Improving Team Morale by Creating a Safe, Inclusive Workplace
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The prompt for this round of the FEDforum is team morale. This week, hear from the Professional Managers Association (PMA).
Morale starts with ensuring every employee feels safe and comfortable in their workplace. Only when an employee feels comfortable being their authentic self can they focus their attention on their job duties and responsibilities without hesitation. Aside from the individual benefits, the federal government should strive to promote equality, inclusivity, and a respectful environment for all employees in pursuit of the government’s mission to be a model employer for the rest of the nation.
June is a particularly prominent time to recognize the importance of inclusivity for team morale. This month, we recognize both Pride Month and Juneteenth.
Pride Month was established to recognize the Stonewall Riots, protests for LGBTQ+ rights that erupted from aggressive police enforcement of laws criminalizing homosexuality. While the Stonewall Riots sparked a movement for LGBTQ+ inclusivity in 1969, it was not until 2003 that the Supreme Court held laws criminalizing homosexuality were unconstitutional. During Pride Month, we recognize how far our nation has come in the fight for LGBTQ+ inclusivity and how far we still must go.
During Juneteenth, we commemorate the abolition of slavery. While the Emancipation Proclamation was signed two years earlier, it was not until 1865 that federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to ensure all enslaved people would be freed. Juneteenth serves as an important reminder of the price of freedom many Americans had to pay, and our nation’s troubling history of exclusion and discrimination.
Understanding and recognizing our nation’s struggle for equality is critical for understanding and recognizing how the legacy of inequality continues to pervade aspects of our nation identity–including the makeup of our federal workforce and the comfort of diverse persons in our federal workspaces.
The Civil Service's relationship with the LGBTQ+ community has a difficult history. We are glad to see progress in its policies, but we have a long way to go in changing its culture. At the Treasury Department, LGBTQ+ representation among staff is analogous to the US population. Still, the majority of the IRS’s queer workforce choose to cover their identities in the workplace, attributing this to a sense that they would otherwise be unwelcome.
Acceptance at the IRS remains a work in progress. Many IRS workers would agree that they do not feel anyone should have to hide their identity at work. In fact, the Human Rights Campaign found that more than 80% of U.S. workers feel that way. At the same time, 70% of the same workers also feel that discussing one’s sexual orientation at work is unprofessional.
When we consider morale, we need to think of a team’s cohesion and relationships. There is tremendous social pressure on workers to self-disclose personal details during casual conversations. Indeed, the same survey by the Human Rights Campaign determined that discussions of personal lives occur daily or weekly in the workplace for 84 percent of workers, with 65 percent reporting discussing personal relationships, and 36 percent discussing sex. Here, we find the tension facing the IRS LGBTQ+ workforce. Often alone on their team, the LGBTQ-identifying worker is left having to choose between withdrawing from that in-office chatter or participate, and risk being viewed as “forcing their lifestyle” upon colleagues.
Because these conversations are the foundations of workplace relationships and trust among colleagues, being unable to participate erodes a worker’s ability to build rapport with leaders and potential mentors. More than 16 percent of LGBTQ+ workers report feeling stalled in their careers.
LGBTQ+ workers face a wide range of microaggressions, often unintentionally, which foment a sense of pervasive negative sentiment about their identities and further isolates them within their teams. Nearly 80% of LGBTQ+ workers report facing inappropriate comments and sexual harassment at work. Sometimes these microaggressions shift to discriminatory statements, rising to the level of EEO involvement—which, almost always, result in no action. PMA’s own LGBTQ+ members have shared with us their personal stories of being discouraged from filing complaints or being told by an IRS EEO counselor that “that’s just how they speak at home.”
The combined stress of covering their identities, missed opportunities for career progression, and an unfriendly workplace has negative consequences for the IRS. Employee engagement amongst LGBTQ+ workers is 30 percent lower than others, and 20 percent are considering leaving their job at any given time. Now that the Great Resignation has improved private sector wages and benefits, top LGBTQ+ workers are likely to simply leave government altogether. Creating an inclusive workforce is critical to the recruitment of the next generation of IRS employees and thus, the success of the Service.
We also see a struggle to maintain safe and comfortable workspaces on the racial side of inclusivity. The IRS workforce has steadily increased in diversity over time. In a March 2021 annual report, the IRS found that nearly 29 percent of the workforce is black, 14 percent are Hispanic, 6.5 percent are Asian, and 49 percent are white. American Indian or Alaskan Natives and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander each make up less than one percent of the workforce.
Unfortunately, IRS leadership does not reflect the diversity of its workforce. In FY 2020, the IRS reports the following distribution of members of the Senior Executive Service by racial and ethnic origin:
White – 65.9%
Black – 23%
Hispanic – 5.8%
Asian – 4.2%
While diverse persons are joining the IRS workforce, they are not advancing within the workforce. The Merit Systems Protection Board found in a 2020 survey that African American and Hispanic employees were more likely than White employees to say that they had not been treated fairly in terms of career advancement, awards, training, performance appraisals, job assignments, discipline, and pay. These groups were more likely to say that they had been denied a job, promotion, pay increase, or other job benefit within the past 2 years because they had been discriminated against based on race. Reports from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) also confirm that people of color are underrepresented at higher pay levels and in decision making roles.
When employees are essentially segregated, with white employees filling leadership roles and people of color filling subordinate roles, discrimination thrives. Unfortunately, PMA has had to expel members for racially insensitive language in the past. This creates a vicious cycle where leadership roles become undesirable to people of color who know they would not be welcome, entrenching racial disparities.
For these reasons, PMA has supported a number of actions to protect all employees and improve the diversity and inclusivity within the federal workforce:
Stronger messaging from the Commissioner and Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Chief making it clear that discrimination has no place within our agency,
Implicit bias assessments as part of the personality assessment batteries managers and prospective managers undergo as part of the succession planning process;
Making the existing unconscious bias training and LGBTQ+ trainings mandatory instead of optional;
Implementing anti-racist leadership training;
A review of IRS workplace culture to identify areas where systemic racism and other biases have seeped into our processes (e.g., standards of dress, religious comp time, performance standards for written/verbal communication, etc.);
Training to help managers overcome their biases; and,
A path to help those unwilling/unable to address their biases transition out of management and into a role where they no longer have influence over others.
When employees feel unable to advance their career because of systemic inequities, team morale is diminished. When employees do not have role models within their organization like them, team morale is diminished. When employees do not feel safe and comfortable being their authentic selves in the workplace, team morale is destroyed.
The column from Professional Managers Association is part of the FEDforum, an initiative to unite voices across the federal community. The FEDforum is a space for federal employee groups to share their organizations’ initiatives and activities with the FEDmanager audience.
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