Got PS?

Episode 3 - How can we make DEI not so awkward?

• Deanna Stanley • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Deanna:

Hi, I'm Deanna.

Kara:

And I'm Kara.

Deanna:

And this is the Got PS podcast, the podcast about all things psychological safety. Hey Deanna, how you doing this week? Actually, I am doing pretty good. I'm trying to think about it, but I really don't have anything to complain about. So yeah.

Kara:

That's always welcome. And we hope our audience is doing well too.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

Yes, it would be good if they're doing well. But how about you, Kara? Can't be all about me, even though it should be.

Track 1:

I hear you. I like it to be all about me too. I'm happy that at least it's sunny outside. There's something about just sun and spring and being able to walk outside that it's good for the soul.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

I appreciate the fact that it's getting warmer. I hate cold weather.

Track 1:

I'm hating it more and more as I get older and older.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

Amen to that, but oh my god, my allergies have been murder.

Track 1:

my moment of gratitude is and not to brag. I have no seasonal allergies, so I can just, so I can just look at everything and see and just take it in for how beautiful it is without it bringing me misery. I know I'm in the minority,

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

I'm glad. I mean, I hate you, but I'm glad for you.

Track 1:

Thank you. That felt heartfelt.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

Let's actually move on because I'm sure the people listening to us want to hear the meat of the matter.

Track 1:

That is true. And as we said, this is a podcast about psychological safety. As we've said before, we have our own view of psychological safety called full stack psychological safety. The full stack is made up of five stages. Those stages are culture, community, conversation, contribution, and commitment. The last four stages of the full stack psychological safety model are geared more towards teams. The first stage is geared more towards the whole entire organization. How it behaves, what its rules and mantras are what are its norms, a lot of it is around how does everyone behave when nobody's watching? Last week we started to dive into this cultural layer and we talked about how organizations are behaving around firing. We presented one case, AWS, which was. It's kind of misbehaving. And then another case, Deanna, what was that case? Where they were actually behaving

That was JPL.

Track 1:

They were behaving in a very appropriate and nurturing manner during a time that was very stressful. anyways, Deanna, tell us a little bit more about the cultural layer of psychological safety.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

As Kara said before, The last four stages of psychological safety are all about the team. Corporate psychological safety is not necessary, but it can either help or hinder team psychological safety. It's sort of the hardware that everybody runs on. It's what happens behind the scenes, and let's face it, bad psychological safety in the corporate culture will definitely affect your team's psychological safety. We've all experienced that.

Track 1:

What does this look like, in terms of norms and behaviors? the mantra for this level is everyone is welcome. That means everybody of all shapes, colors, sizes, races, religions, gender identification, sexual orientations, they all belong and they are all welcomed.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

We're going to be talking today about DEI, which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. You may have seen that there's a lot of DEI news going around at the moment. Go to Google and search DEI and you're going to find a whole pile of news. Major US companies, including Meta, Tesla, and Home Depot, shrank their DEI teams by 50 percent or more last year. We've even got a problem right now with states passing anti DEI laws. Alabama has passed one which prevents DEI in public universities. Utah is looking to pass an anti DEI law too. And in fact, and this one's gonna piss you off, piss me off, some GOP figures have blamed DEI for the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse.

Track 1:

Oh boy. I, I kind of do not want to touch that last one, but I have to say. Last week we talked about, AWS, And their policy of silent sacking, a lot of that had to do with previously in 2021, there was actually a lot of competition to hire new people and hire people greatly. I think some of that rise in the competition also led to a rise in DEI as well. You want to be the most opening and welcome place so you can bring the best talent in. I think that was great. Now we're seeing shrinking all over the place. And DEI is shrinking as well, unfortunately. I think in some ways they're of the same kind of coin. The last one, the GOP is blaming DEI for the Francis Scott Keith bridge collapse. Oh, my mercy.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

They claim that we're focusing too much on DEI and not about things like safety. However, here's a really interesting, like, brain smashing concept. How about we do both?

Track 1:

I don't know why people think we only have the attention capabilities for concentrating on one thing.

