Problem
It was 7:00 am on a Monday morning as Alex Francis watched the sun rise from his 20th floor corner office in Toronto's financial district. Alex was recently hired as the new CEO of City Shuttle Inc., replacing long time CEO Bill Thatcher who retired a few months earlier. With roughly 20 years of experience in industry, Alex was well positioned to finally take the helm at City Shuttle (CS). He was both excited and nervous to begin this new chapter in his career. He had learned from the many mistakes made by both himself and others at previous companies and was determined, this time, to run City Shuttle right! The first issue that Alex knew he had to tackle was the high turnover and low morale among employees. Alex had met with workers at various levels and areas of the organization and found that CS employees across the board were unhappy and unmotivated. The marketing team subtly complained of unfair treatment by an unnamed supervisor, while drivers were much more vocal about their disdain for the new mobile booking system that the previous CEO had installed before he left. An important feature of the new system is the ability for customers to see driver's profiles, which includes a first name, photo, short statement, and the number of years the driver has been with the company. This allowed customers to personally select a driver based on the profile information. CS marketing department believed this would help create consumer engagement and, hopefully, a lasting relationship between CS drivers and their clients. However, drivers claimed that since the introduction of personal driver profiles, female, racialized and immigrant drivers had received markedly fewer bookings than before the introduction of driver profiles and customer choice bookings. Most concerning of all, Alex noted that there were two separate sexual harassment allegations against different managers (one in the technology team, and the other in sales) which were currently under investigation by the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.
Alex took a deep breath and analyzed the employee profiles within the various functional departments of CS. Although there was significant gender and racial diversity within the organization, the segregation was glaring. Mostly white women worked in the administrative and sales roles, mostly white men worked in the managerial positions. The drivers tended to be racialized men, while the tech team was more racially mixed, but overwhelmingly men. These groups rarely interacted with each other. Salaries also varied enormously by functional area and there was a massive gap between workers at the higher levels of the organization versus those in lower-level positions. Alex contemplated his first move to address the challenges before him.
Task
1) What organizational paradigm did CS to have for managing diversity before Alex came on board as CEO? How do you know? Race and Ethnicity in the workplace
2) How can Alex convince the senior leadership team that equity, diversity and inclusion should be given more priority? Explain the strategy that he should take to bring this to their attention. Higher individual performance (engaged)
3) What policies and practices should Alex institute to address and correct the EDI challenges that CS is facing? Which ones do you think would probably not work?
Communication, Need EDI training, Discrimination blind spots