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A note to our employees

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21–30 of 421 posts

Re: A note to our employees

#21
post #16

Mandatory sexual harassment training sounds quite disturbing. Anybody can comment in detail how it is conducted? Is it really mandatory for everyone or only for men?

What are you talking about? Mandatory sexual harassment training is standard for managers; California requires it for companies with 50 employees or more: https://www.dfeh.ca.gov/sexualharassmentpreventiontraining/

Re: A note to our employees

#22
post #15

Looks like Google has tried to dodge directly acquiescing to most of the walkout's demands. The chief diversity officer will "continue" to report to the leadership team, rather than being promoted. No mention of the employee representative on the board, either. Pichai states they'll add detail to their sexual harassment report, but doesn't commit to release it publicly, as demanded. Google also didn't address pay ine…

> No mention of the employee representative on the board, either. Can someone who knows better than me explain whether this is actually a reasonable request? It sounded ridiculous to me but I admit I am not knowledgeable in these matters.

Elisabeth Warren is working on a bill to make this a requirement.

Personally I think its sensible to have some accountability to your employees, not just your shareholders.

Re: A note to our employees

#23
post #16

Mandatory sexual harassment training sounds quite disturbing. Anybody can comment in detail how it is conducted? Is it really mandatory for everyone or only for men?

i'm not sure what industry you work in, but i've had this at every single job i've held—even ones before the SJW bogeyman existed

Re: A note to our employees

#24

Serious question: Does the Chief Diversity Officer include diversity of ideas and experience? Or is it just skin deep like it sounds? Edit: Lots of up and down votes. Why is this question so controversial? I'd like to see an argument as to why it's an invalid or flawed question.

I don't have any experience with Google in this regard (beyond looking into the Damore case, which is a bit muddy because of the amount of public pressure Google was facing [0]). However, in my experience, diversity programs and officers tend to be about liability and checkboxes; and there is no legal checkbox for diversity of ideas. Plus, surface diversity is much easier to measure; and you optimize for your metrics…

> [0] Ideally a diversity officer would stand up for Damore.

That claim depends entirely on how you interpret Damore's behavior. Tolerance does not and must not require tolerating intolerance [0].

I'm not stating a claim as to whether or not Damore's behavior should be considered intolerance. I don't have a take on that. But without having some opinion on that, you can't claim a priori that a diversity officer is obligated to enable his views.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Re: A note to our employees

#25

Serious question: Does the Chief Diversity Officer include diversity of ideas and experience? Or is it just skin deep like it sounds? Edit: Lots of up and down votes. Why is this question so controversial? I'd like to see an argument as to why it's an invalid or flawed question.

Serious response: Framing it as an 'Or' implies the two are mutually exclusive. They are not. Diversity is fact. The world is diverse in a variety of ways (skin, eyes, experiences, gender, language, nationality, etc.). Inclusion is the action. Equity is the goal. In the OKR framework, being able to measure your progress towards the goal is important. The real question is, which aspects of people who work for your com…

> If implied in your question that the goal should be equity in 'thought', how do you propose that is measured?

OP mentioned "ideas & experience," not "thought," which seems like an intentional framing as something unbounded and immeasurable.

Diversity of ideas could be measured by the average number of options/solutions that are seriously considered (and investigated/piloted) over the course of multiple projects for a team.

Diversity of experience seems somewhat obvious to me. But if you want clarity on this as well, the idea would be to value various types of experiences in the same way that companies value diverse outward traits like gender, sex, skin color, racial identity, etc. It's a balance. You could hire a person of each gender/skin color combination, but if they all grew up in the New England suburbs and all of them went to either MIT or Harvard, you are generally NOT going to have a diversity of experience, even though everyone _looks_ different. On the other end of the scale, you could hire one person from each type of school, big state school, small technical school, ivy league, "public ivy", liberal arts college, bootcamp graduate, etc. Hire people native to your country/culture, and people who come from a different part of the world. But if they are all white men, you are not going to realize as much benefit.

I think it's important to make an attempt to combine all of these concepts to come up with something that approaches the concept of "diversity of thought."

Re: A note to our employees

#26
post #16

Mandatory sexual harassment training sounds quite disturbing. Anybody can comment in detail how it is conducted? Is it really mandatory for everyone or only for men?

It is conducted like every other sort of corporate training around risk factors for the company, discussing principles and examples of violations and grey areas. Other examples are ethics e.g. "should I take a bribe?" and security e.g. "should i pick up a usb key in the parking lot and put it into a work computer?". Similarly the answer to "should I sexually harass my co-workers?" is also no.

Re: A note to our employees

#27
post #16

Mandatory sexual harassment training sounds quite disturbing. Anybody can comment in detail how it is conducted? Is it really mandatory for everyone or only for men?

i'm not sure what industry you work in, but i've had this at every single job i've held—even ones before the SJW bogeyman existed

[deleted]

Re: A note to our employees

#28
post #16

Mandatory sexual harassment training sounds quite disturbing. Anybody can comment in detail how it is conducted? Is it really mandatory for everyone or only for men?

Mandatory sexual harassment training is performed by every employer in California who doesn't want to get sued for someone getting sexually harassed at work.

The purpose of it is usually not educating people, but providing a liability shield. Juries don't look kindly when Billy was harassed by his manager, and Billy's employer couldn't even be arsed to put Billy through a two-hour course, that spells out why harassment is a bad idea.

On the other hand, if Billy's manager did go through this training, and harassed Billy, then the company can blame everything on the manager.

Re: A note to our employees

#29
post #16

Mandatory sexual harassment training sounds quite disturbing. Anybody can comment in detail how it is conducted? Is it really mandatory for everyone or only for men?

It's common in the U.S., and the second question is the sort of thing that would get you sent back to take the class again.

Generally I've seen they use the "stoplight" model, in that some behaviors are "green", near universally accepted as non-harassing, some are "red", near universally rejected as harassing, and some are "yellow" meaning individuals vary. "Red" behaviors should get you fired immediately, while "yellow" often puts some burden on the offended party to speak up about it, and it only becomes harassment if it continues.

Google's training when I took it a decade ago focused almost exclusively on the yellow/gray area and was pretty interesting because of it. Other trainings I've suffered through focused on the red zone which felt obvious, awkward, and dull.

Re: A note to our employees

#30
Look at the overspecific promises going forward!

- We will make arbitration optional for individual sexual harassment and sexual assault claims

Ordinary harassment and assault is still covered by forced arbitration, as is systemic sexual harassment. Good to know.

- We will update and expand our mandatory sexual harassment training

Everyone knows already that mandatory XY training serves to deflect liability from the company. If the previous instance wasn't good enough for its purpose, the new one will certainly be.

Why not just follow policy in the employee handbook? They usually have a section on harassment and appropiate conduct, and form part of the employment contract.

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