biggest issue with DEI, as it currently exists, is not a reflection of inefficiencies or unknowns about DEI itself so much as it is a reflection of how DEI itself exists as a second order mechanism. That is to say, the difference between an effective DEI program and an ineffective one has less to do with the people and the levers they act on, and more to do with the culture and engagement of the company itself. If your intention is to actually make your workforce more diverse and to respect the wishes and the needs of the employees, DEI will be successful in exactly the same way that having these intentions will just naturally create systems similar to DEI which serve to accomplish the same goals - elevating the voices and concerns of the workers and giving them actual weight (we can see this issue is clear in sentiment polling when you ask workers what they are searching for in a company, in addition to desires to work at a diverse workplace and other issues DEI often focuses on). Other notable and important work of DEI is to recruit and engage cultural groups in the use-case of your business. For example DEI may advocate for community managers who directly interface with communities which your business serves and through listening and prioritizing this communities needs can increase engagement which leads to referrals through word of mouth and existing community organizations. In short, DEI is just a handy way to systematize what naturally flows from an engaged company that cares about the humans involved in the system. It's not necessary for the engagement, but the engagement is necessary for it to be effective.
Couldn't agree more.
Every time someone's like "corporations only care about money and another won't do X if it's not profitable" I want to scream that corporations don't do X if they don't want to think it's profitable. Corporations and their leaders will say and do stupid shit because of their own biases. They're not rational actors. And they're as prone to their biases about what "is profitable" about any particular decision. Because when the DEI committee wants to do more than a Juneteenth picnic and have real conversation about equity in the workplace... They're doing too much and making people feel uncomfortable. (And I personally think there's so only many perceived "grifters" in the DEI area because people think outsourcing a fundamental integral part of doing business is fine. No shit, I should go into consulting too. )
A diverse workplace is not the same as having a DEI department with a chair.
DEI absolutely costs money and things that cost money get cut. The only reason companies still employ tech support is not because they want to, but because they can't do without.
one leads to another. Odds are that if you lay off a DEI department you start caring a lot less to a diverse workplace.
I think it's fair to say that for most studies saying the DEI increases profitability you're likely to find one that says it does not.
One of your citations is McKinsey. My country is currently considering implementing gender quotas for boards of large state companies and I happen to be friends with a guy who sits in a government expert committee for analyzing the potential main and side effects of proposed laws (his field is economics and regional development). As part of his work on this proposal he talked to one of chief consultants at McKinsey who told him that whether specifically gender diversity brings any positives with relations to profitability and better decisions is unknown and unprovable, the data as a whole does not point significantly either way.
If I recall correctly, the actual numbers that McKinsey publishes reflect this, though for some reason not the conclusion that their DEI consultants write based on the data.
I do not know anything about other types of diversity, like ethnicity, since my country is very ethnically homogenous and this is not a topic here.
edit: here's a paper criticizing McKinsey's research quality and conclusions of their articles on ethnic diversity
To be fair, gaywallet's assertion was that diversity increases success - not necessarily DEI programs.
CEOs these days aren't exactly regarded as objective visionaries c. 2020's, so I didn't take it like that at all. Basically, whatever vibes the CEO has drives the company. be it laying off all the developers to hire more sales people, or buying twitter and deciding you don't need thousands of engineers to manage the (formerly?) largest site on the internet.
Eh I think it’s safe to say that the approach of appointing DEI teams and councils has yielded pretty weak results at actually advancing the intended goals. I don’t know what Microsoft’s experience was, but my personal experience has ranged from these mostly being wastes of time that created a bunch of new metrics to track with no evidentiary backing, or style guides based more on vibes than anything else.
Not having a dedicated DEI team doesn’t mean you’re not doing the thing, but I think the goal works better if it’s folded into the company’s routine procedures and teams. And that takes people intimately familiar with the team’s issues and challenges rather than a consultant who answers to senior managers only.
Because people generally assume that the future will trend toward being better than the past. The ones that believe we have a future, at least.
There's many points to make for and against the assumption, but that's why.
I mean, that quote has always been a bit tone deaf and arguably extremely western centric. The VAAAAST majority of history has been somewhere on or near the scale authoritarian conservatism for the subjects of their respective states. Especially when you get into the definition of if liberal then counts as liberal now.
That's not what the aphorism means. It means that history will show them to be right/good. It's not that the past is on their side; it's that the future is on their side.
I think when they lay off a whole team, that says the priority is quite a bit lower than "business critical." It's more like "maybe we'll try again someday, with a different team." Or possibly there's someone else doing that work.
I think the concern is that DEI teams are often bomb throwers rather than builders that advocate for effective systematic changes. It takes a whole lot more than adding a new HR team to promote diversity at every level of an organisation. There are also plenty of DEI grifters that push nonsense conferences and learning materials that don't help (and are sometimes worse than nothing, somehow).
I agree with NaraVara's comment.
I've seen talk lately of "quiet firing" as a counterpart to the quiet quitting we were hearing about during lockdown. Basically, the company makes changes that cause x% of the employees to quit - like forcing return to office. They may have to pay unemployment, but they won't end up paying severance.
I wonder if this might be a next step in that direction.