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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32956 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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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.

My experience since leaving graduate school a year ago has been the same, but let me tell you academia is so bad. That was an environment that really was as bad as or worse than twitter and I’m scared that it will some day come for the private sector.

The extent of DEI training at my own workplace in Boston has been our company president spending 1 minute talking about how much our company values diversity in our employees and such during a speech she gave at a party after offices reopened in 2021. I was worried that this was a portent of a coming DEI initiative or the like, but there's been literally nothing. I'm guessing this sort of thing is not uncommon in workplaces, and it's really just the notable outliers that gain attention on Twitter. I do think it's probably a crapshoot, with higher risk in certain parts of the country that a company you start working at could have struggle sessions, but there are plenty of opportunities for employment where they're completely avoidable.

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.

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.

I think this is really a function of workplace culture and class rather than geography. Most of your college-educated, white-collar workforce is cognizant enough to recognize that "no homo" in the office probably won't fly. But I doubt that the truck drivers, technicians, assembly line workers, and even janitorial staff are really watched by the liberal panopticon so closely. For many working-class gigs like restaurants, the working language (Spanish, most frequently) isn't necessarily understood uniformly by the educated left anyway.

But I could just as easily write this about dropping "fuck" in every other sentence, which is also a distinctive class marker.

In one of the open offices at my work there is a large rainbow flag. In the machine shop there is an even bigger American flag.

Anecdata, but while my white collar friends find pride month notable and full of impositions, they don’t notice black history month or other diversity pushes all that much.

Middle management is drowning in guidelines and policies. The amount of training that has to be done, things have to be certified etc. If middle management followed all rules and regulations, the world would grind to a halt.

One wonders whether this is, in fact, the active ingredient. That is, the middle managers know that they don’t really add anything of value, hence they spend their days coming up with more and more byzantine regulations, while also maintaining a tacit understanding/distributed consensus of which rules really need to be followed to the letter and which can be safely ignored. Once the rot is sufficiently entrenched, the middle management class can kick back and relax, secure in the knowledge that they can credibly threaten what is effectively a (distributed?) work-to-rule strike, should anything threaten their overinflated status

A few months ago an NBA player was fined for saying “no homo” in an interview.

This has happened in NBA press conferences like half a dozen times. The use of "pause" after innuendo is also pretty common, but apparently hasn't yet been deemed "homophobic", but presumably could be depending on the contextual use. Shaq certainly still knows how to laugh about Chuck Barkley getting banged. That these jokes are so common even in the public eye provides a pretty clear picture of how common they are behind the scenes and between friends that don't think they're about to be judged by HR.

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.

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.

Ours is somewhat similar, almost entirely opt-in. One thing that low key kind of annoys me is how useful it is as a way to rub shoulders with executives though. A new person on my team who barely does their job is on a first name basis with my departments executive director because they worked on some dei presentation. There are greater injustices of course and it's better than it could be but it sits wrong with me.

This entirely depends on the people involved. There are a surprising number of upper management folks who aren't true believers. I've advised some on how to approach things. They know how destructive the woke spiral is and how cancerous even a small number of the most vocal advocates can be. They want to be on a first name basis with the worst of the worst, because they want to know who to target when an opportunity arises to move people out of the business.

Obviously, the valence switches completely if they are a true believer or even a collaborator.

I suppose the social climbers will always find a way. Perhaps this is better than outright banging the boss

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