The cost of DEI rollbacks, the new employer-employee relationship , and the human cost of content moderation

This episode dives into why some CEOs are paying the price for walking back DEI, how the employer-employee relationship has fundamentally shifted, and the horrifying conditions faced by Meta’s outsourced content moderators. From strategic miscalculations to moral failures, we examine what these stories tell us about leadership, labor, and the values that shape today’s workplaces.

Connect:

With Anessa:

• On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anessafike/
• On her website: https://www.fikeandco.com/
• Her book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-revolution-of-work-fuck-the-patriarchy-and-the-workplace-it-built-anessa-fike/21206822?ean=9781961347540&next=t

With Stacey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceynordwall/

Articles:

• How some corporations miscalculated the impact of abandoning DEI 
• Has the Labor Market changed or have employees?
• Meta faces Ghana lawsuits over impact of extreme content on moderators

Transcript

Stacey Nordwall (00:00):

Welcome to Toot or Boot, where each week we talk about news related to HR and the world of work. We tooth the news we like and boot the news we don't like. I'm your host, Stacey Nordwall, a serial joiner of early stage tech companies as their first in or only HR person. And joining us again today we have the one and only Anessa Fike. Welcome back Anessa.

Anessa Fike (00:21):

Thank you for having me. This is always so fun.

Stacey Nordwall (00:25):

For those who didn't hear you last on the last episode, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Anessa Fike (00:32):

Absolutely. So trying to make it quick, I have been doing fractional people and talent leadership for almost 12 years where I have worked across almost every industry except for oil and gas. And I've worked with more than 125 organizations in 30 plus countries from as small as three to as large as a couple hundred thousand. So pretty much have seen everything there is to see in HR and talent. So very little surprises me at this point.

Stacey Nordwall (01:00):

All right. And we have a pretty packed episode. Anessa and I were talking and said we could just take this completely off the rails, but sometimes we're going to go for it. We're going to go for it. Sometimes it's good to get a little unhinged, right?

Anessa Fike (01:15):

That's right,

Stacey Nordwall (01:16):

That's right.

Anessa Fike (01:18):

I mean, that's where I like to live. Sometimes it's just in that spot. 

Stacey Nordwall (01:21):

Alright, well we're going to start off with an article from Fast Company. This one is called How Some Corporations Miscalculated the Impact of Abandoning DEI. The recap for this article is that it discusses the negative repercussions faced by companies that have rolled back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. CEOs miscalculated the consequences which have included loss of top talent, consumer backlash, and investor concerns. They said that rolling back DEI didn't just alter an internal policy position, it signaled a values misalignment with employees and consumers driving financial losses and reputational damage, which is a trend they said will accelerate as Gen Z and millennials will dominate the workforce and consumer base by 2030. So they said the CEO's miscalculated the market impact of rolling DEI back 

Anessa Fike (02:20):

What? That's such a nice way of saying something that we know was not a miscalculation.

Stacey Nordwall (02:26):

Yeah, that what I was going to ask. How do you think they managed to miscalculate this one?

Anessa Fike (02:32):

Well, I'm going to first say that, I'm going to guess that most of these people that have done this are not actually good business people. I'm just going to put that out there

(02:43):

Number. I would say this one, I don't know how, if we're going to toot or boot, because I toot the people that are really still into DEI and doing the right thing, and I boot the people who were like, we're not going to do it, but now we're going to come back. Now it just seems like they're trying to grab attention and money back again. But I think that this is, it's interesting and it's validating for us that have done this work for so long because how many times have we've been asked what's the business case and what are the numbers and where's the data?

Stacey Nordwall (03:18):

And

Anessa Fike (03:18):

We're just like, oh, there's so much data. We're so tired of giving you this.

Stacey Nordwall (03:22):

Let me show you Target. Exactly.

Anessa Fike (03:26):

But it's so validating to see that just how much money is being lost from Target. For instance, from I know I haven't shopped at Target, and by the way, I've saved so much money because I haven't shopped at Target. I just would just go to Target, walk around and look and buy stuff I didn't need. And so if you think about Target's target audience, it's all of us who aren't going to go back. When you say you're not going to do DEI, right? I think that there is an audience that's for Walmart and I think there's an audience that's for Target and for a while I think a lot of us, at least for me, I was like, Target's okay, target, okay, yes, we're introducing more product lines. We're introducing some business owners that we haven't seen before on the shelves. Amazing love that for us.

