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My employer recently held a DEI week. One of our Human Resources VPs sent out an email with information about this “dedicated” event. The main course was a series of videos. Managers were expected to replace a normal staff meeting with one of these videos followed by a “conversation.”
Needless to say, this did not occur. Our monthly staff meeting went exactly as planned—brief program updates followed by technical presentations on recent tasks. Not a peep from our manager, who probably had to take some sort of training. This foiled my plans to write a review of our corporate strategy and emphasis, because I’m not watching a video version if I don’t have to. Instead, a few remarks on the framing.
Much emphasis is placed on “employee-driven” culture, putting the onus on managers and employees. At the same time, the initiative is very open about being “CEO action,” a coalition for executives to pledge how much they like DEI. Roughly half the subjects appeared to be advertising actions already taken at the corporate level.
The signaling strategy is obvious. Executives are more coordinated and socially skilled than 99% of the company, so they get to read the room and sign on to initiatives which they think will be well-received. HR departments make that intent into a program. Managers and employees enact it—in proportion to how much they already buy in. And in the end the company gets a few sympathetic stories for the executives to advertise next board meeting.
I want to emphasize how short this falls of the consultant-driven, aggressive approach which gets skewered on social media. No one is asking defense engineers to hold struggle sessions or reflect on whiteness. Twitter would like to show you the most dramatic, offensive version. If your workplace looks more like Twitter than like this…consider moving to Texas.
I kind of think the higher-ups are in the dark about what workplace culture on the ground is. A few months ago an NBA player was fined for saying “no homo” in an interview. I got into a discussion in the /r/nba thread with a corporate employment lawyer from Los Angeles who told me that you’d be in deep shit if you said that at any company. I tried to get through to him that no, those corporate HR policies he’s setting aren’t getting implemented in places like Texas and that middle management is simply lying because they don’t want to look bad. No one has the guts to tell these people to fuck off, so they think that they have the respect of their underlings.
They know. They just continue to gather power at the top until they have enough to crush the culture at the bottom.
The practical power of the executives (or, more pertinent, the HR bureaucrats) over the corporate culture as a whole is real but limited. In theory, they can do whatever they want; in practice, both their visibility into the real situation on the ground, and their ability to carry out initiatives, are limited by the cooperation of their subordinates. There's not really any amount of power at the top that can change this; the only remedy is to either convince the entire management chain to willingly cooperate, or else replace them. And companies' ability to actually replace long-time employees is fairly limited.
There certainly exist companies where the existing management structures allow for full HRification of the entire culture. It's not remotely true of every company, and most companies where it's not true don't have any realistic path (or any real appetite) for getting there.
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How would you disprove that?
HR can already assign training, mandate activities, set the narrative, and probably fire anyone who pitches a fit. The CEOs are on board. What are they waiting for?
I think you’re assuming too much coordination. Companies are competing on brand, just like they do with advertising. And that ad copy doesn’t have to suffuse the whole organization to be effective. It will always trade off with realism: the demographics of places of work, the supply of female engineers, the available HR budget.
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