Verified by 
Participating in the "daily grind" is probably one of the biggest love-hate relationships in our lives. Working full-time, and in some cases even part-time, takes up a large portion of our week, and all of the in-stream decision-making about how to use this time can become a burden in itself. When you substitute words that represent time (hours/days/weeks, etc.) with life, how we are choosing to use this time can take on a sobering philosophical angle.
How are you spending your life? Is this a good use of your life? Are you managing your life well?
Work also has the habit of influencing your time before and after your actual work hours. The mental and physical planning to ready yourself for work and the fatigue and lingering work thoughts after work hours also contribute to how you spend your time. This can push the 8-9 hour workday to a 10-11 hour workday, leaving you with about 4 hours of your day for non-work. This puts thoughts and ruminations about the work-life balance into perspective, because when something is balanced, we typically see both sides of the balance as being equal in some way.
The only point I wish to make here (even though considerations of how we choose to spend our time are interesting) is that work takes up more of our lives than you might think.
I believe it is this fact that makes it so difficult when we are deciding how we would like to present ourselves to our colleagues. You have to put something forward, given how much time you are spending with colleagues (even remotely), but, and just take a cursory moment to consider social media, sharing is fraught with potential problems. So many topics that are important to us, not just intellectually but personally and emotionally, are terrible topics for the workplace—sex and sexuality, race and racism, religion, politics, personal philosophies, mental health, and discussions around prejudice and discrimination. The only surefire, safe way to talk openly about these topics is to do so within a framework provided or endorsed by Human Resources.
So here is the conundrum—you have to spend a large part of your life not discussing many of the topics that are important to you. And, in addition, have limited time outside of work hours to explore these topics.
There are many people, having acknowledged this problem, who will keep all conversation strictly about work. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea; after all, you are supposed to be doing work! But this kind of attitude does not really help build and foster connections.
Compare a reliably company-prudent employee who gets their work done without making waves to a deliberately raucous and contentious celebrity. The latter is going to attract a huge following, partly because all of the drama sparks conversation about right and wrong and can be funny and entertaining (and is usually lapped up in non-work time). Ironically, the behavior of the celebrity, motivating and inspiring the cohesion of a following, puts them in a better position to lead, but it will be the boring, company-prudent employee who ends up leading European Operations. It’s almost as if the passions that pull humans together have been deliberately excised from the workplace.
However, Human Resources obviously does exist for a good reason. Sexual, racial, and religious harassment should not be tolerated in the workplace, and what makes the potential for these things to be worse is that there are power structures in workplaces. If anybody started to leverage their workplace authority over employees in such a way as to permit harassment, not only does that need to be shut down for that individual but also before a culture of harassment starts to bloom.
This is a strong argument for keeping all workplace conversations about work. Even a well-intentioned conversation about these topics can go uncomfortably awry, especially when one or more people in the conversation do not feel connected in any meaningful way to the others. With a lack of familiarity and trust, it is very hard to gauge the intentions and beliefs that belie the triggering of such conversations. This pushes us to keep workplace conversation strictly about work.
The workplace thus finds itself in an awful dilemma.
Violence, activism, and the battle for equality are all extremely prevalent in our shrinking world. These issues galvanize our minds—and we take our minds to work with us. Salient social issues have a habit of educating people and building awareness, which might lead one to recognize and label behavior that has been directed at oneself. It would not be uncommon in this situation to want to talk to other colleagues to see if they feel the same.
The confines of a Human Resources framework might not feel good enough, or fast enough, for many, which for the workplace instills a sense of urgency. Yet, some sort of framework is required. With a lack of true connections at work, and the lack of trust that results, social issues need to be presented and discussed in a safe space where nobody feels personally attacked.
Yet, is that even entirely possible?
If somebody expressed anti-homosexual or anti-trans sentiment and rationalized this through their faith, how could any homosexual or trans individual not feel personally attacked? If somebody wanted to make the case that affirmative action unfairly promoted non-white-male people, how could non-white-male people not feel personally attacked?
The answer put forward by many workplaces is diversity training.
But you only have to consider what the ultimate goals of such training would be to realize the futility. Firstly, the people running and coordinating the training would need to be experts in human behavior who have been certified by license or professional degree. Without this, the credibility of the training is immediately undermined. In addition, you run the risk of turning employees who are a part of a minority into tokens, which is obviously also problematic.
But even if you had trained individuals coordinating the training and could avoid singling out and exposing minorities, what are you asking employees to do? Show the privileged white individuals just how privileged they are and how sheltered they have been? Show people just how systemic racism and sexism really are in both the private and public sectors of the nation?
The training would need to convince certain individuals that their beliefs (and possibly actions) are ignorant at best and harmful at worst—otherwise, what’s the point of diversity training? These realizations are painful, and people do not like to admit them about themselves—so is the workplace the right place for it? These trainings, if truly engaging everyone in an interactive setting, have the potential to shame people, even unintentionally.
Even though the motivation comes from an honorable place, and even with the possibility of minor successes and breakthroughs, diversity training seems limited enough to warrant the status of in vogue.
One solution might be to hire more employees with a liberal arts background to complement any business, marketing, sales, or science backgrounds. Liberal Arts departments have been encouraging discussions around prejudice for decades, usually framed around a pivotal novel or text. In addition, students will have to have written papers, reading broadly from a number of perspectives to answer a research question. If all workplace diversity training began with people who have this background, it would already be advanced and possibly not even needed.
In a world where careers are uncertain, and colleague relationships are limited and ephemeral, the kind of meaningful connections required to address social change are non-existent. The workplace would need to change fundamentally for these connections to take place. As it is, most people will turn to their private lives to educate themselves in a safe space, while wishing to be left alone to get on with their work during their work life.
