If you have been in the “Corporate” world, you would have come across this term in one of our friendly neighborhood Human Resources (HR) meeting. Seriously, thats how some HR teams address themselves. They have to show proof that they are needed and important and hence they create new trainings that don’t really do anything other than a cheesy video, some new terms that are the latest fad and then a few awkward smiles and bad jokes.
Micro-aggressions is another of these Gen-Z terms invented to allow people to come forth with their “accusations” because they aren’t serious enough for the accuser to think through. The trainings insinuate that victims often don’t report instances because they have to collect proof for the serious stuff and whereas here you can just slack or pop-in to your HR colleague and tell them whatever you feel like without the proof of the burden. It's like neighborhood watch where you can call the cops anytime you want and report anything you want or even anything you “feel” like it. “Feel” is it is not a joke. It has happened.
And it's headache for the managers too. Anytime an employee “whines” about something and it can be remotely construed to being “sexist” or “racist”, you are on the hook for reporting it as well. So, the one-one meetings you have with your employees are like meetings with a lawyer or worse meetings with a prosecutor. You need to be on guard on what the employee is insinuating in a rant against their colleague, their boss or their subordinate and then duly report to HR team. See, isn’t it genious on HR teams to actually invent work for themselves?
And isn’t it a good thing, you ask? Aren’t perpetrators long hidden under the shadows of jokes and silly banter to push forward their hurtful agenda’s? Except that it isn’t. Like many other things, this gives the Gen-z’s another avenue to act like cry babies and not deal with issues like inter personal tensions and heated discussions. Imagine you are of the “protected” class and you have a heated discussion with a colleague on a design or on a strategy. These micro aggressions give you the perfect alibi to go and report to HR saying that your colleague was hurtful towards you because of their gender, your race or whatever crap you want to call it. And then the manager and the HR team investigate this. And if several of these so-called issues occur, surely there must be something wrong, right? After all, there is no smoke without fire. And guess what happens, suddenly the beauty of discussion, debate and all the things that make work lively and interesting disappear.
If you think I’m over exaggerating these, I’ve seen a few of these in my own tenure and had a face palm moments several times, except that I couldn’t face palm because I would be the micro aggressor. A colleague of mine once wanted to report my direct for laughing in a meeting. Her version was that the report of mine would have a laugh during a discussion and it shows that he was blowing away the discussion and being hurtful towards her. I didn’t know what or how I should respond to this? We are all human and there are times when our biases and our quirks come into the foreground. Surely, I don’t discount that my direct was definitely not being nice, but how is that a micro aggression? Do we now need to stop laughing, stop showing any emotion on our face for the fear of repurcussions?
Another time, I had to hear from the same person that an interviewee made her uncomfortable during the interviewer because he remarked that he didn’t expect a woman to showup to the interview. Now, on the face of it, this looks like a serious issue, right? But the backstory is that the interview was supposed to be with a guy (lets say Charlie) and then due to last minute scheduling snafu’s, we had to replace with another person and so she had to go there. The interviewee made a rather stupid remark of saying that he didn’t expect a woman to show up because he thought the interviewer was Charlie. Well, not really smart, but would you reject a candidate because of one remark?
We are already dealing with the pronouns issues at work. Literally, now, you don’t know how to address a group of people other than folks. If you are used to saying, “guys”, someone can report you for a micro aggression. If you say, “boss”, someone can report you for micro aggression. You cannot say “brown bag sessions”, you cannot say “white lists” , you cannot say “war room”, you cannot say “merry christmas” and the list goes on. There are so many terms that are colloquial and suddenly, they have been banned or restricted to use because somebody finds them hurtful. And you wonder why?
All of these are due to a fundamental flaw: We have now created a thinking process that thinks of humans as fundamentally evil, sexist, racist and isolationist. And that vile is coming from a “Human Resources” team. So, go figure!
