HR experts cite challenges of allyship, tokenism, sponsorships in Canadian workplace
A recent poll of Black employees in Canada KPMG has revealed a landscape that is improving slowly in supporting racialized workers, but still has a long way to go.
The poll by KPMG surveyed 1,000 Canadians who are employed and self-identify as Black.
Eighty-three percent of respondents said their employer has “made progress on their promises to be more equitable and inclusive for Black employees over the last year”, and 82% said that since the murder of George Floyd Jr. and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, they have seen their company make “significant progress” in creating more equitable and inclusive workplaces.
However, just as many respondents reported experiencing racism at work – almost a 10 percent increase from last year’s poll.
Amanda Bartley, senior manager of management consulting for KPMG in Canada and co-chair of KPMG’s Black Professionals Network, said the numbers give a snapshot of the situation for Black Canadian employees, but don’t tell the whole story.
Support Black employees with sponsorships, mentorships
The seemingly contradictory result of the survey, said Bartley, reveals that employers are not digging deep enough to discover the real experiences of Black employees at their organizations, and relying too much on “allyship” and other surface level initiatives.
“I see a lot of organizations spend a lot of focus on allyship as a really clear solution to systemic racism and anti-Blackness,” she said.
“The one thing that I see that is missing from a lot of allyship programs is really clear conditions that qualify or disqualify someone from being an ally. Because then anyone can call themselves an ally, but where's the accountability around it? Organizations focused on other pieces, like sponsorship and mentorship, they might be driving better outcomes.”
Much more impactful for Black employees, Bartley said, are concrete programs such as mentorships, sponsorships and stretch opportunities. Also, support for Black employees who do make it to upper management and the C-suite is essential.
“There's so many different ways that you can support Black Canadians, but I think the one thing that I see, especially as black Canadians continue to rise in organizations, is there's a lack of sponsorship around ‘How are we going to get them to the next level and what does that look like?’ I think that would be a far more impactful program to invest in than just a program around allyship.”
More support for Black employees in the C-suite
The report found that 76% of Black employees said their company has a Black person in the C-suite or board of directors, and 83% of respondents saw their organization making progress in making that goal easier for Black employees.
Rebecca Paluch, assistant professor of organizational behaviour at UBC Sauder School of Business, said that while those numbers point in the right direction, the question is how supported are those employees once they get there?
She pointed out that Black and minority employees can be “tokenized” once they make it into leadership roles. This makes it the employer’s responsibility to advocate for those employees after they are promoted, not just before, as there can be a perception that they are there because of their race, not because they are qualified.
“They do deserve to be there, it's just a little bit more surprising because it's not the traditional demographic of who we see in these leadership roles,” Paluch said. “So I think that's important to recognize and I think it's something organizations should be aware of, that some employees may have these perceptions that they're not qualified to be in that role. So having the organization demonstrate all of the ways that they are qualified is important, to make sure that the leader has legitimacy in their position.”
Organizations should track career progress of Black workers
The KPMG report stated that 83% of respondents said they are valued and respected on the same level as their non-Black colleagues, and 75% said their colleagues’ understanding of the barriers Black Canadians face has improved over the last year.
However, these numbers fall short of telling the whole picture. For example, Bartley pointed out that this number does not provide for the different ways Black women and men are treated in the workplace. For this reason, she encourages organizations to create their own data to help identify where exactly they can start to implement programs that go below the surface.
Starting to keep track of numbers — such as how long Black employees remain in their roles compared to their cohorts, how often they are promoted compared to others in their cohort, and what roles they are being hired for in relation to their experience — can start to fill in the blanks where more general statistics fall short.
“When you are able to look at very specific information regarding someone's experience at an organization regarding sponsorship, mentorship, being put up for opportunities, being considered for promotion and being considered for stretch opportunities, the everyday experience of the teams and whether they're healthy and they promote a good culture, that’s when you’re able to pinpoint exactly where you need to double down,” said Bartley.
Counter ‘last in, first out’ phenomenon
KPMG’s report found that 73 percent of Black employees said their career progress was halted or delayed due to their employers’ anticipation of recession or slowed growth. Also, 80 percent reported expecting a “last in, first out” process of layoffs will mean racialized employees, generally hired last, will be let go first.
This phenomenon contributes to a sense of precarity experienced by Black Canadians in a job market that is inequitable, said Paluch.
“Systemically, Black employees are often the last ones to be hired on, or are in lower positions in the organization, so there's this systemic issue that creates this problem where, when there are layoffs, the employees that are already most at risk are the first to go,” said Paluch.
“That's something that I think organizations, particularly as they are managing these economic volatilities, they have to be aware of that and consider the DEI implications when they're doing mass layoffs – rather than just taking out the bottom rungs, are there other ways to more equitably distribute some of these cost saving implications?”
What comes next? Wondering about DEI initiatives and the bigger picture
Looking at the bigger picture, Maureen Kihika, assistant professor of sociology and labour studies at Simon Fraser University, said the biggest question for her is: why now?
The attention given to DEI and the experiences of Black Canadians has increased since the murder of George Floyd Jr. in 2020, and the resulting Black Lives Matter movement, she said. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to a mass self-reckoning by individuals and businesses.
But the resulting initiatives around DEI are reactionary, Kihika said, meaning they aren’t addressing what really is a larger societal problem.
“My interest is trying to understand how, in a place like Canada that pats itself on the back for being inclusive or being multicultural, or being better than the United States, how this conversation about blackness and implications of blackness and in particular about blackness in the labour market, only starts to be a really big conversation relatively recently.”
Kihika, who researches the experiences of racialized Black Canadian workers and their communities, pointed out that while progress in inclusion in organizations is important and positive, it raises big questions around the Canadian labour market itself.
“As long as we're not addressing that foundational context of the inevitability of capitalism, what we do is superficial fixes here and there that prioritize that particular group in question, at that time, but then immediately after that we'll need to sustain those inequitable relations,” Kihika said. “At some point, there's always a group of people that are suppressed in the interest of maintaining the system.”
More comprehensive data on Black Canadian employee experiences needed
Kihika also pointed out that KPMG’s polls are valuable in that they are snapshots of data that can start public discourse, but she would like to see more comprehensive data from public entities such as Statistics Canada, to provide depth and context.
The KPMG is based on data from 1,000 Canadian employees who self-identify as Black Canadians. While useful for this “snapshot” Kihika said, there are many factors that affect Black Canadian employees that may not be represented by this sample.
“A lot of the work that Black Canadians do is going to be work that is in the service industry, Black women in particular will be in the service industry. Black men will be in warehousing and that kind of thing,” said Kihika.
“It doesn't really underscore the ways in which the labour market is segmented, so these 1,000 people that are being interviewed could be some of the few people that are experiencing the benefits of the [George Floyd] fallout. I think that's where this conversation about tokenism comes from, because we see a few individuals, and then we tend to think that this speaks to the larger demographic.”
