Employee Groups : Community Building or Ghettoizing

I had a discussion recently with some HR team members at a large financial institution who have Canadian operations but are mainly in the U.S. and the issues surrounding employee groups for affinity groups came up. If you're not clear what I mean by that many organizations sponsor, support or promote "diversity groups" of their employees. So for example you might have an "African-American" employee group, or an "Aboriginal Employee Support Group" or a "LGBT in the workplace group".

Now again these sorts of groups or employee organizations do exist on both sides of the border although they tend to be more popular south of the border. Why is that? Well for one thing, at least in Canada, there are mixed views on the subject.

The two main schools of thought on this are that either it's a great idea that fosters a sense of community spirit and belonging within a group of employees or it's a terrible idea that creates "ghettos" of employee cliques arranged along lines of ethnicity, skin colour or other groups.

While I can see how, to a certain extent, groups that are by definition exclusive do seem to detract from the goal of inclusion I think that seeing these groups in a very negative light is to miss the point. Employee engagement has become such a "hot" topic, especially in light of the economically uncertain times of late when there is plenty to distract employees, and yet engagement of diverse employees is for many simply an afterthought.

The disconnect that employees can feel from their place of employment is magnified very much for many diverse individuals because, on top of the regular issues, they can feel like "outsiders" at their place of work. In this line anything that an employer can do to make their employees feel more at home in the workplace is going to lead to higher engagement and better productivity.

And at heart that's what these groups are about. Building communities, even smaller ones that may be in some ways exclusionary is an important step in making employees feel at home in an organization.

It's interesting to note that the companies who really "get it", those that engage with all diverse employment groups and not those just covered by legislation, are far more likely to have these groups and tend to do more work to encourage their creation. It speaks I think both to the reality of these groups as a vital part of an effective diversity strategy and the bottom-line fact that diversity inclusion has a positive effect on the success vector of a business.

The idea of embracing diversity in an inclusive way is important, and we should not lose sight of that. But encouraging groups to celebrate their differences with each other isn't harmful to that cause, in fact, in the end it brings us much closer to that goal.