The Case For Inclusion/Diversity
When the subject of inclusion comes up we generally think of fairness, and thanks to legislation workplaces are becoming more diverse and inclusive. Companies are making sure they spread the net and consider people of all races and ethnicities, religious and sexual orientation among other things. The bottom line about “diversity in the workplace” as it is right now is that it is being done to avoid lawsuits and also important, to give the appearance of fairness.
Quick anecdote. Someone I know who is of African descent got a job recently and told me about it. A week later he contacted me saying two other black people have been added to the workplace. This is in a city with the majority of its population white and asian.
My first thought was, did they think no one would notice that these people are most probably “diversity hires”? And I know what you might be thinking, I considered it too. There is nothing wrong with adding people to the workplace because there aren’t other people who look like them. The problem with this situation however is myriad and I would quickly touch on two. The first is that no one feels good being hired just because of a physical characteristic. You might be thinking “well at least you have a job”, but if these new hires are in any way like me, they want to EARN every single opportunity they’re given. It doesn’t feel good to the employee.
The other issue is employment that is far from being based on merit. My big issue with this is that it leads to what psychologist term a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you as a manager decide that your workplace is missing a particular racial group, it is incumbent on you to try to find competent people of said group to join your organization. The keyword here is competent. Some racial groups unfortunately are immediately prejudged as incompetent before they even have the chance to prove their worth. When employers go on a hiring spree of specific racial groups chances are that they’re throwing an important factor out of the window- competency. They bring in new people mainly because they’re the right race and end up with non-performers, leading them to confirm their previously held biases- that people from those racial groups are in fact incompetent.
The importance of inclusion cannot be overemphasized. You want employees that mirror customers/clients both in terms of physical and cultural attributes, and that translates into more profit for the company since customers/clients are more comfortable and can be served by someone who understands them more- especially in the case of language barrier. Sacrificing competency is completely unnecessary. If competent people of a particular race aren’t putting in their application, it might very well be because they have seen your work environment and have been led to believe that you prefer a certain demographic. The onus is on HR to go out of their way to find those people.
What should come to our minds when the subject of inclusion comes up is the fact that diversity necessarily means that people come into the organization with different ideas and perspectives, some of them specific to their cultural upbringing, and this is very beneficial to the company. It is most probably the case that Africans and South Asians for example understand Africans and South Asians respectively better than anyone else. Bringing those perspectives and allowing people share ideas on how to reach demographics they are familiar with is good for productivity and bottom line. So away from the argument of fairness, let’s focus on efficiency.