The people.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

who are complaining about it only can focus on one thing.

Track 1:

Yeah, I think they're kind of playing their hand.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

But despite all this bad news I just shared

D PEI is still important.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

Business leaders are saying they're still committed to diversity. In a survey of more than 300 C suite leaders the law firm Littler found that just 1 percent of respondents said their organizations decreased their DEI activity. 60 percent of them actually increased their D. I. Activity. According to one study from W. K. Kellogg Foundation, many companies are doubling down on D. I. But Because of all the freaking anti woke, anti DEI crap that's going around, companies are being a lot quieter about their DEI strategies. They're using this pushback to, gently renege on some of the promises they made when they created C suite DEI positions. Partially because, they made way ambitious promises that unfortunately they're discovering they can't accomplish. First of all, because changing the culture to be more inclusive takes a long time. The more people you have, the more time it takes. It's going to be a very slow turning. Think about how long it would take an aircraft carrier to turn versus a speed boat. Big difference! The bigger you are, the slower it is to turn. You can't just make these incredibly wide promises and actually expect it to happen. And second of all, at least in the tech culture, it's not just about wanting to hire more people for DEI. It's also improving the pipeline. We've got to make sure that people who are not your standard White male makes it through college in a field of STEM that they don't feel excluded and that they graduate and they still want to continue down that road because if they're unhappy and there's been studies and I'm not going to quote which ones because I honestly don't remember and I haven't done the research and this is also dated from, way too long ago from the last time I remember it, but there are studies that show that, a lot of people, start in STEM in college, but finish with a completely different major because they are not felt welcome. It decreases your hiring pool. Everyone's competing for the same pool of diverse people and it's impacting some of those promises that companies have made. What we need to be doing, focusing lower down. Not just at college, but let's talk about high school and elementary school levels. We should be encouraging everyone to get involved in STEM. Not to the exclusion of art and music and things like that, because they're equally important. I'm going off on a tangent here, so I'm going to shut up.

Track 1:

This is something that Deanna and I feel very passionate about. We are both members of the society of women engineers, and they're very focused, not on just women being seen as equal in work. But they also go and they go to elementary schools, middle schools and high schools and really mentor young children and girls and make them feel like they can, foresee a future within STEM fields. A lot of times they already at those ages feel like they're having problems. They're struggling in math, they're struggling in science, and they're not sure if they should still go the course. Even in colleges when I went to school, I went to school for electrical engineering and we graduated with 50 people, five of them, women, I think at this point, It's probably still pretty similar. And I've been out of school for over 30 years.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

Again, this is based on dated data, because I have not looked it up recently. Shame on me. But, ladies, if you want to have computer science education and you don't want to feel excluded, go to Harvey Mudd University. The last time I knew they had the most female welcoming computer science program in the country.

Track 1:

oh, that's awesome. I've never even heard of it.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

They're in California, I think.

Track 1:

I have to say in terms of universities, I did get accepted to Clarkson university. And it was one female to every, I believe, 10 males across the university. I ended up going to a different university that was more, just single kind of major that you could imagine. And so the general population was 50, 50. It made me feel comfortable but it was hard within the major itself. My professors held me to very high standards, and they wanted to see me succeed, and that's really what we want, people to do within the work environment.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

I don't actually have numbers for my college, I don't remember. But I do know our science fiction and fantasy club had two women in it. I was one of them.

Track 1:

Damn, that wouldn't be the case now, though. I feel that's one of those things that's starting creeping the other way.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

I really hope so. Now that they're talking about pragmatic DEI, which is backing away from education efforts and pushing DEI in a way that some people felt was aggressively woke. They're now trying to focus on building a diverse and inclusive culture, so they can support a steady stream of data driven messaging, both internally and externally, because they discovered you can hire as many diverse people as you want, but if your culture doesn't support them, they're gonna just turn around and leave again. If the company is not inclusive in its culture, all your hiring targets are going to fail. And even if your hiring targets succeed, no one's gonna stay that long.

