JEDI in the Non-fiction World
First, rather than go with the trend to continuously elongate acronyms, I’ll stick with JEDI for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. It’s beyond me how Belonging and Accessibility are not part of Equity and Inclusion. Besides, I like the “power” of the term JEDI. I can already see you waving your politically correct light saber on the way to more profitability.
As a small business owner with a small number of employees, how can you meet expectations of “fairness”? Do you have to look for people who can fill a need for multiple descriptions without a concern for ability? According to the United Nations, there are 195 recognized countries in the world as of January 2024. Some of those countries have multiple ethnicities within them. If you have twenty employees, you’re going to have to work some magic to cover them all. It seems as if, every day, there is a new way someone can identify. Basically, you want to know if they can do the job and if you can stand them while they do it.
My suggestion is that you start with a commitment to hire the best and review people on paper with no awareness of where they are on the ever-growing scale of differences. You can guess, most of the time, by a person’s name what gender and race they are. Don’t do like one major employer did and drop the resumes from women behind a file cabinet. Don’t automatically toss resumes in the trash can if the name is hard to pronounce. Look at the content. Call a former employer (who can only say that they worked there from one date to another) and ask if they would hire them back if there’s an opening. The story I got with that question about one accounts payable clerk and the boss with an intervention by the boss’ wife was right out of a soap opera!
A criterion I like in interviews is the surliness measure. If someone refuses a handshake or won’t make eye contact, you might want to know why. A Muslim fellow was not allowed by his religion to shake my hand when I collected him from the lobby. Was that going to affect his value in the job? The fellow who tried to come across the desk and grab me by the throat when he came in to see if a decision had been made did not pass the surliness test. As passionate as I am about hiring Veterans, I was grateful when the Warehouse workers ran to pull him away and put him out of the building. If you do have to exclude someone for surliness, document everything. Lawsuits can go in directions no one expects.
There’s value in having a diverse culture in your company, no matter how small the company is. Your customers are diverse. Do the best you can. Getting more perspective from more points of view is gold!
