How EDI Took Over the Workplace

How have we got ourselves into a scenario where merely holding a dissenting opinion in what is meant to be a pluralistic society can result in the loss of your job and career? Why are employers, large and small, implementing policies and training which they think are well meaning but which often result in those same employers acting unlawfully, discriminating against employees and damaging their employee relations, colleague relations, engagement and ultimately, productivity?

There is a growing concern that well-meaning but deeply flawed execution of policies and training in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI/DEI) has had exactly the opposite impact than the one intended. The Department of Business and Trade published an in-depth objective report in late March which highlights this and urges urgent action to course-correct. The Dynata survey data behind the Free Speech Union’s independent report indicate that the majority of workers who have been through some form of EDI training, some 63%, felt that the contents of the training conflicted with their own opinions and beliefs. More disconcertingly, 12% of those surveyed say that they have witnessed someone being sacked because of this conflict. Even if 90% of those witnesses were mistaken, extrapolating to the wider population that’s over 200,000 who may have been sacked for what George Orwell called ‘wrongthink’. And when you see what has happened to the likes of Graham Linehan, the man behind Father Ted, it’s not a huge leap to conclude that if it is bad in the world of celebrity, what is it like for ‘normal’ folk without a platform to defend themselves from? Furthermore, if we take those who have been sacked out of the equation for a minute, the impact on staff engagement and morale cannot be underestimated and this may go somewhere to explaining the disastrous productivity figures in the U.K. economy in recent years.

So, once again, how on earth did we get into this situation and what do we do about it?

This is the first in a series of three articles I am writing examining how this has happened. EDI has been present in U.K. employers for over 20 years now but it is only fairly recently that it has become all encompassing to the point where it controls employer culture to such an extent that sometimes even CEOs are too terrified to challenge it in their own companies and Government ministers in their own portfolios. Here, in part one we examine how the Covid crisis and the death of George Floyd turbocharged workplace EDI from 2020. Part two will examine how the creep of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) policies in the investment sector and in the Civil Service has forced EDI through supply chains into small employers. Part three will examine the impact of all this and the various approaches to fixing it.

So, how the death of George Floyd and lockdown saw the turbo-charging of EDI of sometimes highly dubious quality into the British workplace.

By summer 2020 we were well into the Covid crisis, HR departments were up to their ears managing how to keep people working in a society that had closed down – working from home issues, staff welfare, furlough, sickness, social distancing, vaccine policies, testing policies – all of which needed careful navigation with an eye on what was happening but also on the long term risk of any hasty decisions. U.K. HR departments were, on the whole, careful to support the concept of bodily autonomy and to resist vaccine mandates that many other Western nations adopted and which are now being examined by those nations’ courts.

Then on May 25th we had the tragic death of George Floyd. The reaction to this incident was extraordinary and the speed at which it went viral was astonishing, fuelled by millions stuck at home and isolated, viewing the world through the letterbox slit of social and mainstream media. Now I am not going to discuss the subsequent BLM protests here. Rather, we are looking at how this impacted British businesses and employers. Now, there was a great deal of outcry in the U.K. as elsewhere and we saw many employers openly express their concern and many wanted to be seen to ‘do something’. So HR teams suddenly had CEOs and boards demanding that they implement initiatives like Unconscious Bias Training, convinced that they had serious systemic racist issues in their workplaces despite the ample evidence that this was very rare in the U.K. There were also demands to up the ante on EDI, and all this at a time when HR teams were massively stretched.

So, what do you do when you lack the inhouse resources to address a situation? You outsource and you recruit. This resulted in a huge demand for external EDI training and an equal demand for EDI specialists. The problem being that both were in very short supply in the U.K. market. Any high demand market sees a rapid increase in supply and a drop in quality. This situation was no exception. The USA was somewhat better supplied for both and training businesses seeking to meet the demand adopted American EDI training courses without paying attention to the content. DEI training in the USA has a huge focus on race, which may be unsurprising given the often turbulent history of race relations in that nation. Unfortunately, many of these courses were copied or purchased by U.K. trainers and delivered into our employers in the U.K. without consideration that the content may be both irrelevant and potentially damaging to employee relations. This resulted in the rapid adoption of highly controversial Critical Race Theory (CRT) in many U.K. institutions. I am not going to debate CRT here; suffice to say that it’s caused major issues when implemented into the U.K. workplace as gospel. In particular, it alters the definition of what constitutes ‘racism’ and that definition conflicts with that of the U.K. Equality Act. It’s essential that employers stick to the Equality Act version to avoid acting unlawfully.

