How To Respond To Discrimination Incidents And Build Cultures Of Belonging In The Workplace

In this blog post, we talk about discrimination at work and what companies can do to repair harm when discrimination incidents happen. We offer guidance on how to support affected persons when harm is caused and how to design systems that address discrimination proactively.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Discrimination — and the protection from it — sits at the heart of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) work, whether that be inside of organizations or society at large.

Despite this importance, tackling (anti-)discrimination directly and with open eyes is something that many of us, individuals and companies alike, shy away from. We like to consider ourselves good people (or good workplaces).

Recognizing that we discriminate and that we allow discrimination to take place in the spaces we move through clashes with that self-image of being a “good person”. This discrepancy directly hinders us from being effective in our DEIB efforts and truly creating tangible and lasting change.

If we want to succeed in creating more inclusive and equitable workplaces that allow all humans to access opportunity and resources, we cannot keep sweeping incidents of discrimination under the rug and crossing our fingers that no one finds out.

It is time to examine how we respond to incidents of discrimination — structurally and culturally — and how we can repair the harm that discrimination causes both the individuals directly involved in the experience and the culture they are a part of.

Organizations Don’t Address Discrimination Until It’s Too Late

In our work at Dr. Mega Consulting, we unfortunately often find that organizations don’t confront discrimination until an incident triggers the problem.

When this happens, organizations are unprepared for how to respond and take appropriate actions, especially ones that go beyond the immediate legal steps (and even for those, many are woefully undereducated and underprepared). Not only is this harmful to the affected employee(s), it can turn out to be very harmful to the workplace culture and morale as a whole.

A lack of appropriate anti-discrimination processes and -policies make workplaces unsafe. This is especially true for folx who are part of historically marginalized groups who, because of structures of marginalization existing in the broader social context, are often the direct target of discrimination.

As a purpose-driven social business, we wanted to create a resource for organizations to understand how to address discrimination and develop systems that proactively protect people, prevent the harm caused, and work to repair it. This is that resource.

Because it’s crucial to stress this: it does not matter how “good” we think we are, we are all humans, and therefore, we will cause each other harm. That is part of the human experience.

We may be well-intentioned, but that does not mean that our actions do not end up being discriminatory and causing harm. The sooner we accept that inevitability, the sooner we can begin to honestly examine the structures that allow discriminatory behavior to thrive and ways of changing them. As well as designing systems to actively and equitably address harm when it has been done.

What is discrimination?

Before diving deeper into the topic, let’s learn to recognize discrimination.

Discrimination can take many forms, some of which are not as apparent as others. We tend to associate discrimination with spectacular or overtly aggressive actions, such as verbal or physical assault, insults, hate speech, and other forms of more “explicit” discriminating actions.

But we need to remind ourselves that discrimination can also happen in more subtle and implicit ways. Sometimes discrimination comes in the form of seemingly “harmless,” quiet, and even “polite” gestures, phrases, or behaviors, which are more implicit and sometimes tricky to identify and address.

Discrimination Can Look Like This

• Inappropriate jokes (e.g. based on someone’s external features or sexual orientation).
• Intrusive questions regarding someone’s personal circumstances (e.g. asking someone if they are pregnant).
• Microaggressions (e.g. asking someone where they are “really” from).
• Assumptions regarding someone’s ethnic background, first language, education level, etc.
• Intentional misgendering (e.g. repeatedly using the wrong pronouns when someone indicated theirs)
• Inappropriate questions or comments regarding health or personal life circumstances in the professional context (e.g. job interviews, etc.).
• Systemic and institutionalized practices favor one demographic over another during business processes such as hiring, promotion, performance reviews, etc.

While national and local laws don’t protect us from every form of discrimination, in many countries, there are a great number of legal protections in place.

Unfortunately, we are often shocked to discover that most people actually don’t know their legal rights when it comes to protection from discrimination.

In Germany, this is regulated through the General Act on Equal Treatment (AGG), which defines discrimination as “the less favorable treatment of a person on the grounds of age, disability, ethnic origin, race, gender, religion or belief or sexual orientation (Section 1 AGG) which cannot be justified by objective reasons.”

If we learn to recognize discrimination across different forms and circumstances, we become better equipped to address it and build systems to prevent it.

You are an HR department, a work council, or a DEIB Committee and someone has just reported a discrimination incident. What should you do?

An awareness of local and international laws governing the protection of persons from discrimination is important and vital. However, addressing discrimination in the workplace should be a priority driven by an intersectionally feminist, liberatory, and radically human perspective and not motivated exclusively by compliance.

