Here are some survey results guaranteed to get people talking: Although organizations believe workplace diversity is important, only 30 percent can define what diversity is.
This is the classic business dilemma—can you prove that your initiative is producing results? Are you willing to invest time and resources to demonstrate it? It’s probably why diversity efforts haven’t been more successful. If the business case for diversity could be more accurately measured and quantified, more organizations would not only embrace it, but would zero in and make diversity a bottom-line priority.
The SHRM workforce diversity study made this same point. When both HR professionals and diversity practitioners were asked an open-ended question about changes that could help foster greater diversity in the workplace, both groups had the same top response: a greater emphasis on the relationship between diversity and business results.
One contributor to the survey, Frank McCloskey, vice president of diversity at Georgia Power, had some pretty strong words about this. “The field is stuck, with little innovation in how we are tracking diversity,” he said. “There is lack of discipline and understanding of what diversity means beyond race and gender or how success is being defined, or not being defined, by most corporate diversity and inclusion initiatives.”
Anyone who dares to say that there’s a lack of strong, measurable business metrics for diversity efforts usually gets taken to task for it. But I can’t recall anyone actually producing something that showed the connection between diversity and bottom-line business results.
I wish they would. Maybe if someone did, diversity could become more of a strategic business practice and less of an elusive goal that, for most organizations, always seems just out of our reach.
Here is the latest one: the state Supreme Court ruled this week that despite a voter-approved law that makes medical marijuana legal, workers who indulge can still be “fired for testing positive for the drug at work.” According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar said, “We have no reason to conclude the voters intended to speak so broadly, and in a context so far removed from the criminal law, as to require employers to accommodate marijuana use.”
This is a big issue because, as the Chronicle story noted, “Lawyers on both sides of the case said pre-employment testing for marijuana is common among California employers, especially those that have federal contracts and are legally required to keep their workplaces drug-free.”
The issue isn’t over, however. Some California legislators are vowing to pass legislation addressing the issue. A story in the Los Angeles Times said that “Within hours of the court’s decision, Assemblyman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) announced that he would introduce legislation to prevent employers from discriminating against medical marijuana users. The people of California did not intend that patients be unemployed in order to use medical marijuana,” he said.
Frankly, I don’t think the people of California thought too deeply about the possible workplace repercussions when they passed the medical marijuana initiative back in 1996. Now, you have two legal issues that are at odds: a law that allows people to use medical marijuana legally for medical purposes versus the legally mandated need for employers to provide a drug-free workplace.
Is there a right answer here? How do we handle compassionate policies and laws that are at odds with safety and common sense in the workplace? If you have an answer, I’d love to see it—either as a comment here or an e-mail to me at jhollon@workforce.com.
Most people would probably say no, and that’s what makes a story in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer titled “Boeing bosses spy on workers” so frightening. “The tactics used by [the state of] Washington’s largest employer raise questions about where an employee’s rights begin and the employer’s end,” the story says, “and how much leeway any corporation has in investigating an employee if it suspects wrongdoing.”
Boeing, America’s premier plane builder, refused to discuss its surveillance policies with the Post-Intelligencer, except to say, “Issues that necessitate investigation in order to protect the company’s interests and those of its employees and other stakeholders are handled consistent with all applicable laws.”
Clearly, Boeing has a great deal of sensitive proprietary information that the company has a duty to protect. I don’t think that anyone would question that, but as the P-I story points out, some of the company’s actions seem more designed to intimidate employees and keep them from talking to the media. “Recently, a Boeing investigator told a Puget Sound-area employee that he was followed off company property to a lunch spot, that investigators had footage of him ‘coming and going’ and that investigators had accessed his personal Gmail account,” the newspaper said. “The primary reason for the 2007 investigation, the employee said, was Boeing’s suspicion that he had spoken with a member of the media.”
The employee–who was talking with the Post-Intelligencer for a story about Boeing’s struggles complying with a 2002 corporate reform law–was eventually confronted by company investigators who “laid out some of their findings. He has since been fired,” the newspaper reported.
“ ‘I wasn’t surprised, but more just disappointed in them,’ ” the fired employee told the newspaper. “ ‘Instead of looking at the problems, instead of investigating that, they investigated the people that were complaining and got rid of them,’ said the employee, who had been an auditor in the company’s Office of Internal Governance and asked that he not be named.”
