Day 12 - Creating Healthy Workplace Culture
Creating a culture in the workplace where everyone feels welcome and can contribute is a core practice of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Today, we look at how norms of dominant white culture can be problematic to inclusion. Then we explore how innovative organizations are evolving to create cultures that are more supportive of everyone’s well-being and participation.
Creating an Inclusive Environment in the Workplace
Research shows that employers tend to value white employees over black employees, from electing to interview candidates with white-sounding names to paying black employees less than white counterparts. Frequently the norms of white and Western culture are set as institutional norms, affecting hiring, firing, and the workplace environment. The Bias of Professionalism is described in this article from Stanford Social Innovation Review. (Article, 10 min.)
|
|
Examining Cultural Norms
Organizations often try to diversify their staff without looking at their cultural norms. In her book, Waking Up White, Debby Irving writes:
“The purpose of identifying and examining the dominant white culture is not to prove that white people are racist or that everything that white people think and do is wrong. It’s a way to provide feedback along the lines of 'Here are some dominant white culture ways of thinking and acting that are holding back efforts to dismantle racism.'”
Here are some examples Irving cites:
● Conflict avoidance
● Valuing formal education over life experience
● Right to comfort and entitlement
● Sense of urgency
● Competitiveness
● Emotional restraint
● Judgmentalness
● Either/or thinking
● Belief in one right way
● Defensiveness
● Being status oriented
- Where do you see these showing up in your own life, family, or organizations you are part of?
- How might these work to diminish a group’s willingness to hear feedback, handle differences, or be open to multiple points of view?
- What is the opposite of each of these and how can you find ways to bring more balance into your organization? For example, if the culture is highly competitive, how can you bring in more cooperation or if people avoid conflict, how can you build skills and processes to deal with conflicts in a generative way?
Creating a Culture Where Teams Thrive
A Lesson on the Psychology of Meetings from SNL and Google (Video, 6 min.) - Google spent millions of dollars researching how to build the perfect team. They gathered tons of data on teams within Google to see what helped a team work together and be productive. It turns out that the critical variables to success were group norms and a sense of psychological safety. In this video, journalist Charles Duhigg tells the story of how Saturday Night Live, and its producer Lorne Michaels in particular, got people with big egos to engage in creative teamwork.
|
|
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Frederic Laloux was a consultant who was disillusioned with the politics, bureaucracy, and stress in many organizations and how resistant they were to change. He decided to launch his own research project about: “Is it possible to create organizations that draw out more of our human potential, then what do these organizations look like?” He discovered pioneer organizations that have already started operating on a new organizational model. They came from different industries and regions, and had remarkably similar practices, even though they didn’t know about each other.
|
|
|
His book, Reinventing Organizations, maps out in detail how these organizations work. A core shift is from a top-down approach to one that grows the full potential of each person and allows much greater autonomy and peer-to-peer collaboration. “The Future of Management is Teal” offers a good summary. (Article, 24 min.) Be sure to check out the story of Buurtzorg, a home nurses organization, as a great example of the Fuller quote above, where people flocked to the better alternative.
|
|
This interview with Tanisha Johnson shares what it is like to be one of a few people of color in an organization - and community - and how workplaces can do the internal work to evaluate their hiring and culture to be diverse and inclusive. She works in Seacoast NH and co-founded the Black Lives Matter Seacoast chapter. (Video, 7:53 min.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|