One sentence showcasing why white-collar work never really changes

That pull quote/screen grab is from this article, which is supposedly about why you need to remove toxic players to … benefit women of color? Why is toxicity necessarily a race issue? That I didn’t quite see. The article has some OK stories and some good, if well-known, points. But at the end, they recommend the same shit as every other article about this topic, which is “conduct a focus group” and “really understand your culture” and “report the toxic guys to HR.”

None of these things even remotely work. Focus groups are useless unless they’re customer-facing, and even those focus groups are broadly useless. “Really understand your culture?” If an executive hasn’t done that in the past decade, with everything swirling around from Trump to Floyd to COVID to back again, why would they do it now?

And reporting stuff to HR is the biggest joke of them all. HR is broadly a useless joke, and most people with an IQ over 50 know that. In the specific context of toxic employees, well, HR works for the executives. The executives pay them. They could semi-easily outsource the function, but they don’t. And why? Because HR gives them air cover and deals with the employee messes in a way that’s cheaper than lawyers are. HR never deals with “toxicity.” What they actually deal with is, “Do the executives think this person…