(04:14):

But then all of a sudden it was kind of just like, but wait, I'm confused. You were supposed to be the one that we went to. You were supposed to have our backs. And so I think for that piece, it was a little bit jarring for some people, but the data's there and the business leaders can't ignore that data now. And so I think back to our point of miscalculation, I think it's a really nice way for them to see YA, and they're hoping that some people aren't going to pay attention and are just going to go back. And I think those of us who have been paying attention this whole time are going to see it for what it is, which is a thinly veiled excuse and we still aren't going back. I think once trust is broken from a consumer standpoint for a lot of these businesses, it's really hard to get that trust back.

Stacey Nordwall (05:06):

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, I kind of took the toot in this that I was like, this is what we have been saying. If you want to be an attractive employer, you have to implement inclusive talent strategies if you want to connect. And it isn't just something that ends at the door or internally, it extends beyond. People are looking at your brand. They want to have aligned values. We know all of these things and consumers are looking at those things when they're making their purchases. We know this. So I think that it felt like, again, sometimes I just read things and the validation just does it for me of like, okay, I wish that this would translate into companies actually listening to their heads of people and people leaders before they have to fall flat on their faces. But sometimes you have to watch them fall flat on their faces. Sometimes they have to

Anessa Fike (06:10):

Learn their own lessons.

Stacey Nordwall (06:13):

They got to touch the hot stove. It's like, great. And I think one of the things that they said too, they started talking about ways or why they thought some of that misalignment happened, and I thought this was a quote that I wanted to pull. The driver of misalignment was many CEOs and their close circle of advisors operate in insular circles shaped by an era when DEI was a mere compliance or PR effort, not a business strategy.

Anessa Fike (06:47):

And we all been there as heads of people where it's like the CEO, even though we are the experts, they'll say, well, my one friend said they’re going to do this, or my one friend's doing this. And it's like, great, let's take your study of one person and oh, we're going to just do what they say. They have no idea what they're doing. So it's just also validating for us, for other people to see all of the things that we have seen for years and that we've also told people for years, you can't keep just making decisions in your three person breakfast club together that you have to get on Saturday mornings. That's not a big enough group to really have any significance. And none of you are experts, by the way. So it's really interesting for us to just have that validation.

Stacey Nordwall (07:46):

Yeah, and I think too, part of what they're saying in this article is those CEOs people need to widen their circles because ultimately they are out of touch with their consumers. They're out of touch with their employees. And because they kind of said it was like the ivory tower experience because they just weren't, weren't in touch. And I thought it was interesting, they also kind of pointed out that institutional investors incorporate DEI into their sustainable and risk management assessments. Looking at that and saying, okay, if you're doing this, what does that mean for your longterm workforce and what does that mean? Are you going to be able to handle long-term market shifts? And they're actually factoring that into how they're looking at companies and who they're investing in. So again, it's like to do these kinds of things is so shortsighted.

Anessa Fike (08:41):

You'd think that maybe they didn't get those MBAs or they didn't really pay attention.

Stacey Nordwall (08:48):

I know, and it hurts because I'm so bad at business, we're so bad at business, so bad at business strategy, couldn't possibly have seen this coming.

Anessa Fike (08:58):

Oh my gosh. And FYI for any of the CEOs, COOs listening out there, I will tell you the number one hack for being a way better CEO than anyone else that's out there, pretty much listen to your people leader because we say, I told you so more often than any other leader, we have seen it and we know it was coming that be the dream. I've had a few of them every now and then that are like, oh my gosh, yes, listen, okay, great. And those are just so lovely and it works so well. And by the way, those companies made way more money, so that should be an indicator. But too many people don't listen to us.

Stacey Nordwall (09:36):

Yeah. A hundred percent, yes. All right. We will move on to our next article, which is from Inc. It's titled, has the Labor Market changed or have employees? The recap for this article, they talk about how the traditional employer employee relationship is evolving. The career ladder or lifelong tenure with an employer doesn't really exist so much anymore. Employee trust is at a low because of layoffs and AI coming in and so forth. And so workers are really stepping back, prioritizing meaningful work growth opportunities and autonomy. This shift challenges companies to adapt their management practices to retain talent and maintain productivity. So does this idea about the shift in the traditional employer employee relationship resonate with you? We've talked about this some before.

Anessa Fike (10:29):

Yes. And I would say it's interesting to me that any employer still believes there is this illusion, and I want to say illusion of stability. None of us trust you all.

