Validated Passages

10

When they speak up.First, the diversity of the team mirrors the sort of diversity they want to attract among members.Their headquarters is in Atlanta, not on the coasts.It’s not uncommon, for example, for someone to have an interview with a client and for them to come back to us and say, hey, because you’re so loud about your values, I know that this client or this individual doesn’t seem aligned with them.In several cases, this has meant We Are Rosie passing on a client.This business is a mechanism for the distribution of access and opportunities and wealth to people who have traditionally not had access to these things, Olson said.We just always have to do the right thing.They’d never admit it, but they want to preserve the monoculture.But she can make it very easy to connect their organizations with workers who would otherwise be shut out of them.Most companies are battling years, if not an actual century or more, of monoculture.But a lot of organizations are resistant to actually seeing themselves clearly.Training will only get you so far.Who holds the leadership positions?Once you’ve established a baseline, you need to get more granular and detailed in your conception of diversity.Too often executives take the wrong approach here and begin to try to collect an employee from every race.Do you have a mix of parents and nonparents?Is the majority of your workforce from one generation?What percentage graduated from Ivy League schools?But are all of those women white?It’s also not trying to perfectly match every person with a manager who has a similar background or life experience.The point is continuing to dilute the sort of monoculture that makes it so difficult for hires to thrive.Which means, in many cases, relinquishing ideas of what the office should look like and how it should operate.Getting rid of the monoculture isn’t just about hiring or promoting people.It’s about figuring out how to organizationally shift the locus of power and control away from those who’ve had it, without question, for so long.This is, in a sense, a radical change when it comes to power dynamics inside companies, and the process will likely create some sort of tension.Getting rid of the monoculture sounds like a deletion, but it’s actually an addition.Inclusion means adding voices, which is precisely where the process derives its power and value.Diversity and inclusion aren’t about ripping all status and privilege from one group and conferring it to another.They’re about balance.It’s not just We Are Rosie, after all, that’s able to recruit monoculture castoffs.It’s distributed companies like Doist, which has employees in thirty countries across the world and a 97 percent retention rate, because the job descriptions are legitimately flexible and don’t require workers to show up every day in an office.It’s organizations like the 19th, which understood that the only way to recruit journalists who could make their coverage truly intersectional was to allow them to live in and cover the communities they called home.If you legitimately cast your net wider, you’re going to get more fish eager to swim into it.Many of these ideas have been so thoroughly normalized that unless you’ve struggled to fit within them, it’s difficult to see just how exclusionary they can feel.Offices, for example, are naturally social.Take the example of Helen, who told us, eight months into the pandemic, that she’d never been happier at work.The transition was more seamless than expected.What did change, though, was her relationship to the company’s culture.Worse, there was the nagging concern that she wouldn’t be recognized or come to mind.She was continuously bending herself toward her company’s idea of culture, and the contortions were exhausting.But after the pandemic sent everyone home from the office, her company’s culture started to bend toward her.She began to feel less guarded.She started leading more in nonwork conversations.Sounds silly, right?