By Susan Letterman White
Employee Resources Groups (ERGs) historically have been an effective tool for developing workplace inclusion. They are a structure or grouping of people who are exposed to each other, form relationships, and share information and experiences. Organizations that want to be known as places where everyone has a fair chance to succeed and as having a positive reputation with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion discovered the invaluable nature of networks of voluntary, employee-organized communities that foster connections between employees that share similar interests, characteristics, or backgrounds. Most commonly, employees of similar ethnicities, gender identities, or sexual orientations form employee resource groups to give them a safe space to discuss their experiences at work. They build psychological safety and give a collective voice to individuals that share a sense of marginalization or a voice that has been underrepresented in workplace narratives.
What if we reimagined the possibilities of ERGs? Would it be possible to structure them in a way that expertise and power are also exchanged across differences in addition to information and experiences as relationships are formed? We think of ERGs as groups of people with significant commonalities. What if we thought about how to bring together people who have more differences than things in common? Could the right differences create the context where the relationships lead to an exchange of expertise for valuable opportunities?
I have two examples to offer, which I call Community + Employee Resource Groups (CERGs). They can serve as models for future design: the Boston gym, Inner City Weightlifting and the New York City research collaboration with local universities, Town + Gown. Each of these is attractive to a diverse group of people with different skills and needs. They are win-win for the people involved and an additional “win” for the larger community. They build valuable relationships across differences, the necessary ingredient for creating more diversity at higher levels of power and leadership in the workplace and community in which that workplace exists.
The Boston gym Inner City Weightlifting (ICW) pairs trainers from lower-SES backgrounds with more affluent clients. The trainers have the expertise and this flips the power dynamics, otherwise based on SES and creates a genuine form of inclusion. Trainers get access to new networks and opportunities and clients gain new insights into complex social problems, like inequitable incarceration in addition to weight training expertise.
New York City’s Town+Gown is a systemic action research program that focuses on the Built Environment. The program engages students interested in local urban planning in research questions of importance to various city agencies involved in construction and development projects. It is a public-private partnership among entrepreneurs, city agencies and the academic community. The City gets exposure to talented students and researchers in local universities and students get exposure to the City workforce. Universities are one area that often focus on building internal student body diversity, making them a good source of City exposure to a pool of talented people across a variety of differences. Cities and state governments with easy access to local universities and an interest in building a diverse leadership pipeline should consider launching a Town +Gown program. The added benefit is that the design of the program is to come up with innovative solutions to important problems.
The benefits of CERGs make sense and are aligned with the data recently published in two research papers on increasing economic mobility of low socioeconomic status (SES) people through exposure to high SES people. The key message is that in a context that both exposes people to others who are socially diverse and encourages the development of true friendships, it is possible to create the exchange of valuable benefits that include the extension of a valuable opportunity by a person who has access to that value.
Social economic status (SES) is the relative position and power a person has in a society based on a combination of their social and economic position, access to resources, and work experience. Many studies have shown that if you are connected to people who are more educated or affluent you are more likely to be the beneficiary of valuable information, mentoring, and job prospects. It can also shape your aspirations. Additionally, there are many studies that have shown how a person’s social networks influence their adherence to social norms. These two recent papers show that it is not exposure between these two SES groups is not enough. The context in which the exposure takes place makes a difference. The context must be one where friendships are forged. The paper introduces the concept of “friending bias,” defined as “the tendency for people with low SES to befriend people with high SES at lower rates even conditional on exposure.”
Policies and processes shape contexts. For example, smaller groups are more likely to encourage friendships. Contexts where the power dynamics are flipped is another. The Boston gym Inner City Weightlifting (ICW) pairs trainers from lower-SES backgrounds with more affluent clients. The trainers have the expertise and this flips the power dynamics, otherwise based on SES and creates a genuine form of inclusion. Trainers get access to new networks and opportunities and clients gain new insights into complex social problems, like inequitable incarceration in addition to weight training expertise. Peer mentoring programs, like this, that flip the delivery of expertise will empower as the expert the otherwise socially marginalized and underrepresented group and make dependent the otherwise socially empowered group. This re-equilibration opens the door for a real friendship to happen and for the sharing of valuable opportunities for subsequent SES change possible.
Our natural tendencies for developing friendships and the flip side, the friending bias, can be reduced if we understand how to create the right context so that exposure across differences gets the right conditions to make a difference. It comes as no surprise that friends are often those who cross paths with regularity, such as coworkers, classmates, and people we run into at the gym. That’s the exposure piece of the equation. Social identity, it seems, is also part of the equation. Apparently, we like people who support our current view of ourselves.
Communication facilitates the first two essential behaviors: self-disclosure and supportiveness, both necessary for intimacy. We must be willing to extend ourselves, to share our lives with our friends, to keep them abreast of what's going on with us. Likewise, we need to listen to them and offer support.
What makes a friendship https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200611/friendship-the-laws-attraction