Anessa Fike (10:45):

We are under no illusion that there is any stability left in anything. The pensions are gone, the long-term time at some of these organizations are gone. I mean, look at 401 Ks right now, even that's really looking kind of just given the economy. So all of it is just really unstable and chaotic, especially right now. And the smart business leaders would say, you know what? We are going to show our employees that we actually care in the way that we put together policies and have all of these, the way that we operate, the way our core values, the way we live our core values. The smart ones would do that, but a lot of them are not. And a lot of organizations are really just digging into the common phrase that we hear all the time. No one wants to work, and I don't know how many times I need to hear, no one wants to work.

(11:41):

And then I dive into it. And when I ask one or two follow-up questions, they can't answer them. So I'm always like, what does that mean to you? Do people want to work for what you worked for 20 years ago? Sure, that doesn't exist anymore. So what are they working for? What are they working towards? And I think people are also, with this shift, with this labor shift, especially with more and more people going, fractional gig workers advisory speaking, all of this stuff that's coming into our lives, even social media and influencers, we are now way more able to take a bet on ourselves

(12:20):

And be able to say, you know who? I can trust the person that I look at in the mirror every day. I know what they're going to be able to do. I know the work they're able to put in. And people are realizing that that is way more stable than any full-time job has ever been. And I think that is honestly scaring a lot of leaders and scaring, but they're not talking about it. And so I think this behind closed doors of what does this shift in the gig economy, the fractional economy, how does this labor shift? How's it going to affect us? And they don't have answers because the thing that's not entering their brain is treating people better. And it absolutely should be. Right? It's the duh thing and they're not getting it.

Stacey Nordwall (13:11):

Yeah. Yeah. I think to your point, they called this out in the article that especially, and I want to say this is pretty US focused and what I'm about to say, but that this rise of at will work and work, all of this employers have been treating employees, they've been treating that relationship as transactional. And then in return, they're like, well, wait, why are you viewing it as transactional? Why are you treating it that way? Why aren't you giving me your all? And it's like, wait a second. You're creating this imbalance where you're training it as though it's a transactional thing, and then get surprised when employees treat it the same way. Exactly. Yeah. So I think to me, that is one of those things that really was, it's very true and stands out a lot where you see all of this, oh, people don't want to work. People don't want to work for a transactional relationship and expect to give you loyalty and whatever. They're defining it in a different way to what suits them and what works for their lives. So yeah, I think it, it's interesting especially then as we're talking about some of these other things too, of what is this kind of long-term business strategy. It is not a good long-term business strategy to treat employees transactionally. And you get what you get when you do that,

Anessa Fike (14:37):

Right? A hundred percent. And then it's like when you go, let's say to a sandwich shop and you have someone who actually gets taken care of and cares about their job, your sandwich is going to look beautiful. It's going to great. Let's say you get someone that is treated horribly and doesn't care about their job and is actually just looking for another job, sandwich is going to look horrible. And so I think that that's a very easy thing for us to think about. It's just it's not actually difficult to treat people well, it's not. And we make it so difficult, and we somehow these leaders create all of these humps for us and loops to go through, humps us to jump over for what? It's just the right thing to do, number one. Number two, it makes you more money. And number three, people stay longer. So I'm not sure what the downside is.

Stacey Nordwall (15:28):

Yeah, and that is what they're saying in the article as well. They say the healthiest businesses recognize that long-term success comes from aligning employee and employer interests. So when you treat people well, that's good for your business. That is one of the things we are kind of talking about. A lot of this, it's like I think that as people, leaders, we understand these very simple and inherent truths, and we're like, why do we have to explain this? Why do we have to explain

Anessa Fike (16:05):

Why is being a decent human being something that we have to have a 45 minute meeting on, right?

Stacey Nordwall (16:14):

Yeah. Yes. And I think that, yeah, that is one of the things that I, especially when it comes back to business case and then you're like, I can present all the business cases in the world. I don't know why I need to present a business case for not treating people transactionally, knowing that we already know it's going to equate to long-term business success, but we get stuck in these loops with folks because for whatever reason, they just don't want to change how they've managed. They don't want to change how they have done business or really look at how the whole relationship has changed. And if we even think about our entire industry as a whole, if business leaders were good actual leaders and people were actually good people, our entire industry would need to exist. Our industry exists because people cannot do the right things. That's why we're just corporate babysitters for a lot of people who just don't know how to adult well and be good people. That's literally why most of our industry exists. So it's wild to think about that an entire industry exists because leaders can't be good people. I'm just going to leave that there.

