Diversity Training in a Nutshell: Why It Fails and How to Make It Work
In April, two black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks after the store manager called the police. The men asked for a bathroom code but were denied because they were sitting in the coffee shop, had not ordered anything, and refused to leave. They said they were waiting for a friend, who arrived after they had been taken away by the police.
The reaction to the incident was immediate: people started to protest, targeting the chain of coffee shops and accusing its management of racism. Why? One witness said she had been sitting in the coffee shop for an hour without placing an order. Also, the manager refused to give the men a bathroom code (for the same reason — they had not bought anything), but then another customer got the code without making a purchase. Starbucks, reacting to a national debate, closed 8,000 of its US coffee stores on Tuesday, 29 of May, to conduct racial bias training — a type of diversity training.
Why companies even do diversity training?
Diversity training is designed to teach people how to overcome their biases about other people and why it’s necessary to do so. In diversity training, people learn to recognize and prevent discrimination in the workplace and in communications with clients.
Nowadays, relationships between employees within a company, and between companies and their customers, are quick and extremely reactive. Social media is a volatile place for talking about cases of discrimination — you can watch your “strong” brand positioning disappear in a matter of seconds. Situations like the one mentioned above are having a major negative impact on the various brands’ reputations.
Diversity training is extremely important for all companies, and especially for large corporations and retail chains like Starbucks. As Jacinta Gauda, the head of Gaude Group in New York, said, “The more your brand is trying to connect emotionally to people, the more hurt people feel when these kinds of things happen. They are breaking a promise. That’s what makes it hurt deeper.” Although it’s true that if you aren’t polite to your customers or your employees, sooner or later they’ll leave you (and tell the world about it). But there are more reasons to implement diversity training.
Removing biases is one of the solutions for dealing with a talent shortage. If you have a diverse corporate culture, you’re hiring people who have the skills needed for a position and who are usually under-represented in the industry (such as women in STEM fields, for instance). That’s definitely a bigger talent pool. Non-discrimination policies ensure that people have equal possibilities to work, obtain services, and to make purchases regardless of their gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, cultural heritage or religion. These policies are also about ensuring the same friendly and professional environment for people with different levels of education, work experience, and personality traits.
Diverse teams in a company are groups of people with different backgrounds: their ideas can bring innovation and take your business to a higher level. Gender and ethnic diversity are also connected to creativity and financial profits, as the McKinsey report confirms. Along with new ideas, the understanding of the worldwide multicultural marketplace comes: diversity now is recognized as one of the main business drivers. So why diversity training fails so often?
Three typical mistakes in diversity training
When creating a diversity training program we usually work with problems that occur from two different sources: the specifics of human learning and sociocultural backgrounds. Biases arise due to environmental factors and they are supported by how our brain works. We tend to have difficulty remembering things that we don’t consider valuable. So if someone doesn’t believe that racist jokes are harming the workplace environment, they will probably remember very little from a racial bias training session. In fact, they can be even more annoyed. Diversity training is usually perceived with pessimism, as there is no easy way to remove the impact of people’s past experiences. But we can tell which actions would make a situation even more complicated.
- Your training is mandatory, and it’s based on negative reinforcement. Often, diversity programs are implemented on the basis of “if you don’t change your actions you’ll lose your job.” That’s true: people do get fired for discrimination and harassment. But positioning diversity training that way doesn’t work. Negative reinforcement only deepens bias, partly because the biased majority then acts more aggressively towards the minorities, blaming them for their struggles and, in general, refuses to engage in the training.
