Companies have been warned they have “wasted a fortune” trying to make middle-aged white men more “woke” in failed attempts to improve diversity, consultants have argued.
The firm, Mind Gym which advises blue-chip companies on workplace culture has said businesses should stop investing in “ineffective but expensive” strategies such as unconscious bias training.
Joanne Cash, chairman of Mind Gym, warned that training strategies intended to combat racism and sexism can risk making wealthy white men feel they’re “being told off for who they are”, all the while ignoring issues such as childhood trauma, bereavement and mental health.
She said: “Even the most privileged person will have gone through life with suffering of some sort.
“Every single individual has a private story and one of the dangers we’re seeing in the dialogue at the moment is that we lump people together in a very unsympathetic way.”
Due to the lack of failure of unconscious bias training, Mind Gym said it is now advising clients such as US pharma business AbbVie and City insurer Gallagher to swap unconscious bias training for a programme that focuses on “the nuances of diversity and why we can all feel left out at times”.
She said: “A more nuanced conversation is needed in the workplace if we’re going to achieve permanent change – there’s no point castigating one group of people in order to promote another.
“If there’s a risk that one group feels they’re being told off for who they are, you’re leaving an entire group of people not feeling very good about themselves. It doesn’t need to feel divisive.”
Mind Gym’s report argued that people who take part in unconscious bias training behave less inclusively afterwards than they did before, almost as if companies just did the training to say: “yes we have ticked that box”.
Unity News Network (UNN) Staff Writer | To find out more details about our staff, please head to the About Us section on our website.