Stacey Nordwall (17:29):

They're choosing profits over people and making things transactional, and then wondering why business isn't what it used to be. It's like, yeah. Yeah. Okay. We're going to move on to our last article of this episode. I am going to first give a bit of a warning. This article references some really disturbing content. There's disturbing content that these moderators are being exposed to in this segment. So if you're not prepared for that today, you can skip the rest of the episode, come back for the last minute or so and hear from Vanessa and how you can connect with her. But we will also put that info in the show notes. So this is your chance to opt out for this last article. It comes to us from The Guardian. The title is Meta Faces Ghana Lawsuits Over Impact of Extreme Content on Moderators. The recap is that Meta Faces legal action in Ghana over claims of psychological harm to content moderators who are exposed to disturbing social media content as part of their role in reviewing and removing the content from META'S platforms. This lawsuit comes after 140 Facebook content moderators in Kenya were diagnosed with severe PTSD caused by exposure to graphic content. All of this raises questions about worker protections in the digital age, because as they point out in the article, many places may have protections in regards to physical injury, but those worker protections may not extend to psychological harm. This was a rough read. What stood out to you?

Anessa Fike (19:14):

So I am going to probably bring in careless people by Sarah Wynn-Williams as well. And it's a book around her experience at Facebook and Meta. And the thing that really stood out to me is honestly, I wasn't surprised. I was not surprised by the behavior of Facebook and Meta, if you read that book. I actually wasn't surprised before I read the book, after I read the book. I just thought, oh, wow, it's even worse than I anticipated. But it's not. Facebook and Meta are not known to think about other people. They’re known to think about money and each other in the leadership circle. And anyone, by the way, I always want to caveat this by saying go and read this book. The Careless People book by Sarah Wynn-Williams is very much a depiction of what a lot of us have experienced in tech startups early on, especially in the last decade, similar to if you watch Super pumped, very similar to that experience of what those people went through in Uber, et cetera. And so if you've been in startups, this isn't surprising and it very much should be. It very much should be surprising. It's just not to those of us that have seen it before.

(20:35):

And for me, there's this piece around we should be thinking about the toxicity, the workplace dynamics in terms of what employees are exposed to, right? Yeah. I honestly think that there should be more hazard pay for more jobs out there. You hear about hazard pay being paid to truck drivers who drive hazardous materials. You hear about hazard pay for certain other types of trades, but I really think that this is going to be probably not in the next three and a half years, but maybe after that, that's going to be a discussion around how do we actually implement some guidelines around hazard pay in some of these institutions. Now, the other piece of that, the Facebook meta thing is for me in reading the book, Careless People, it's not something that was new to them. It's not something that they didn't know wasn't going to happen.

(21:48):

And so for me, they knew what was going to happen. They asked even worse of some of their employees earlier on in Facebook and Meta. And so I really think that if you really want to understand that, it's great to read Careless People, but I'm under no illusion that Mark Zuckerberg or anyone in Meta or Facebook's leadership or anyone tied to them in that matter, cares anything about people. I think that as a people leader, we have seen time and time again that they have had opportunities to show us that they care, and they've shown us time and time again that they don't. And so when someone tells you who they are, believe them. And Facebook and Meta have told us who they are for a long time. So again, it's not concerning. But I do think that there's going to be this discussion again, probably past four years from now.

(22:39):

They don't think the administration right now is going to do anything about that, but about trauma and workforce trauma and what does that mean, and is there hazard pay? I think that honestly, what I think is probably going to happen is some of these organizations are going to run out of people to work in those areas because the new generation, gen Z, gen Alpha behind them, they're just going to say no. And so they're going to start to run out of people to actually do these jobs. So they're going to be almost forced to pay attention to how they're treating employees and what they're asking those employees to do.

Stacey Nordwall (23:17):

Yeah. Well, I That is probably, well, there was a lot of stuff I read in this article that was pretty grim. It was quite grim. But what stuck with me, and this is to your last point, they say, the article says that they outsource this content moderation work, and often employ content moderators in the poorest parts of the world, often in Africa, and it's their job to remove the post and train AI to remove the post. And what does it say that this work is being outsourced to the poorest country?

Anessa Fike (23:59):

Right?

Stacey Nordwall (24:02):

It says they don't care.

Anessa Fike (24:04):

Yeah, I don't care about people.

