http://www.nationalreview.com/node/435684/print The Joys of Mandatory Workplace Diversity Training, a Guided Tour
People resent being treated like dull children.
By Kilgore Trout — May 20, 2016
On Thursday morning, I found myself staring down the barrel of that familiar corporate ritual: mandatory workplace-diversity-and-inclusion training. Well into my second decade of employment with a large multinational corporation, the prospect of again clicking through the soul-deadening exercises filled me with a sense of almost comical dread. Through a pragmatic lens, I should’ve been happy at the instruction to push aside my real job and spend a few hours collecting a paycheck for doing very little, but instead I procrastinated as long as I could until I finally broke down.
Just a few clicks into the sterile legalese, I was quickly reminded why I’d developed such an instinctive resentment of the task. Diversity-and-inclusion training is a modern necessity for any substantial employer, and I do not doubt that a diverse and inclusive workforce drives innovation and engagement, thereby enhancing the bottom line. But it cannot be ignored that the reason diversity training exists as a mandate rather than an option is that trial lawyers have scared corporations into a defensive pose. Because large companies cannot trust that management in multiple locations will navigate the myriad legal tar pits that may result in a lawsuit, they are driven to establish that they’ve done their utmost to prevent a lapse. In other words, the whole thing has become a check-the-box activity: You certify that you’ve received the training, and we’ll produce that document in a court of law should an applicable suit be filed against us.
My company chooses to purchase many of its training modules from a third party. This vendor writes the curriculum and populates slides with bland, transferrable diversity-and-inclusion language and concepts, making what I’m sure is its best effort to liven up the sessions with stock photography and real-life examples. The modules are sold to multiple customers, so by nature they can’t be specific to any singular business or company. At face value, it’s a decent business decision and allows the vendor to apply its specialized skillset to producing a multi-language package at a fraction of the cost of creating the material internally. And yet, the resultant mess serves better to create more of the alleged problems than to resolve them. Let’s dive in.
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