At the beginning of this year I accepted a new role that permitted me to work from home pretty much all the time. There are occasional meetings or workshops that must transpire in person, but these are categorically the exceptions that prove the rule. However, while distractions at home are definitely fewer, I am curiously less productive there, and I have struggled for quite a while to conjure an explanation. This article might be at long last a good start: scientificamerican/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/ Like many of my fb friends (indeed, INCLUDING many), my workplace associates are a gaggle of deadline-beset analysis-addled scenario-wrestling distractions. While pretty much to a person I have affection for them all, I expected relief from all of those distractions to be a boon to my productivity. The opposite has proven to be the case; I have lately been going into the office far more than strictly necessary, in part for the people, but no less for their collective distractions. Their timely and mercurial concerns, however divergent from mine, always get me thinking in new ways, going in different directions, and often a swathe of great innovations can stem from something as innocuous as eavesdropping on the discussions happening all around me there. But beyond being clever and interesting, my associates are also a pretty diverse bunch, and while this is stimulating to me on a personal level, it had never occurred to me that it might be so on a professional one as well. The article digs into why & how that can be, but here is the conundrum that occurs to me... Suppose your workplace is dominated by one particular cross-section of label combinations – gender, religion, ethnicity, political leanings, whatever. Now suppose there is a job opening, and two equally qualified candidates apply – one of that combination, but the other of some other (suppose radically different) such combination. If there is a scientific basis for believing diversity enhances productivity, should the latter not be more preferred than the equally qualified but less diversity-inducing former? Anyone with any sense knows it is wrong to discriminate against others on labels like these, and beyond that I believe most people (most of my friends at least) share my visceral disgust for it. But if diversity really does have tangible & scientifically measurable benefits, how can employers not be tempted to discriminate in favor of combinations less represented in their organization? Put somewhat more paradoxically, would such means of DIVERSITY-building not in truth be exactly the same sin of DISCRIMINATION in disguise?
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 16:08:24 +0000
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