To actually eliminate racism at work we need to recode the workplace

Unless managers change the workplace code — the policies, processes and norms — racism will persist.

In the wake of George Floyd’s vicious death at the knee of a police officer and the protests that followed, Corporate North America once again woke up to the fact that racism is an issue in our society and our own offices.

This isn’t the first time companies have awoken to this issue. We’ve seen years of diversity reports and initiatives to bring equality to our workplaces. And yet, things have barely changed. It’s been proven that bias training and HR-led diversity initiatives do not work. Diversity efforts in big tech — the ones that are supposed to be the most progressive and rule bending — haven’t moved the needle.

The skepticism of the latest corporate proclamations is real — and justified.

Many people are calling out corporates for being too light in their actions, too self protecting and too self promoting.

Our companies need to and can go beyond expedient window dressing to address the much deeper problem embedded in the day-to-day way we operate at work. Instead of taking hours to craft the perfect LinkedIn post with Corporate Comms, CEOs — and then all people leaders below them — must look inward to their own workplaces and shift the status quo internally.

The workplace isn’t working for Black people

The workplace is not a safe nor equitable place for Black people.

• Forty percent of Canadians have experienced racial discrimination in the workplace (Environics).
• Black Canadians disproportionately occupy lower paying jobs and are disproportionately unemployed (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives).
• In the US, where Black people account for 12% of the population, only 8% are professionals and 3% hold executive roles (Centre for Talent Innovation).
• If we feel smug about our Canadian niceness, there is just as much racial discrimination in hiring here as in the US (Sociological Science)

The issue lies in the system

Racism is systemic. It is embedded in the formal policies, standard practices and invisible norms that guide our behaviour in every social setting.

The workplace is no exception. There are a shit ton of rules we follow at work, most often without even realizing it. We have rules for hemlines and hair colours and communal microwaves. We have rules for speech and email etiquette. There are a shit ton of rules at the workplace if you take time to think about it. And these rules keep Black workers in lower positions or out of jobs or feeling unsafe consistently in all our workplaces.

To add to the challenge of change, we’re really good at following the rules at work. Our sense of self-worth and tribalistic desire for belonging is tied to our professional persona. We don’t break the rules because we fear being judged, reprimanded, ostracized, demoted, fired or blackballed. This is why more of us will stay awake at night worrying if we insulted our boss in the meeting than whether we insulted aunt Mary over dinner.

We need to recode the workplace to eliminate racism

The everyday rules — the norms, processes and policies — we follow that need to change to truly eliminate racism at work.

I call this the workplace code and here’s a starting list of new rules to guide our behaviour at work.

1. Don’t hire anyone from your personal network until you’ve completed a fully diverse search

Upwards of 80% of jobs are found through personal networks. Here’s the issue: the majority of our personal networks are far from diverse.

Pause for a second and think who you’d invite to a 100-person birthday party. Would 6 people be black, 10 people be from below the poverty line, and 8 people be homosexual?

It needs to be a standard rule that hiring managers (not just the HR specialist for diversity!) seek out job fairs, affinity networks, conferences and training programs aimed at Black people.

2. Know your gut is biased and only rely on concrete, objective criteria to hire the right person

Black people, particularly those from lower-income families, are more often screened out or given lower salaries during the recruitment process. White names receive 50% more call backs than black names. Hiring managers give preference to candidates who sound like they are from a higher social-class.

Clearly, our guts are biased when hiring, even if we don’t want to acknowledge it or do it consciously. Concrete, objective criteria of what the candidate needs to do in the job to be successful and values fit, not culture fit, is needed before hiring. Otherwise, we’ll only continue to hire disproportionately wealthy white men.

3. Fire people who are racist

We tolerate bad behaviour at work. Racism is no exception. Unfortunately, it is only after a swell of evidence or public outcry that something is done. An ABC News executive has been charged with a history of racist comments. Uber’s HR Chief stepped down after ignoring repeated racial discrimination complaints. The CEO of an Arizona-based company was fired after a racist altercation with an Uber driver was caught on tape. Adidas employees have publicly called out the racial discrimination that happens at the company.

The issue with these actions is they come too late. Executives don’t all of a sudden get to the top and become racists. Multiple accounts of racism aren’t needed to take initial action. Managers need to be vigilant from the very first incident of racism. Policies prevent brilliant jerks from sticking around at Atlassian and Netflix. How are they handled at your company?

Before we move on to #4 — it’s important to address microaggressions. These subtle, often unintended or unconscious, derogatory remarks happen daily in the office. A single-off comment isn’t likely cause for dismissal if the person didn’t understand the offence they committed. BUT — recurring accounts and no change in behaviour after education has been provided is as good enough reason as any to exit the perpetrator from your workplace.

4. Proactively talk about racism with your team

Talking about racism is considered NSFW — not safe for work. Studies show that over 70% of employees that experience harassment or discrimination don’t report it. Bystanders are even worse as 77% don’t report it to HR either. Employees don’t speak up because they feel a social threat.

