Excerpt from

Fix Your Team

Chapter 7: Lack of Diversity and Inclusion—The Risks of a White Bread Workforce

This is an excerpt from Fix Your Team (Wiley, 2018) by Rose Bryant-Smith and Grevis Beard

Symptoms

  • Everyone looks the same, everyone has always looked the same … and everyone probably looks like the boss!
  • They may not mean to be disrespectful, but team members are discouraging and offending customers, colleagues and stakeholders from other cultures. For example, they are impatient with customers who speak with a strong accent.
  • If anyone in the workplace looks, sounds or thinks a bit differently, they don’t get heard at all. As a result, they tend to keep to themselves, keeping their head down and making sure they don’t give anyone a reason to target them.
  • Capable staff who have different personal characteristics are not even considered for desirable work opportunities such as training and new projects.
  • Because of how they are planned, social events that are supposedly for the whole team always seem to end up excluding some people. A couple of colleagues never attend.
  • If a member of the team can’t make themselves available outside work hours, they are seen as failing to contribute and as less valuable.

What’s Going On

If a stranger were to walk into your workplace today, what would they notice about your team? There may be some notable, visible characteristics of the group to which you may not have really given that much thought. For example, are the team members all around the same age? What proportion of employees shares the same skin colour, cultural background, sexuality and gender? Does a certain type of person lead and succeed?

Having a team that is made up of the same type of people — mostly the same gender, age, ethnic background, religion and education — can go unnoticed. Homogeneity can fly under the radar when the composition of staff has not changed in decades, particularly in traditionally gendered sectors (nursing or mining, for example).

A lack of diversity can create risks to the team’s functional abilities, culture and ethics. Employees can become victims of inequitable work practices when the people with power perceive them to be different, less worthy or more troublesome, as we’ll see in the next case study. Typically, these groups have included: women (especially pregnant women, and women returning from maternity leave), people with carer responsibilities, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, LGBTI individuals, employees who are active in unions (or non-unionised staff in highly unionised workplaces), people with English as a second language and some religious groups.

Case Study
A Rough Road

Mark, the founding owner of a small construction business, recently employed Sally to run an all-male team of quantity surveyors, roadworks engineers and other building workers. Although Mark was somewhat wary of appointing a woman to manage what he knew was ‘a pretty blokey team’, Sally was eminently qualified and had experience in a larger company.

Sally is keen to improve efficiencies, pointing out in meetings and on site inefficiencies in project design and rollout. Very quickly she meets resistance. A number of staff call her ‘ma’am’ in a mocking way, and refer to the company becoming a ‘nanny-state’ when Sally enforces health and safety procedures. Sally is accused of not understanding ‘the way things are done around here’. Her attempts to challenge these opinions are met with silence. In her second month, she comes across a sign stuck up in the tearoom that reads, ‘Ditch the witch’. Sally then overhears a colleague say, ‘It must be the hormones’, when she is rightly angry about a major error made by a worker.

Increasingly frustrated at being disrespected and stymied in doing her job, Sally telephones Mark. Mark does not return her call; instead he texts Sally that he has heard ‘noise’ about Sally’s ‘aggressive style’, and maybe she needs to reflect about how she has been engaging with the staff. Sally is so angry at being treated as the problem, she takes a day of annual leave later that week to reflect and recharge. Upon hearing this, Mark texts her: ‘Sally, sorry you found it too tough, and now can’t do it due to stress. I will pay your entitlements. Happy to supply reference.’

Unfortunately, discrimination is not just something you read about in hypothetical case studies. It is all too common in Australian workplaces. The Australian Human Rights Commission reported in 2014 that higher levels of discrimination are experienced by people born in countries where English is not the main spoken language, people aged between 55 and 64 years, people with disabilities and Australian Muslims.

Obvious signs of discrimination are overt racism, sexism, homophobia and religious intolerance, such as:

  • ‘jokes’ that are not funny to the victim
  • graffiti on toilet doors and noticeboards
  • hurtful ‘pranks’, which can involve physical violence
  • refusing simple flexibilities that some employees need in order to practise their religion and that wouldn’t affect their job performance (such as breaks at prayer time)
  • ignoring religious festivals that some employees celebrate (such as Diwali, Eid and Hanukkah)
  • operational decisions that exclude certain people (such as employees who are on maternity leave during a restructure process, or who cannot attend meetings after 5.30 pm).