Track 1:

One of the things that I've heard, is anonymizing resumes because a lot of times when people hear DEI, they think we're hiring just to get certain numbers of bodies into the company. regardless of their skills or anything else. And that is absolutely not true. One way to make sure that you're bringing in the person that's best suited for the job and making sure you don't have any unconscious bias going into the hiring situation is anonymizing resumes. What all that means is you take off any kind of identification in terms of gender culture, race or whatever you take names off and all those kinds of identifying,

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

went to college, because if they went to a historically black university, then you're going to make an assumption as to it. You may take off languages, because if somebody says they speak Punjabi, you instantly have an idea of what they look like. you've gotta do all of those things.

Track 1:

but the organization has to be committed to do that

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

What's actually an inclusive culture?

Track 1:

Did we not just go and experience one of the most inclusive cultures we have ever experienced Deanna? And

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

were gone for two weeks? Okay, more like three weeks if you don't count the little itty bitty podcast I put out. That's partially because we were on vacation. We were on vacation on the JoCo cruise. what's the JoCo cruise?

Track 1:

that's right. It's for Jonathan Colton. He is the nerd indie rocker extraordinaire. If you don't know who he is and you're listening to our podcast, we are sure you would love him. So look up some of his music.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

If you've ever played Portal, you've heard his music, because he made the famous song, Still Alive. And he also did the music for the second Portal game, although none of those tunes were quite the banger that Still Alive was.

Track 1:

we went together on to the JoCo cruise. The thing that we noticed first without even stepping foot on the cruise is they pushed out a terms of conduct and those terms of conduct said to us what the culture was going to be like, even before we got on the

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

We weren't allowed to board the ship without first signing the Code of Conduct.

Track 1:

This code of conduct is what you would expect from any kind of organization that you are going to be a part of. this cruise had about, I think, 1, 500 folks on it. I believe Deanna,

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

around there,

Track 1:

All shapes, sizes, cultures backgrounds, what states they came from, gender identification.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

they came from.

Track 1:

That's right. We talked to somebody who was going back to England. We had all kinds of orientations, including a very strong group of polyamorous people.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

Everything. Not only did they have a code of conduct, but they emphasized it at the orientation meeting on the first day. They also mentioned that if you saw anyone either violate the code of conduct, or even just make you uncomfortable in any way, shape, or form, they had someone who was a dedicated listener. There was Multiple ways we could contact them. They also had what they called the cruise ship mom. If you had any problems, you could always go and talk to mom.

Track 1:

The other thing that was really great. I am a mom of a. Gender nonconforming child, we'll just leave it at that, and they had gender neutral bathrooms throughout the cruise ship. What they did is the JOCO staff, the day that we boarded the ship, went around and put new signage on all of the bathrooms

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

No, not all, just some of them. That way, if you were not comfortable in a gender neutral bathroom, there were still bathrooms available in your gender.

Track 1:

right. So the gender neutral bathrooms usually said, this is a gender neutral bathroom that has just stalls, or it would say it's a gender neutral bathroom that has stalls and urinals, and you could pick or choose which bathroom you went to. And there was a time I went in and somebody who identified male just went in the female bathroom. I didn't care. It didn't matter. It was all great. I have a child that is gender nonconforming and they literally have not gone to the bathroom in school for two and a half years. Because

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

you could have pulled that off. I can't, but apparently I also have a tiny bladder.

Track 1:

I think it's literally my child just does not drink at all. Almost. It is. And so to have a place where they freely could pick any bathroom, bump into any particular person in that bathroom, and none of those people would care. Just the thought of that brings tears to my eyes. It is such a small thing, but it's just so amazing. That's just one of a number of things that they do to actually show the code of conduct in action. What are some of the other things they did, Deanna?

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

Some of the other things, everyone was given a lanyard with a name tag so they could put their name on it and a little bit about themselves, they included pronoun stickers. Everyone had a pronoun sticker on their name tag. They had pins that you could attach to the lanyard that said, yes, come talk to me, or no, I want to be left alone right now, that you could change it out depending on your feeling. They had A huge variety of performers. Some of them were cis and traditional, some were non binary, some were trans, some, I have no bloody clue what they were, and it didn't really matter. And these people would talk about their experiences, One of the performers talked about, how close they came to suicide, for instance. Another one talked about, how they talked to their mother about getting hormone replacement therapy. It was an amazing chance where people really felt comfortable talking about the hard topics.