You can’t expect that people will share the racism that happens in your office. You have to proactively ask and create a safe space to share the information. An AI tool called Spot has been developed for employees to report discrimination and other issues at work. Accenture holds open forums to talk about the really challenging topics, including race. When was the last time you explicitly asked your team members if there is any racism happening at your office?

5. Collect data on performance rating, promotions and pay by ethnicity. Then fix the discrepancies.

The racial wage gap is a thing. On average, a black man who does the same job and has the same qualifications as a white man is paid less, and it only gets worse the more senior they get. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 60 black women are promoted. Nearly half of working black women have had their judgment questioned in their area of expertise while only 27 percent of men have. Black employees walk a tightrope of emotional expression allowed in the workplace, lest they be deemed angry or out of control. The research is clear: Black people, whether consciously or not, do not receive the equitable promotions, performance reviews or pay.

Collecting data on where the issues lie is only the start. The manager needs to be informed to correct the discrepancy. Since you can’t just expect managers to all of a sudden start evaluating Black people differently, new processes of how performance is assessed and promotions and pay is granted also have to be built. This new code will shape the anti-racist norms that will then become more natural behaviour in the workplace.

6. Make your suppliers, partners and customers live up to your ethical standards

If you care about what is going on inside your business, you should also care about what is coming in via your suppliers, partners and customers. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Only 35% of companies listed as Canada’s Best Diversity Employers had supplier diversity policies. There are frequent reports of customers committing racist attacks against employees.

One of the most atrocious practices for the Black community is the use of prison labour, which is considered a modern version of slavery. There are a slew of companies that use inmates as an alternative to cheap foreign labour, of which the inmate only keeps about 20% of wages after they are garnished for food, shelter and other costs.

When signing a new supplier or partner contract do you ask for their workplace diversity or prison labour policies? If a customer expresses racist remarks to one of your employees or is found to have racist practices in their own company, do you not allow them to use your product or service?

7. Let people show up how they want. And show them they can.

Black women are 1.5 times more likely to be sent home from work because of their hair than white women. Chastity Jones is suing her employer for revoking her job offer after not removing her dreadlocks.

That is why California was the first state to ban discrimination against natural hair with the CROWN Act (Create a respectable and open workplace for natural hair Act) and other US states are following suit. As the CROWN Act states, the issue is that “[p]rofessionalism was, and still is, closely linked to European features and mannerisms, which entails that those who do not naturally fall into Eurocentric norms must alter their appearances, sometimes drastically and permanently, in order to be deemed professional.”

Managers must make it explicitly clear that professionalism is not associated with hair style or dress. If you want inspiration for the future of dress codes, here is a suggestion: just cover the things you want covered and call it a day.

Where to from here?

First, Managers must be in charge of change

Managers, not the C-Suite nor HR, are the ones that shape the employee experience. A Gallup study found that managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Put another way, it is managers that enforce the rules of the workplace that either make it a safe and fair place — or not. Managers should be put in charge of change.

For HR and the C-Suite, your job is to make sure change happens. Here’s your task list:

1. Make a senior executive accountable for each one of these new workplace codes. Their job is to work across the whole organization to ensure it becomes part of your new way of operating.
2. Provide the resources managers need to make changes in their own areas
3. Check in to make sure it is done. Set a calendar reminder for September 10, 2020 and January 10, 2021. Don’t wait for another bird watching black man to be reported to police or a black woman to be sleeping at home to be killed by police, like Christian Cooper and Breonna Taylor were, to remind you there is systemic racism in your workplace.

Second, focus exclusively on Black workers

Intersectionality is a real thing. Discrimination and disadvantages show up in so many different ways depending on race, gender, ability level, citizenship status, sexuality and more. Go back and re-read the new workplace rules. Replace Black person with transgender or different abled and you’ll see they could help them just as much as it would others that don’t win with the workplace rules.

But — and this is an important “but”! — racism against Black workers needs a concerted focus. There is a deep legacy of systemic issues to address. There are also particular workplace rules that impact them the most. We cannot blur this into an initiative for all workers. Black workers deserve and need a specific focus right now.

Third, take personal responsibility

Committing to recode the workplace will elicit a number of emotions. Some will feel guilty for having allowed racism and an unfair system in our offices up until now. Some will fear a loss of power and changes in office dynamics. Some will begrudge those that will win in this new system with seemingly less effort than they had to exert to attain their own career success. We can’t let these emotions be excuses for inaction.

We have to accept that up until now racism has lived in our offices. Even racialized individuals are coming to terms with their own inaction. As for me, I have been studying the workplace code for years . I have always thought of myself as a manager who creates workplace where employees, along with the organization, can thrive. And yet, I have failed to create a fully anti-Black racist workplace for my teams. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors and a female in tech, I would have thought I’d do better, but I didn’t.

Taking responsibility today won’t change what has happened in the past but it will change what happens in the future.

I’m committed to changing the workplace code. Are you committed too?

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Write “I’m committed” in the comments to mark your personal responsibility.

Please share other rules that need to change, new information or different views. This is just the start of a difficult and important recoding of our workplaces.