I’ve been feeling tired recently – the exhaustion of explaining my experience to my peers has occupied enough brainpower that I sometimes actively avoid engaging in conversations on race despite the moral imperative to do so. I realize how privileged I was to have space in college to engage in these conversations in a manner that even if disagreed with, my arguments were recognized as worth consideration and debate. It was refreshing then to have this discussion with the Deliberate Evolution group on diversity in recruitment. We went beyond the simple premise of “appreciating diversity” and into the operationalization of such a virtue. How do we simultaneously value diversity without tokenizing and metricizing it? How do we match intentionality with action? These are some of the questions we consider.

Here are some of the readings we used in this discussion:

1. History of Diversity Training in US – Diversity Officer Magazine
2. It’s Time to Prioritize Diversity Across Tech – Forbes Magazine
3. Lack of Diversity Data – Fortune Magazine
4. Struggling to see the Impact of Diversity Initiatives – ComputerWorld

There has been a lot of different literature out there explaining the value of diversity to an organization. At a low level, if you are selling a product to a heterogeneous market, having a heterogeneous team helps you understand how to make your product better suited for the range of needs and considerations. At a higher level, diverse teams create more divergence in discussions which while can create friction, also create room for creativity and innovation. There are logically, therefore, industries where homogenous teams make sense – routine, non-creativity driven jobs to a homogenous market where stability is more important than diversity. Understanding the value of diversity to one’s organization is an important preamble to understanding how one should measure it and plan for it. The shoddy thing to do is to simply recruit to fulfill some arbitrary quota and not plan for integration and follow-up.

One of the anecdotes shared was the use of diversity indicators in a Big Tech company in the US. This company wanted to measure the number of people across different identifiers in its recruitment pipelines but also wanted to recognize the individual’s right to self-declaration. It did not want to assume on the behalf of the individual, especially when it could have an impact on postings and team composition. However, as it was always awkward to ask for a self-declaration in fear of potentially coming across as discriminating, the company could never effectively track the effectiveness of its diversity recruitment initiatives. This story was an eye-opener for me because it made me realize that while top-level conversations around diversity in recruitment were well-intentioned, their operationalization was a hard nut to crack. Funds have to be tied to KPIs and outcomes, but if diversity was to be observed at a data level, no one would have accurate information.

Companies that take more qualitative but still rigorous approaches to diversity recruitment may have better luck. Some companies organize special recruitment tracks for those who self-identify as a minority group (e.g. LGBT Associate Programs) to aid in their tracking and support efforts. Some companies keep high qualitative baselines for integration and coordination amongst all its employees instead of being obsessed with the data. Others use proxy data. All of these have limitations and their own slew of political issues, but they all present a complex picture of how exactly diversity looks like in an organization. I think at the end of the day, we all came to an appreciation of how messy HR departments have it with the scenario.

I mentioned an anecdote of a minority employee in Singapore joining a team where people spoke Chinese even when he was in their presence. While they would occasionally catch themselves and switch to English, the fact that they could fall back into patterns of speaking Chinese around the office made him feel out of place and uncomfortable. Yet the irony was that the burden lay on him to flag the issue if he wanted any change, with full knowledge that any such action would draw ire towards him. I thought about the scenario and realized that there was very little that could be done at an organizational level. Even if the HR department was to foresee this issue, it would have been inappropriate to have sent a reminder to the team to speak only English at the workplace. Such complexity is at the heart of such diversity conversations. Diversity is good and valuable but people do not want to engage in the messy negotiation of what it entails.

I don’t presume to have solutions, but I also don’t think a lot of people have appreciated the problem as it is. Challenging norms is a key action in establishing new ones, but it requires those who occupy privileged positions to recognize the innate value of justice and acting towards a moral imperative.

Do you have any thoughts to improve diversity initiatives in workplaces? I’d love to hear your views.