Track 1:

We also had a few African American performers. We had a Jewish performer who very much spoke about his religion as part of his act. We had somebody who was Hispanic. We had a ton of races when it came to performers as well. I already mentioned it before, but we did have a lot of people who just were not conforming in a number of ways. They worried a lot about those with disabilities. The one thing that they really liked about the ship is that it was relatively not perfect, but relatively easy to navigate if you were in a wheelchair or with a cane. And they made sure to make things very accessible for them as much as they could. There were those that were polyamorous and they had polyamorous meetups. They had, ace and Aro people as well.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

I gotta tell you, I had to Google what Ace and Aro meant. It's short for asexual, so someone who does not feel any sort of sexual pull towards any gender. Aero are the people, and I don't remember what it's short for, I am so sorry, bad me, but aero is short for people who don't feel romantic attraction.

Track 1:

And the final group was non binary, gender fluid, and gender queer. We had a prom, I remember one night, and a couple of fun meetups later in the evening where people could come dressed up. however made them comfortable. Those who were gender fluid were dressing what would be considered in society opposite of the gender that they present as normally. That was totally fun. Totally fine. I saw every hair color you could possibly imagine to the point that Deanna, now I'm going to be dying my hair pink. They just inspired me.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

I do want to mention that Kara was talking about all the different types of people she saw, but there were official meetings where you could go and discuss some of these non traditional things. You could talk about being polyamorous, you could talk about your disability. They had official meetings for those ace and aro people, and for the non binary, gender fluid, gender queer people. These were official, they were in the schedule, so you could do that. This was not a perfect cruise. They have this code of conduct, they have all this inclusion, but they did still have moderators on the internal social media of the cruise. Because some people are just gonna be dicks.

Track 1:

That is very true. We were able to meet up with somebody who was one of the people who created this forum. It's actually called TwitR, which we love, you know, like a pirate, rrr. We were able to meet somebody who was part of the team that developed it. And he spoke about, especially last year was relatively difficult. There was a lot of people who. Got a little angry as the week went on. They got tired. Maybe they overdid it. They were up late too, too often. And the moderators had to kind of take over overtime. This year, I think it was a little bit more of a love fest. And we did not hear much of there being problems on Twitter. People felt so committed to this code of conduct that all of the moderators were volunteers. They were actually taking time out of their vacation to moderate Twitter to make it a safe space for everybody else, because they wanted to keep that general culture of the cruise going and protected.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

it was wonderful. People were very comfortable expressing their authentic selves. You saw plenty of people cross dressing, you saw people in costumes. surprisingly, I saw A lot less people in really, really tiny skimpy clothing. Less than I would see on a normal cruise, which just occurred to me, but people covered their bits more on this cruise.

Track 1:

We like bit coverage.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

There were all sorts of pop up meetings. I talked about the official meetings for people with disabilities, for the polyamorous, etc. But there was also pop up meetings. People would come up and say, Hey, I'm interested in XYZ, do you want to get together? I attended a Star Trek meetup because, I am a hardcore Trekkie. And, both Cara and I attended a pop up about menopause where all the women got together and talked about how miserable they are.

Track 1:

That is very true. We are women of a certain age and we are experiencing certain discomforts and we were more than happy to hang out with other ladies having those same discomforts as well and to,, talk turkey.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

Very true. To give you an idea of how comfortable things were, there were various, Formal and informal ways of giving each other gifts. Yes, people were just randomly giving people gifts. There were formal ones, one which was called crack and post, which both Kara and I signed up for, where you ended up becoming part of a group of eight people and you had to deliver some sort of a gift to each of those seven people. The eighth person being yourself, of course, and they would give you gifts to there was also a maker's exchange, which was similar to Kraken's post only with handmade gifts. And since I have zero crafting genes, I was not participating in that one. But it wasn't just the formal ones are informal ones. There was some woman who went out and bought 90 little stuffed hedgehogs to give away. There were people who 3d printed Pokemon and hid them all around the ship. There were people who hid other things around the ship, pineapples, dinosaurs, various things like that. A lot of doors had some sort of a bag, or a yip yip, but or something that you could put things in, and people would just randomly go around and drop things in them. I know Karen, I multiple times would just sort of wander around and drop stickers or temporary tattoos in any bag we saw in a hallway.

