Slide 1: a group of ~20 white males in suits together in times square
Slide 2: three Kenyan olympic medalists standing together in uniform
Slide 3: a stock photo with a dozen men and women of various races and dress talking in an office conference room
The HR person then said "The answer to all of these questions is 'Yes.' here at company we value the diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives of each and every one of our employees. We encourage all of you to offer your suggestions and feedback, and bring your unique perspective to bear in your work here."
I was blown away. Never once has HR made me feel more valued and empowered.
"And I’ve often told people a story– there can be 12 white blue-eyed blonde men in a room and they are going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation."
(https://beta.techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/apple-diversity-head-...)
She departed Apple soon after, though I don't have the evidence to make the stronger statement that she departed because of the remark.
Personally I always worked better with people who are similar to me in behavior and attitude. It's always a challenge trying to work with people who are very different. I don't mean different race - I mean different personality to the degree that it's super annoying.
You can't say it never worked even once for a trainee. It probably works with some of them. But for some it also kills productivity and incentivizes job flight when your trainees could be working productively and enjoying their jobs.
It's a bit like the death penalty- say for the sake of argument that having a death penalty on the books, in locale X, deters 10% of all murders there. Is 10% enough to call it a deterrent or not?
In terms of my personal experience, I learned some things in the compulsory sessions I've had to attend in various workplaces, but I don't suspect I'd ever have been a problem to my employers without them. A few people I've sat next to in this training still "offended" even after attending (or signing in then leaving) the courses.
In the end, I suspect it's mostly a cost-saving CYA measure, which mitigates damages when the company is inevitably taken to court ("You mean to say, Ms. HR director, that you never created a mandatory training program, not even a handbook?" "This is why, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client deserves 3x $50M instead of $50M, for the horrors he/she had to endure working at company X")
I mean you can honestly believe this and at the same time someone has a completely different perception of you.
> for some it also kills productivity and incentivizes job flight
I've never heard of anyone leaving a job due to job training. I've heard and seen plenty leave due to a lack of it.
Imagine job training which is mandatory for staff but skipped by the upper-level executives, when it was one of their incidents that kicked off the whole reaction. Also imagine it is conducted in a very haphazard, incompetent, and counterproductive manner. One day a week for months, on all kinds of topics. Your deliverables schedule is not reduced but rather accelerated to make it even less enjoyable.
Anecdata is great, but those leaving (or avoiding) jobs that have that kind of managerial incompetence don't answer the surveys as "too much job training" even if that's what it was. There's no upside to making that your lead reason.
I've seen lots of people quit because a company is too stuffy/sterile/formal.
While I avoid engaging in such, I've directly observed it, and been on the receiving end -- what was done to me was illegal, but it was a 1:1 with no witnesses.
There's a useful purpose in mentioning this. Particularly for people newer and less experienced in the workforce: When co-workers and bosses won't email, IM, or otherwise write with regard to a topic. Nor address it in a group. When someone out of the blue invites you into an office, meeting room, or other private space to discuss it.
Ask yourself, "Why?"
This is one of those cases where your intuition may catch on and manifest, first. If something seems "off" about a topic or line of communication, consider it more closely.
Also works when dealing with third parties. For example, if you are dealing with a salesperson who only ever "talks" about features. Especially 1:1. Best to verify what you're being told, elsewhere, and agree to nothing until you do. (And, if you can, find someone else to deal with who's more straightforward. Not "friendly", but direct and forthright in their communications.)
Do some googling of “Enron email corpus analysis” or similar things for examples.
It’s very easy for someone to say even innocuous things that in a different context sound damning or infer a state of mind that may or may not be accurate, but can give someone a way to dig into more detail.
My first experience was the required business ethics training. It was a Netflix style (and netflix production quality) mini-series. I had originally planned to just let it run in the background while I did real work on a different desktop, but it honestly pulled me in. There was the occasional awkward line, but they had good actors who sold it. You actually care about the characters and their conflicts. The company just announced a second season, and there are honest to goodness water cooler rumors about it. Is John gonna get fired? What about the obvious chemistry between the two sales team members? Really, it was shockingly engaging.
Then I did the diversity in hiring training video. I rolled my eyes in advance of the inevitable American hyper-sensitivity (I'm in Europe, we do a lot of eye rolling at you guys lately)... And then actually learned a ton about unconscious bias in research, hiring practices to try and avoid it, and some of the things that would have tripped ME up. It definitely had an impact on how I interview candidates.
After that I had my first onsite training. An afternoon of diversity and inclusion, involving a group of improv artists trying out different scenarios/approaches, and leading frank discussion with the audience. I discovered that I've internalized a fair bit of racism in my home environment (as the victim), and it really made me think about how to create a more visibly safe environment for potential LGBTQ people on my team.
Training at MS has been fantastic; I'm honestly looking for some follow-up courses in our leadership series, and some others. So it IS possible to produce good, engaging, and meaningful corporate training courses.
