A friend of mine is a top science researcher working as a professor at a state university. Every year he is required to take several hours of diversity training and sexual harassment training. With a lab full of grad students and post-docs, an experiment on another continent, a full schedule of talks, and young children at home, how does he find time for this? “You can’t just turn the videos on and try to work. The software monitors your mouse movements. So I hire this company in India that Tim Ferris, the four-hour workweek guy, promotes. They take the training on my behalf.”
12 thoughts on “Diversity training and outsourcing”
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I love it! Next step will be for the trainers to outsource all their work and we will have a nice closed loop of workers in India creating training that the workers in India can do.
Good idea on his part, but I bet it’s grounds for termination if he gets caught. Of course I also bet his employer doesn’t really care, and only has the policy to cover their own asses in case he gets them sued. Gotta love a country run by lawyers.
– It idea was covered in “the big bang theory” (the egg salad equivalency chapter); Sheldon uses research assistants.
– Any modern QA software with a record replay mechanism would enable them to only make one person take the course.
Wow, my govt contractor employer only requires us to do about 3 hours of ethics & diversity training. Of course I am busy too, but I guess this guy is too busy. I wonder what would happen if it could be proven that he really didn’t take said training?
Brilliant. Reminds me of that guy who took on multiple jobs by outsourcing most of them out and was rated the best worker in his company.
Philip: We don’t have required diversity training at the (state) university where I work. The president just implemented a “sexual harassment module ” and we were told that it was required training. But our the union claimed it was non-contractually binding, and I am surmising that most tenured faculty ignored the president’s command to undergo the training. Out curiosity, I decided to take the training. It lasted about an hour. It was apparently designed more for a corporate environment than university’s culture. I view the whole business as a waste of time, except that most likely protects the institution from certain kinds of litigation. Greetings from Nagoya, Japan.
I worked at a startup that was acquired by a publicly traded company. Immediately, the HR department from the head office sent us a bunch of videos to watch. The office watched the videos as a group. The only woman in the office, who happened to be a lesbian, said, “why would anyone sexually harass her? She’s hideous!” and that was the end of the training. At my present company, after 5 years of no harassment from HR, now it seems every quarter we get molested with more mandatory computer training. I would look at the QA automation software angle to minimize the group pain level except IT has locked down all of the machines, preventing unauthorized software installs.
Our diversity training was online, you’d go through some pages and then get quizzed every 5 pages or so to make sure you were reading. I noticed the URL scheme was like “…page1”, “…page2”, etc. and figured out I could skip the quizzes by just filling in the next page number into the URL and I could finish in a minute or two.
They got smarter over time and added things like warnings if you read the page too fast (sorry speed readers!) and unpredictable URL or javascript schemes.
I wonder how much software that would actually be be useful to our customers could have been created with those same efforts at outsmarting us.
Excellent idea for the court supervision driving course I am going to have to take. Its an online course these days.
I married a Chinese National, one of our close friends is a Brazilian woman, both woman have careers but aren’t particularly politically aware. I am always surprised at the matter-of-fact way that they describe sexual harassment and promotions granted for sexual favors in their native countries. Somehow, through a succession of measures many of which I have thought silly at the time, we in the United States have advanced past many of these practices.
I have learned to have some humility in evaluating these practices. We in the U.S. have evolved to treat women better today than they were treated 40 years ago, when I was 20. I lived through this change but I don’t pretend to know how it happened.
Interesting how everybody’s immediate reaction is “How can I get out of this?”.
Anyone with “a lab full of grad students and post-docs”, probably young, from diverse backgrounds and traditions, and perhaps working at their first paid jobs, should be extra attentive to the workplace environment.
Incidents of harassment and insensitivity are way more common than most people imagine, even in “enlightened” workplaces. This hurts job satisfaction and productivity.
Yes, there is a legal side of all of this, and yes, many of the low-budget online training videos are simplistic, but why not treat it as a required part of your job and learn as much as you can from it?
Jim: “Harassment and insensitivity” are not things that university researchers seek to avoid. They are the normal conditions faced by the graduate student! If his or her job satisfaction is low then his or her remedy is to complete the research and turn in a PhD thesis so that the cycle can be repeated with the next crop of victims, usually immigrants. Maybe one day the government will require truth in labeling and universities will have to rename themselves “research plantations” and put graduate students into their SAP systems as “slaves”.