Track 1:

It was just an absolute love fest. A lot of the things that I brought home is kind of those little gifts that we gave each other on the ship. I gave to my kids and now they're so excited because we're all planning to go back in two years in 2026. And my kids can't wait. I wish every place could have been like Joko Cruz. It's not perfection, but it is Aiming for everyone to operate at their best selves and being received with warmth and good wishes from those around you. And I wish every place could be like that.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

I've never experienced anything like that before. It was wonderful. where else can you wander around in a complete bustled dress and have people compliment you rather than think you're a weirdo?

Track 1:

The reason we bring this up is every culture can't be like this. The cruise has been around for, 15 years next year. This code of conduct has been in place since the beginning. Those who go back year after year, which there is a large community of people that go back year after year. They come from places where they cannot be their authentic selves. This is actually a place of reprieve for them, a place where they can fully express themselves for seven days and kind of let their hair down and feel a community envelop them. It's a little bit different than a corporate culture. It is a smaller number of people. They come with the expectation that the community is going to be the way it is. With a corporate culture, you have a lot of people kind of coming and going and things are a little bit different. Dean, I don't know if you have any ideas how this could translate into a corporate culture.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

some of it could start translating into a corporate culture. One of the things, those gender neutral bathrooms. You can start doing that. Not all your bathrooms, but, at least a couple in each building. That would be really handy. Most companies have got some sort of policies and procedures, but they don't actually emphasize a code of conduct which wouldn't be bad. A lot of organizations have created interest groups. We're talking like a women's council or, a black American council things like that,

Track 1:

like people together.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

They should. at our company, the Black Culture Network, which is our African American council, has some of the best programming around for helping you improve your career has nothing to do with what color you are. They just do a great job in helping people grow their career.

Track 1:

The other thing I will say about our Company is that we do do trick or treating at work and it is it is one of our most favorite things Deanna gives out the best stuff I I mean honestly everything like lit up and had glitter and Kids loved her I gave him a big bag of candy Each one of them. They probably got home and were like, Oh, this lady like did us right. But at the time there was no wow factor with the bag I gave them. That is one thing we do that is really cool that I think builds community. We seem to be so busy and so pushed to be productive that we don't understand that. Taking a little time out for things like that pays large dividends. A lot of people don't end up being as jazzed about it as you and I are.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

That's something you can think about. I know a lot of companies that'll have like a community day or a community half day where everyone gets together and does some sort of charity, which is wonderful, but maybe you should do it more than once a year. Maybe it shouldn't always be a charity. Maybe you should just have an affinity day. Everyone dresses your favorite character. Okay, there could be some issues depending on what characters they dress up, but see, and this, this is where lawyers ruin everything, everyone's goes, well, that sounds like a great idea, but we could get sued. And so nothing great ever happens.

Track 1:

What you're hitting on though is what's kind of cheap, easy, and fun?

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

Yeah.

Track 1:

Dan and I, when we come to work, We're like, how can we have fun today? we believe you should have fun at work. A lot of people get very, very focused on getting their job done. That's something that leads to burnout. Which I'm sure we will cover later. But, Find times to just have fun and through that fun you connect with your fellow workers and when you connect with your fellow workers you build community and when you build community you build a place you want to come and work.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

What we experienced at JoCo DEI just was it wasn't preached. It was so woven into the fabric of things. You didn't even think about it as a separate initiative. It just was. How can you get that happening at your company?

Track 1:

And with that we will leave you to think for the rest of the week.

deanna_1_03-31-2024_153740:

Talk to you later.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Deanna Stanley

Host
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Kara Burgan

Co-host

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