All you need is the resources of Microsoft to do it. :)
Longer answer: No 30 minute exercise is going to instill in someone that the behavior they have had normalized throughout their entire life by those around them is flawed. I mean have you ever tried to tell a C developer there are alternatives?
Where I've worked, shitty people get fired. They don't need to be tolerated.
"We've had racial sensitivity training and fired the offending manager" can be the difference between settling a discrimination lawsuit relatively cheaply and getting taken to the cleaners in a civil case with legs.
Just look at what Symantec did to Google for proof of that (sorry don’t have a link, but, haha, just Google it).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-oB6DN5dYWo
(Warning: bloody. Campy, funny, but bloody)
Whether an app is the best way to provide such training is a different question.
This. I have received excellent workplace training, but never through an app. Actual human instructors can do things that apps can't like discuss the experiences of individuals in the class, or respond to questions about subtle nuances in behavior.
Doing training via an app is IMO, a way for the company to check off that you've been trained, whether or not it was useful. Online training is good for those things that don't require much thought like fire safety or office ergonomics. It's all but useless for things like harassment training.
Of course that guy kept losing jobs for it. :-/ I don't know if he ever really learned. So I dunno.
I think that training like this is especially good for engineers because we tend to have a fixed way of interacting with people and often don't notice when it doesn't work. Being taught specific ways to recognize that and tailor your approach is very useful.
This actually is exactly one of those things that can't be taught by an app. Only a real person will say "your tone is off-putting, try saying it this way..."
This is just one example. A lot of this material is useful not just for not getting fired, but also for getting along and getting stuff done better.
"This training is not about telling you not to harass in the workplace. You already know that. It's about learning how to handle harassment cases sensitively if they come to your attention."
Needless to say, workplace harassment does happen, so it's good to at least understand your institutional options, should they become relevant.
I think everything that stuck (actually made a difference) only stuck because of repetition. We had meetings once a week and eventually came back around to the same topics.
With that experience in mind now I approach all company training in a more positive attitude. Sure most of it is useless but every so often there is something to gain so might as well make the most of it.
We went over the standard stuff, like foot rests under desks, but he also checked our posture, helped us find more comfortable ways to sit, and recommended different chairs to people that had back issues.
It sounds silly, but I only spent ten minutes with him at max. From that ten minutes:
* I learned how to sit so that my posture is correct. I'm yet to have any back issues after a decade of programming, so it's worked well so far!
* My bosses were told that employees should move around for at least 5 minutes every hour. This in itself was fantastic, as it forced people to get out of their chairs and interact with each other.
* Those that needed foot rests were given them, along with arm rests, suitable mice/keyboards, etc. Since I did some freelance stuff at home at the time, he suggested using a trackball either at work or at home to switch things up. I still have that trackball mouse, and it helps with the stress that constant mouse-use puts on your hands.
* He recommended those with bad backs to a specialist shop that deals with special office equipment. My boss, who had suffered with a bad back for years, switched his chair to what was essentially a spring on wheels, and his back got better every week. A few months later, he was playing football for the first time in years.
It's not strictly training, for a minimal amount of time he offered a service that helped more people than a lot of standard office/workplace training. A few years later, at my old workplace we brought a similar person in at my recommendation, and the benefits were visible all over again. If you're a manager, and you're thinking of getting some new equipment in, or are thinking about health and safety, I definitely recommend this.
My only gripe with sexual harrassment training is that it focuses too much on the subtle/annoying harassment stuff and doesn't prepare people for dealing with an actual sexual assault.
On a different tack, I am part of an allegedly marginalized group. I would love if they replaced the infantilizing trainings with videos and podcasts featuring people from my group talking about technology, talking about their careers in technology, and dressed in a wide variety of professional attires and not just what is stereotypical for my group. But then they'd have to do that for every allegedly marginalized group and I'd spend half my week in diversity training. So I'd prefer if they let me code. If my coworkers need to be babied in order to not commit crimes on work premises, maybe they shouldn't have been hired in the first place.
Quality - be mindful and consistent about how dates, numbers are written and records are kept.
Bullying - behavior may make other people feel uncomfotable in way I cannot see.
Privacy - what PII data is and isn't.
Mental Health - don't joke about it, generally 10% of people are suffering. Look for signs, come from care.
Information security - don't share creds, don't leave machines unlocked, be mindful about what I click.
And the move to the social model of disability instead of the medical one was an issue that I had not really considered and I found interesting - I am disabled BTW (of the invisible kind)
I don't think you can really learn how to code without just doing it. Someone may say it's a "learning style" issue, but I've come to believe learning style differences are overblown when teaching "method", e.g. cooking, dancing, programming, drawing, how to play an instrument. You can read all day about how to play a violin and still be garbage until you pick it up and play it.
1. Legally required training. 2. Training to prevent problems that have actually occurred at this business. 3. Training as a means of firing with cause.
People learning something new is just a bonus.
Neosho, Mo
Better than Boot Camp.
