Talking about Diversity issues can be pretty tough. In an organisation where it’s not the done thing, saying you are being treated differently can be extremely uncomfortable, particularly if you happen to be the ‘only’ in the room – whether that be the only woman, BAME person, disabled individual or something else entirely.
I had an interesting conversation recently with a group of coaches around clients from underrepresented backgrounds. Many organisations have a culture of raising these issues through a one-to-one with managers. Unfortunately, this usually doesn’t end particularly well for the underrepresented member of staff wanting to raise their concerns, as they tend to be brushed aside. But why is this the case?
To give an illustrative example, a woman may bring an issue about feeling treated unfavourably in the workplace by another male colleague, for example not being invited to workplace drinks, not being copied into emails or generally not being addressed in meetings with respect. The women follows standard procedure and bring this to the attention of their manager, who in this case is male.
The manager finds this surprising, and due to a lack of wider understanding around diversity issues can only process this issue in one of two ways. In his eyes, either this is a case of clear-cut sexual discrimination / sexual harassment case, and therefore a serious HR issue they need to deal with, or this is a misunderstood perception of the woman he manages, and therefore not a real problem.
Offices tend to be quite small, tight-knit and often cliquey cultures. What often happens is that this manager, knows the male accused in question himself. From what he can see, the accused is a nice, upstanding person, so what his female report is telling him does not correlate with his own experience. The male manager has also not seen any lewd or outright poor behaviour from the accused person towards women. This therefore leads him to conclude that he is not a sexist, ruling out the first option. The response that the male manager therefore inevitably gives is that this can’t be the case as John/Fred/Jim is a nice guy, and perhaps it’s just the female report misunderstanding the situation.
Unfortunately, the male manager is not aware that his experiences are very different compared to the female he manages. He therefore does not think to question whether his experiences would be a good reference point for this situation. He is also unlikely to hear about any individual issues against this person publicly either. Indeed even if several female colleagues have made complaints, these would be in their own one-to-one chats. No one will ever piece these together, as they are all held in separate, private conversations.
The issue then is put back onto the female as her fault as she misunderstands, which inevitably makes her doubt her instincts. This makes it difficult for her to feel confident in her job when she is told that what she is feeling is imaginary.
If she is savvy, she may speak to other female colleagues and get a better idea of this male colleague’s behaviour, and how to handle it. Whilst this helps, it obviously does not solve the problem itself, and these other females will also probably tell tales that they’ve raised issues but been brushed aside.
From the female’s perspective, at this point it is better to give up with the formal system as the one-to-one conversations are ineffective. Whilst she could raise it more formally via a grievance, she realises this will likely result in retribution against her, and she is unlikely to be believed in her claims.
Thus we find the full cycle of diversity issues not being addressed properly. It is worth pointing out that in this example, it is a man as both the manager and perpetrator, both of which are statistically more likely to be more senior in the organisation, whilst the woman may be in the minority. This is only exacerbated with other diverse characteristics, for example BAME individuals may not have other BAME people in the office to turn to in order to verify their experiences, simply due to a statistically lower amount in the population and therefore in the workplace.
So how can we break out of this cycle of not hearing from our minority groups in the workplace? A good start is via anonymous surveys, which collect diversity data to really get a sense of how people are feeling, and whether there are discrepancies between age, gender, race, sexuality etc.
Another way is to hold anonymous focus groups, building a safe space for these individuals to raise the issues in a group setting, and share their experiences. This allows for a more open dialogue than the often uncomfortable one-to-one conversation, though relies on a lot of trust and genuine engagement to get people to actually attend.
There are also other ways, including senior managers having an open door policy to discuss more private issues, or being more aware of how people are feeling and taking more care to actively catch-up with their staff when they are behaving a bit differently.
Of course, probably one of the biggest solutions would be to improve managers ability to deal with diversity issues . Unfortunately, basic managerial competency tends to be lacking in most organisations, meaning there is a lot to do in this space.
Those are my thoughts. Why do you think people don’t speak up about diversity issues in the workplace?