Introduction
Diversity and inclusivity are crucial concepts in corporate organizations, forcing managers to pay more attention to them. Difficulties with an ethical and fair approach to racial, gender, and socioeconomic diversity and continually challenging social biases and discrimination have deteriorated our company’s work. Indeed, the more a company unethically treats its workforce, the more valuable insights it loses and the decrease in its retention rates. Such a strong correlation between diverse personnel and work outcomes initiates participation in the workshop, teaching managers to make thoughtful and fair decisions.
Main Points of the Workshop
The workshop that facilitates our company’s proper approach to inclusivity is called “Rethinking Political Correctness,” meaning that it introduces the concept and addresses all its misconceptions. Since managers hardly deal with hiring and recruiting personnel without unjustly overlooking their racial and national belonging, this workshop aims to equip employees with skills that help them build effective relationships (Ely, 2006). The workshop establishes the uncommon but critical idea that political correctness can harm majority and minority groups in the workplace instead of protecting them. As an illustration, African American females might feel pressured due to worrying about being the representative of their racial and gender group. Meanwhile, if white males think these women’s needs are prioritized over theirs, they might feel marginalization and fear speaking up (Ely, 2006). This complication arises from strict rules promoting diversity, suggesting they should be avoided.
Another essential point established in the workshop is that maintaining diversity in the workforce is much more complicated than initiating it. The workshop allows participants to analyze each case of polarization, self-doubt, and overprotection in the workplace when one colleague becomes reluctant to share his perspective due to his background (Ely, 2006). Lack of knowledge and competence sometimes results in the offensive but unintentional offense.
The workshop asks employees to think and reflect instead of negatively reacting to identity abrasion. This step gives rise to a more necessary process – connecting with colleagues. Calming and refocusing outward, stop justifying our identity, and start questioning ourselves. This guidance taught in the workshop becomes the managerial tool for every team member willing to communicate effectively, ethically, and mindfully.
Strengths and Weaknesses of the Workshop
Analyzing this workshop and its implementation context helps identify its strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, the workshop advisors do not hesitate to fight commonly established and accepted beliefs about political correctness. The concept itself underlies principles that help stop workplace marginalization and discrimination. However, the workshop is dedicated to proving that it might negatively affect personnel when understood and implemented incorrectly, facilitating more polarization of minority and majority groups. The workshop justifies that political correctness does not set a perfect image of respect and equity by providing examples when focusing inwardly on workplace identities that result in self-doubt and backlash. Thus, its strength is real-life examples of political correctness’s adverse effects.
On the other hand, the workshop pays more attention to mindset shifts, which might be challenging for every employee. Some individuals lack self-reflection and analysis, meaning it might take a long time or bring no results for such cases. The workshop considers only mindful and conscious workers interested in improving corporate inclusivity and respect. Moreover, some employees might consider identity as the most sensitive topic, being not ready to tackle their emotional feedback. These blind spots suggest that the workshop’s insights should not be generalized to everybody.
What I Like and Dislike
Points of preference are subjective ideas on the workshop’s usefulness for larger companies. Separate guidelines for corporate leaders and employees are my favorite parts. Additionally, I am impressed by the concept that “zero tolerance does not mean zero discussion,” justifying the need to speak up and voice diversity problems (Ely, 2006, p. 87). However, the fact that the workshop narrowly focuses on the actions of underrepresented employees frustrates me as I believe it should have addressed more majority groups who severely disregard minorities. In my opinion, narrowing the focus on the consideration points for minorities takes all responsibility for unjust treatment initiated by more confident employee groups. This way, the workshop could have contradicted its pure idea that identity abrasions might occur due to the personnel’s biases.
Strategies for Our Company
Even though the workshop findings should not be generalized to every group, there are some valuable lessons for our team. The strategy, which consists of five steps, should be promoted to our company members. Significantly, they should be taught to control their emotional response and focus on the typical corporate goal and mission. If every employee starts to worry about their identity, the leaders become responsible for creating a safe space where every idea is voiced and heard. Since these five principles require collaboration from top management leaders and their followers, it highlights another essential strategy of changing mindset to “what can I change” (Ely, 2006). This idea forces underrepresented members to seek advice from experienced leaders to make the most beneficial identity decisions. This workshop becomes the starting point for many companies to establish suitable diversity standards and skills.
Conclusion
The information provided in the workshop might be challenging to enact at one time. Hence, constantly modifying the workplace and its members’ mindsets is required to initiate comfortable and safe feedback. Leaders should be engaged in promoting the experiences of those members whose backgrounds differ to create an accepting environment. Moreover, employees have the most controversial but helpful goal of questioning themselves in cases of suspected marginalization. Trust and respect are built when people see an opportunity to learn from every workplace difficulty.
Reference
Ely, R. J., Meyerson, D. E., & Davidson, M. N. (2006). Rethinking political correctness. Harvard Business Review, 84(9), 79 – 87. Web.