Stacey Nordwall (24:08):

I think there's an extra level of finding that disturbing to me where they're just completely shoving it out of sight, out of mind, and not caring about the impact that it has on people and thinking, not even doing that within the US or making that within their normal company structure, they're outsourcing it to an agency somewhere else so that they don't have to think about it. They don't have to think about those people or the impact on those people or who those people are. And so it's really, I just find that incredibly disturbing,

Anessa Fike (24:52):

And I'm not going to get the numbers, but there's something to, if you read the book, there's something to the effect of when Mark Zuckerberg was trying to have a baby when they were trying to have their first baby, and his wife was pregnant, and Zika was around, and so he was really worried about the Zika virus, and he did not want to get infected. He had no qualms about sending a pregnant Facebook person to a Zika country, a country that had Zika in it that was pretty prevalent, had no worries until it was him, number one. Number two, they built an entire sort of tent situation and basically this temporary building for him to be in during this time in a different country, and the amount of money they spent on that structure could have solved homelessness in San Francisco. And so when you just think about those two things, they don't care about people. So it's just this elitist mentality that they don't seem to be able to understand how to get out of, and that's not me. So I don't know what that is, but it's just this thing where it's, when you put two and two together, it doesn't make sense for most normal nice people.

Stacey Nordwall (26:16):

Yeah. And to your point, so they said in the article that the wages that the content moderators are being paid are below living costs. So they said, and they were penalized if they didn't meet performance targets. So the base wage was $85 a month, estimated monthly costs for a single person in that city was about $600 excluding rent. And the thing is, to your point, if you stack this up, meta invested 45 billion on the fucking metaverse

Anessa Fike (26:53):

Garbage. It's like fetch. They're still trying to make it happen.

Stacey Nordwall (26:57):

Oh, and they bought, spent over 90 billion buying back their own stock. So you think about

Anessa Fike (27:05):

$85 a month is a cup of coffee to them.

Stacey Nordwall (27:10):

So they could be doing, to your earlier point, also, they could be doing actual things to make the platforms more safe, but they're not doing that. They're outsourcing to low and paying low wages to people that they're just not really concerned about, it seems like. And meanwhile just money is just flowing, and it's such, I don't know. Yeah. It is just so truly disturbing. And this is just one company, right?

Anessa Fike (27:51):

Just one. Right. And in Silicon Valley, there's a lot of them just like this one.

Stacey Nordwall (27:59):

Yes.

Anessa Fike (28:00):

And around the world,

Stacey Nordwall (28:02):

And really to your point about hazard pay and this and that, even extended further out just from meta, but the idea of what kind of work, even if we brought this work back into the us, what kind of psychological harm are people being exposed to? And our laws really, I don't think have caught up to that, to think about that as they point out in the article that physical injury, there's something for that comp. There are things, there are policies and protections, but what kind of policies and protections exist for workers who are exposed to psychological harm in the course of their job?

Anessa Fike (28:48):

It baffles me too, because Zuckerberg still acts like he's this great engineer, and maybe he is, but if you have all of the best engineers in the world, then why can't you create an AI mechanism to have that be a moderator instead of humans? And if you can't figure that out, what are you doing? Right?

Stacey Nordwall (29:06):

Yeah.

Anessa Fike (29:07):

So maybe you're not so great at engineering. So that is my thought. If you're going to tout yourself as something, put it to some good use.

Stacey Nordwall (29:14):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean truly, because like I said, there's stuff in that article that you're like, nobody should have to be seeing this. This is absolutely incomprehensible to me that it is someone's job to be exposed to this kind of stuff. So yeah, it's very gross. Very

Anessa Fike (29:38):

Gross. Very gross. Very gross. And just very gross. And also not surprising, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Stacey Nordwall (29:45):

Oh yeah, indeed. Alright, well, Anessa, thank you so much again for joining. It has been wonderful having you on. For folks who want to learn more from you, connect with you, how can they do that? Is there anything you want to promote?

Anessa Fike (30:02):

Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn or you can find me at fi and co F-I-K-E-A-N-D-C o.com. And if you want to read a little bit more about what I think the next five to 10 to 20 years look like in the workplace, grab my book, the Revolution of Work. Actually, I'm going to ask that you buy it on bookshop.org because it helps independent bookstores.

Stacey Nordwall (30:26):

Fabulous. Love that. Recommend everyone go out and grab that. And the links for contacting will also be in the show notes. Thank you again so much for joining.