This is a sobering story, and it raises two questions in my mind: how far should companies be able to go to protect their business secrets? And, how much should an employer be required to tell employees about the methods and manner in which they will be monitored to ensure that business secrets stay secret?
I’d love to hear what some of you have to say about this, either in a comment at the bottom of this item or in an e-mail to me at jhollon@workforce.com.
Sad to say, there is still a glass ceiling for women trying to rise to the highest ranks in business, but rarely do you get to see just how widespread the problem really is, even in a place that’s reputedly as forward-thinking as California.
According to a recent University of California, Davis, study, only 11.6 percent of executives in California’s 400 largest public companies are women. But, that’s not the surprising part. The big shock is that in Santa Clara County—the heart of future-oriented Silicon Valley—“only 9 percent of companies … have promoted a woman to a top post,” according to a story on the UC Davis study in the San Jose Mercury News. In addition, “only 7 percent of corporate boards include even one woman,” and as the newspaper points out, the study suggests that the role of women in corporations has changed relatively little in decades.
“The numbers are abysmal,” Nicole Woolsey Biggart, dean of the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, told the Mercury News. “What has absolutely dumbfounded me is [that] we look just like the Industrial Belt. We don’t look any different to me. That is the big shock.”
The story goes on to point out that “Some experts in workplace and gender issues say the study’s statistics underscore deep problems that involve social issues, the educational system, and how businesses recruit and treat women.” Added Biggart: “It’s as if women are just invisible. Women [just] aren’t being groomed the way men are being groomed.”
No one should really be shocked that the glass ceiling still exists. We’ve written about some of the reasons a number of times and even highlighted companies like Cigna that are committed to breaking through it. The shock is how thick the barrier still is in Silicon Valley, an area generally lauded for companies with forward-thinking workforce practices. Does it have anything to do with fact that Internet companies are still largely founded and nurtured by engineering nerds, who tend to be male and perhaps more inclined to hang out with—and hire or promote—their techie brethren?
What do we need to do to really, truly break down the glass ceiling that exists for women and minority groups? How can we get more diversity into the executive ranks, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere? Do you have an idea or suggestion? If so, attach a comment here, or e-mail me at jhollon@workforce.com.
There’s a lot of baggage that comes along with the aging of America’s workforce, and some of that baggage isn’t so pretty. Here’s just one example: age discrimination.
Yesterday, a California state appeals court ruled that “a former Google executive in his 50s who was allegedly called ‘old fuddy-duddy’ and told he was ‘slow’ before being terminated in February 2004 has the right to sue the Internet giant for age discrimination,” according to a story in the San Jose Mercury News.
This case should be a wake-up call for every manager and executive, because the issues raised in the story are all too familiar:
• A director-level employee (Brian Reid, formerly Google’s director of engineering) over the age of 50 had gotten only one written performance review—and it was a very positive one.
• In later conversations with senior management, Reid claims he was told that “his opinions and ideas were ‘obsolete’ and ‘too old to matter’ ” and that he was “ ‘slow,’ ‘fuzzy,’ ‘sluggish,’ ‘lethargic,’ did not ‘display a sense of urgency’ and lacked energy,” according to the Mercury News.
• Reid was later moved to a new role at Google, had his previous duties given to much-younger employees, and then was told he was not a “cultural fit” and would be fired from the engineering department.
• Later, according to the appeals court ruling, “senior Google executives discussed Reid’s effort to find a job in other areas of Google, and how there was no role for him. ‘We all agree on the job elimination angle,’ stated an e-mail from Stacy Sullivan, the director of human resources.”
Google denies any wrongdoing and issued a statement saying, “As our court filings have said, we believe this complaint to be unfounded and will vigorously defend against it.”
I’ve written a number of times about “The Talent-Shortage Myth” and my belief that America won’t have the huge talent shortage that so many predict because baby boomers will stay on the job much longer than previous generations. This is a good thing, from my perspective, but it also means that companies and managers will have to work that much harder to ensure that they treat each and every employee with fairness, sensitivity and compassion.
No matter how you slice it, this is an interesting case that bears watching, because it may set the bar for what we can expect in workplace dynamics for years to come.
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