Wednesday, 2 October 2024

Building on the success of the 2023 Ada Scotland Employer Breakfast, this second event focused on allyship and managing microaggressions, bringing together tech, business and HR leaders from diverse but tech-driven organisations to share their experiences and insights.

A huge thank you to Nicola Menzies and Catherine McNeil for driving this programme forward.

A recent McKinsey report said that microaggressions are the most common reason that women leave the workplace.

Definition: Microaggressions are insensitive statements or assumptions typically targeted at marginalised groups.

The negative impact of microaggressions are:

• The impact on physical and mental health
• Stress
• Depression
• High blood pressure
• Poor sleep
• And therefore ultimately burn-out / leaving the company

How can we promote allyship and eliminate microaggressions in the workplace?

• Consider how you respond to a crisis:
  • Focusing on revenue, making sales, building profitability – you can’t throw everything out to focus just on the bottom line – YOU WILL BREAK DOWN YOUR CULTURE AND LOSE PRECIOUS TALENT!
  • One Company rolled out Dignity at Work training on the back of an incident rather than tackling the root cause of the issue and responding appropriately
• Some Companies encourage employee networks and / or communities that cover a wide variety of interests to ensure that people have support around them and can bring their authentic selves to work
  • One Company asks all employees to go and choose to be an active member of one of the networks and then demonstrate what they have done to contribute
  • ‘Networks’ can be diverse and open to everyone, which can help from an educational point of view
  • Give the networks the authority to do what they need to rather than it being a top-down approach
  • You do not solve inclusivity by excluding others, however it was raised that some conversations do need to take place in a safe and shared space.
  • ‘Communities’ can be a safe place for members of that specific community only, for example a women’s group with only women, etc
  • It is important however to avoid silos and ensure that the wider Company is informed/ engaged
  • Importance of colleagues feeling able to bring their authentic selves to the workplace
• Introduce DEI into Company and break this down to individual goals
• Subjects that might appeal to info blasts: Overcoming perfection; Motherhood penalty; Imposter syndrome
• Use personal stories to help people understand
  • Need people from all backgrounds and levels of seniority to share personal stories
• Brave voices to share their experiences are required to make a programme of allyship work. It is social engineering at its core.
• Encourage experienced women to look out for and support/ mentor younger women in the workplace
  • There is a need for those in positions of privilege to speak up proactively
• Women fulfilling technical roles but are without technical backgrounds – very important in these circumstances to identify and carry good allies with you
• Important that senior managers are visible at events that support diversity in the workplace, and being present is all that is necessary a lot of the time
• What is leadership doing to enjoy a high functioning diverse team and the productivity that delivers.
• Identify centres or teams of DEI best practice and recognise their success while also asking what is driving this success which can be replicated. 
• What is being done to uplift the young men coming through?
• Gender imbalance in emotional/social labour in the workplace/importance of facilitators and emotional intelligence in successful workplaces often undervalued. Being Glue.
• Lone females in group model themselves on male behaviour to survive / get on. This must stop.
• Just because a man doesn’t experience something or can’t identify with something –  this doesn’t invalidate what a woman feels when being on the receiving end of a microaggression
• Microaggressions – sometimes, on the face of it, they can be benign or meant with good intentions but are not helpful. An example is a comment about not “overloading” someone who happens to work part-time; the person making this comment is making an assumption and decision on behalf of that individual and it can undermine their autonomy when managing their workload.
• Respond to microaggressions also by talking to a person’s values and to a situation rather than individuals.
• Be an ally by avoiding the thought that “Oh, it’s women talking about women’s issues”; don’t encourage that perception and can also try getting men to talk about these issues instead
  • If there is a training session, email or event associated with things like menopause, menstrual health, etc, males should also be encouraged to attend and participate proactively
• Having a mentoring programme can be really good if you feel like you can’t speak to your line manager
  • It is important to get pairing of mentors and mentees right
  • Note that today’s apprentice could be tomorrow’s leader and so it is important to ensure continuous education and be proactive at all levels
• Adding pronouns to email signatures and to Teams meetings can help to normalize this
  • Companies should ensure that all employees are doing it, and not just those with different pronouns
• Let’s consider how we make these subjects more “Business as Usual” and conversational, rather than the subject of a particular training
• It’s all very well to roll out training but it needs to be applied and demonstrated day-to-day by individuals
• Be careful to avoid the Senior Leadership team “talking” a good message
• One Company spoke about being driven my metrics and spoke about not enough really being done to make a significant cultural difference; there is an observation that senior leaders talk the talk and don’t walk the walk and are too busy focusing on the numbers to be dedicated properly to diversity, allyship, etc.
• One Company spoke about using their Company newsletter as a mechanism to continue raising awareness about these subjects
• Consider what other communication channels you can use to get information/ key messages out to raise awareness and make it more of a normal, day-to-day topic: Email; Reading meeting; TV screens; Teams; Record events; Podcasts; Town halls/open forums
• Another Company spoke about issuing quarterly emails to their business that focus on particular topics that relate to women in business and women in leadership; sometimes the emails can be about controversial subjects but the leader wanted to be intentional about disrupting the establishment and getting employees to think about these things to make it better for this marginalized/ under-represented group; it is expected that managers then use the information in these emails to invite team discussion about it and bring it more into people’s day-to-day
  • We can also use techniques like hosting calls where all attendees read through a communication on a topic and feedback – Jeff Bezos style!
• Be aware of “Privilege” – a white, middle-aged man can be regarded as “privileged” – it isn’t likely that he has been asked in a job interview if he intends to start a family soon because he looks like he might be that age and doesn’t have this barrier to overcome
  • People should be educated on matters that may not concern them but which are a stress to others; the would apply to things like gender, mental health, ethnicity, sexuality and political climate for example
• Be an ally and support efforts in your workplace to do things to support/ raise awareness about women’s health (menopause, menstrual health, mental health)
  • Consider doing something special to recognize Women’s Health Month
• Try to create diverse interview panels for ALL candidates and not just your female candidates!  Have females on male candidate panels
• Recruitment – consider interview questions for candidates!  If allyship is important in your organization, consider what questions you might want to ask someone to ensure that they demonstrate allyship for others
  • Consider also running interview question sets through gender check software
• When responding to microaggressions, try using the “UHT” method but saying “I understand ….. However, it made me feel… Therefore I would ask that you don’t say things like that in future….”
  • You can also name the joke and ask the person what’s funny about it – you might find that this takes any perceived humour right out of it and they understand that it was an unwelcome joke
• Think twice before you say something and take a moment to pause to think – Would I say the same thing to a male?”
• Don’t incentivize the wrong behaviours and be careful not to preference particular types of unprofessional behaviours
• Tough bottom lines lead to inclusive objectives being de-prioritised but managing downturns in business through strong EDI practices to maintain morale is crucial. It is not a fair weather activity.

Lasting thoughts….

• Are you doing this because it looks good to be doing it or do you really recognize the importance of allyship and diversity?
• “You can’t be what you can’t see!”  (reference to diversity in the workplace)
• We should be proactively enthusiastic about diversity at work as it is actually good for business!
• Impact of generational transformation in workforce demographics, with one company reporting a drastic shift in diversity among junior talent pipelines.
• Small changes have a ripple effect
• Further reading to consider is Jeff Bezos – “This is how I run my meetings” and “Being Glue” Tanya Reilly and “What does a scientist look like?” on Netflix, Invisible Women Caroline Criado-Perez, This Changes Everything Podcast Sarah Rice