An absolutely excellent dive into the world of workplace ERGs, diversity theater and the employee voice, by meganrosedickey.
Tech companies use ERGs as tools to foster inclusion and support workers. Sometimes, however, ERGs have the opposite effect.
Prior to Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub in 2018, Blacktocats had"tremendous sway and power over the organization," Jones said. Post-acquisition, however,"our influence diminished almost overnight." It felt like Blacktocats had been relegated to simply a cultural organization, he said. "I focused on what I needed to do to separate myself from being put in a compromising position and having to choose between my career, and my race and my people," he said.GitHub did not specifically address Jones' experience, but a spokesperson said the company is"dedicated to building a community and team that reflects the world we live in and pushes the boundaries of software innovation.
Some of the basic guidelines, Wheeless said, are that management should not pick the participants of the ERG, should ensure employee leaders rotate every six months or a year, should not run meetings and should ensure the ERG functions as a"live suggestion box." It's also important that the communications between the ERG and the company are not bilateral, he said.
GAIN had a variety of goals at the time, Yazzie said. The group was focused on language preservation, donations to organizations, ways to help Native communities outside of Google and more. "That was the most frustrating part," he said."They were willing to tout these things and go to lobbyists and talk about policy and all these projects we were doing, but no one was getting paid to do that work."
In a statement to Protocol, a Google spokesperson said Google has marched in the San Francisco Pride parade for more than a decade. The spokesperson added that Google is"grateful" for SF Pride's partnership and leadership. "The net effect was we had a lot of practical needs, which were not getting acknowledged by [the Gayglers]," they told Protocol."And when trans Googlers did try to do things, we very often found that there were people affiliated with Gayglers who came out with pretty well-rehearsed talking points as to why we shouldn't try to make meaningful change."
The playbook, according to Knapp, includes offering workers"small measures of personal power or fame, or whatever they want in exchange for being complicit in the system."Hazel Court, a senior software engineer at Mapbox, knew gender diversity was a problem in tech at her previous role at Uber. That's partly why she joined the Lady Eng and Women of Infra/Lady Eng Infra ERGs at Uber.
"They had this advocacy role to try to speak some truth to power to advocate for, like, 'Let's get diversity numbers public or internally,' or advocate for change at the company around hiring practices," she said."And that often didn't amount to anything." "As companies often do when they have a union drive going on, they will talk about these initiatives that they had been thinking about doing before the union drive was known in order to say they're working on things and things will get better if you vote no," Court said."And that was talked about at Mapbox."
Some companies also pay their ERG leaders. LinkedIn, for example, announced earlier this year it would start paying its ERG leaders $10,000 for every year of service. At Slack, the company has"always tried to compensate folks" who have led ERGs, VP of people Dawn Sharifan told Protocol. Kinema said the organizing perspective pertaining to ERGs is that they function as company unions by virtue of them being reliant on a company for its existence.
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