Walking the Talk

Ethical culture is led from the top. The board and the CEO may say they value diversity and equal opportunity, but are they walking the talk? Do decisions tend to encourage some types of people and discourage others? Are proactive reviews done of the demographics of new hires and promotions? No matter what the policies and procedures say, what are the employees (in particular, senior managers) actually doing? If the organisation’s culture does not support working parents, people with carer’s responsibilities, people transitioning to retirement, and people with religious and cultural commitments, for example, those people are being actively alienated.

We all have ideas, preferences, beliefs, prejudices and values that inform our decisions. Our views are shaped by our culture, upbringing, life experiences and many other factors. Unconscious bias — inadvertent, negative assumptions about the skills, aptitudes, behaviours or life choices of a person because of their personal attributes — will constitute illegal discrimination if it causes a detriment, or denies a benefit, to someone in the workplace. This is the case even if the decision maker is not deliberately causing a negative impact.

Impact on the Team

Discriminatory bias in the workplace has been illegal for decades in Australia. In addition to the legal, ethical, psychological and strategic risks, there are a host of missed opportunities for any team that is discriminatory or homogeneous, in terms of the employee value proposition, competition, innovation, customer service and stakeholder relations. Just as damaging to the organisation is the negative impact on the team’s functional abilities, productivity, culture and output.

Groupthink vs Innovation

Teams that are homogeneous in their demographic makeup tend to engage in groupthink, mulishly approaching strategic discussions, problems and key decisions in the same way. Often, in a homogeneous team:

  • decision making lacks nuance and richness. Things tend to be done the way they have always been done, and the same things are always ‘front of mind’.
  • risks are miscalculated, competitive opportunities are missed and innovation is poor. The team lacks a variety of life experiences, information, political views, ways of thinking and observations of the outside environment.
  • decisions go unchallenged.

Why is groupthink more likely in a homogeneous team? Two key reasons. First, if differences are discouraged, why would anyone speak up when they have a different perspective? Second, no one even realises there are better decisions that could be made. If all your employees share the same world-view and way of problem-solving, then the same mistakes will continually be made because of these blind spots. You may not even realise what you’re missing!

When we interact with people similar to ourselves, we prepare less thoroughly, we fail to anticipate alternative viewpoints and we apply less effort in reaching consensus. Conversely, being around people who are different makes people more creative and better at solving complex, non-routine problems. Research by psychologists, sociologists, economists and other experts consistently shows that diverse teams are more innovative.

Productivity

A lack of diversity and inclusivity also damages productivity, as those individuals who do not fit the mould cannot bring the full benefit of their ideas and productive effort. Every time a Muslim employee who does not drink alcohol feels excluded from drinks with clients, a young employee is prevented from sharing her idea for a new product, or a transgender employee is overlooked for a secondment for fear they might not ‘fit in’, that employee’s contribution is missed. The employee loses out, and so does the organisation.

Organisations often focus on technological advances to improve productivity, but what if we could enable 10 per cent of the team — those people whom we have inadvertently discouraged through discriminatory practices — to be 20 per cent more productive, simply by removing the impediments we have caused?

The Moral Hazard of Sameness

A lack of diversity and inclusivity profoundly hurts the targeted and overlooked individuals. Employees who are seen as ‘different’ can feel isolated and disengaged. This can damage their productivity because they feel unsupported, they are offered less guidance and training, or they are excluded from social interactions. Exposure to direct discrimination has a significant negative impact on the individual employee’s mental health, physical health, job attitudes, organisational behaviour and productivity. This has been proven in multiple research studies.

The ethical risks of allowing a ‘white bread’ workforce to continue unchallenged are pretty obvious. If the team thinks it is acceptable to discriminate against people, ideas, perspectives and approaches that are different, the organisation is condoning prejudice, allowing the team to act as if achieving the best outcome doesn’t really matter. Quality of output, efficiency and merit are subjugated so the powers-that-be can maintain the status quo unchallenged.