Now the UK has its own history of race relations and tensions that we need to address in our own way. What doesn’t help is adopting those of a foreign nation which has had its own issues in this area and to assume that they apply here. Here’s an example, when a colleague was window shopping for an EDI training company in September 2020 she was briefed on course content by one provider where one module looked at ‘the impact of segregation laws on contemporary systemic racism’. She questioned the training company about this: why was this relevant to the UK? We have never had peacetime racial segregation laws, certainly in modern times. The only one I can recall was the ban on English and Scots marrying in the border regions in the 16th C to try and curb the organised banditry that was rife in the area at the time. Apparently the response from the trainer wasn’t satisfactory as they couldn’t explain why this module, designed for the USA where racial segregation laws did exist, was in any way relevant to the UK.

EDI jobs have been all the rage from 2020, and a large number of quite inexperienced executives were elevated into positions where they suddenly became responsible for a significant chunk of employee training and the consequential oversight of much of employer culture. Unfortunately, this saw an influx of radical activists as well as those who lacked knowledge of U.K. employment law into such roles. Many were very young, their previous experience of organisational culture being their university where radical ideas can flourish but should probably be left in the junior common room. Judging by some of the output from such, there were some serious issues around what they were proposing. For example an Unconscious Bias Training Course at one organisation we encountered essentially took the Critical Race Theory idea that all white employees were born racists. We pointed out to the HR Director of that company that, given two thirds of her employees were white, middle aged women in a care profession, it probably wasn’t the best idea to accuse them all of racism, on the highly racist basis that they had been born with white skin, and that this might backfire horribly given it was unlawful. Indeed, where HR Directors and leadership had the time, such policies were tempered, but in some organisations they were adopted hook, line and sinker, resulting in unlawful practices entering the employer-employee relationship, including the steamrollering of the faith and belief guarantees within the Equality Act 2010, which meant many minority groups themselves were caught as ‘dissidents’.

In some organisations, the lack of EDI teams or departments and the desire to be seen to ‘do something’ resulted in the appointment of ‘action groups’ of minorities within the organisation. So we saw BAME, LGBTQ+, disability groups and such being established and tasked to come up with policies to make employers more inclusive and welcoming to individuals identifying with those groups. In quite a few scenarios I have come across, this degenerated into an absolute disaster, causing conflict, anger, resentment and in some cases disciplinary situations within the groups themselves, let alone in the rest of the organisation. Sensible HR Directors quietly wound down this idea, others, not so sensible or perhaps out of fear or due to being busy, allowed these groups to set the agenda. And they did, often with the same sort of fervour as those citizen groups that were so characteristic of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Only the result was, thankfully, not the guillotining of dissenters but the hunting out and persecution of any employee or manager who challenged the findings of the action groups.

And of course all of this was amplified by the lack of person-to-person contact that always tempers tempers. It is a rule of the modern age in which we live that people will behave appallingly on social media or over a video meeting in ways they would never dream of doing in a first person interaction. The workplace is no exception and the filter of those ‘coffee machine’ chats which do so much to knit cohesion in the workplace, the informal conversations that remind us all we are flawed human beings, was removed by lockdown and distancing.

The reality uncovered in the Government report and the FSU’s survey mentioned above as well what we see with our own eyes is causing concern to many in the HR sector. CEOs now demand to know why employee engagement is on its knees, staff turnover is so high, productivity levels have cratered and creativity disappeared. It’s becoming clear that the rush to implement EDI after George Floyd has resulted in the widespread adoption of quite radical policies and political partisanship that was unthinkable in the British workplace a mere 10 years ago. This is causing major problems for the employer-employee dynamic, colleague relations and ultimately productivity. We will look into what has happened and what we can do about it in part three. In the meantime, coming next: how corporate and public sector procurement forced EDI down the supply chain.

C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack. He is a founder of Fair Job, an accreditation and support service for small businesses to help them navigate the minefields of EDI and HR.