Anti-discrimination policies and processes need to look at two perspectives: the individual and the systemic one.

On an individual level, we need to build processes and intervention practices that are designed to protect and support the person affected, address the harm caused by the discrimination incident and repair it.

On a systemic level, we need to design policies and practices to address discrimination and repair the harm that is caused to individuals and workplace cultures as a whole.

This effort is arguably one of the most important topics to tackle with DEIB work.

Individual Support

• Provide appropriate and timely support directly to the affected person and respect their agency and choice in how they would like to move forward.
• Appoint a person or a committee or a team who can walk the person affected through the reporting process and provide transparency around safety, privacy and accountability policies. In many companies, this is known as an ombudsperson (or team).
• Listen without judgment and discretely guide the person affected to explain the details of what happened.
• Affirm their experience and make sure you acknowledge the harm caused.
• Present options around how to move forward and leave the choice of how to proceed in the hands of the affected person.

Systemic Prevention Systems

• Create policies and processes that comply with the legal anti-discrimination regulations.
• Seek external guidance from outside the organization for the task force to adapt policies and help implement new procedures;
• Research measures for addressing discrimination and harm within the organization;
• Establish a Code of Conduct with clear escalation procedures for every team, stakeholder group and leadership member.
• Set up a task force with representatives of People & Culture, DIEB & Workers Council, and Legal to support the reporting and responsive process when discrimination happens.
• Provide education and awareness through ad-hoc internal programs to cultivate a culture of continuous learning and unlearning of discrimination bias, behaviors, language, etc.
• Build internal systems of accountability to ensure that the company commits to work on discrimination prevention and awareness in the future and further improve the existing culture structures so appropriate changes can be implemented and progress can be made.
• Establish and train an Ombuds team that is empowered and resourced to handle these types of cases in the future.

Repairing Harm — A restorative response

If we truly care about making the spaces in which we work and live more equitable and inclusive for every person, we need to be intentional about not only responding to harm that has been caused but also about how we hold space for the wounds that harm causes the individuals involved and the culture as a whole.

We can learn a lot from restorative justice and transformative justice practices — which have historically been led by Black radical feminist and Indigenous communities — about the importance of accountability alongside healing and learning efforts.

The individual and systemic steps to address discrimination we have outlined above are rooted in a restorative approach. Holding space for the emotions that arise in situations of transgression is as important as holding individuals and structures accountable for their transgressive actions.

Only if we make space for the processing of these situations (known as “metabolizing” in trauma research), can we learn from them and ultimately grow as people and (work)places.

Knowing that we will never be perfect — but that this is also not the goal.

Instead, it is on us to ensure we learn from our mistakes, extend each other grace and care, and strive to do better, and be better, the next time around.

This blog post can be particularly relevant for organizations that believe their culture is “diversity-proof” enough to present a very low to zero risk of discriminatory events.

No workplace culture can fully exclude the possibility of a discrimination incident and therefore, every organization needs to know what to do to prevent this and what processes and policies to have in place in case a discrimination incident happens.

If you are someone who experienced discrimination at work and are looking for further support, we have curated several resources for you:

Apps & Websites:

• Not-me.com — App for the reporting of cases inside organizations
• Yana — Chatbot Unterstützung nach Diskriminierung
• Meldestelle Anti-Feminismus
• Berliner Antidiskriminierungs-App „AnDi“
• Hate Aid -

Support agencies (public & NGOs) in Germany

• Federal Anti-Discrimination Agengy, Germany
• Overview of Anti-Discrimination Agencies all across Germany
• Landesstelle für Gleichbehandlung & gegen Diskriminierung Berlin
• LSBTI Berlin: Discrimination against Queer, Trans, Inter and Non-Binary people (Berlin)
• Büro zur Umsetzung von Gleichbehandlung e.V. (with links to actors across Germany)
• DunkelRichter Attorneys

Before you go!

How to deal with the person(s) or processes causing discrimination?

One important component we haven’t touched on here is how to deal with person(s) or processes that cause discrimination.

If we want to create solid systems of accountability in the environments (or cultures) where discrimination has happened and act towards repairing the harm caused with a long-term perspective, it’s important to take appropriate action to address the source of the discrimination incident and deal with systems or individuals who are at the root of the cause.

Thus, this is a sensitive and often complex step in the context of anti-discrimination work. The way we deal with persons or processes causing discrimination can be very specific in each context and deserves its own space (most likely its own article!) to be unpacked and explored in more detail.

This article was co-authored by Dr. Fox Mega (they/them)

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