Teams Blog

If you would like to have a hard-working, loyal team member, consider hiring an ex-criminal. At the very least, it may keep you out of trouble.

No, I’m not joking on either count. We’ll start with the latter. An article published this week by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) states that "pre-hire testing and background screening of applicants’ credit reports and criminal histories have come under increased scrutiny…" Recent U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) hearings and its first lawsuit against these practices are evidence.

The EEOC asserts in its lawsuit that the plaintiff company used credit histories and criminal background checks to unlawfully "deprive a class of black, Hispanic and male job applicants of equal employment opportunities and otherwise adversely affect their status as applicants because of their race, national origin and sex."

A "policy guidance" page on the EEOC’s Web site explains, "the use of arrest records as an absolute bar to employment has a disparate impact on some protected groups, (so) such records alone cannot be used to routinely exclude persons from employment." Only if the crime is "job-related and relatively recent" can a blanket ban be justified.

If you are hiring an accountant, an embezzlement conviction is probable a valid reason not to hire them. A conviction for a bar fight probably is not, nor is an embezzlement conviction for someone who will have no access to money. (Usual disclaimers: I ain’t a lawyer, contact yours for legal advice, just reporting what I’ve been told.)

The logic is, since minorities and males are more likely to commit crimes, criminal history can be used as a dirty trick to discriminate against otherwise qualified candidates. Don’t want to hire a male into your all-female office, but a male is the most qualified candidate? Check his criminal history, and refuse to hire him regardless of what the crime was or what he has done to make up for it. Since males commit more crimes than females, the odds favor your bias. But the EEOC does not.

What about increased risk to your company or workforce, both valid concerns? Two relevant statistics are bizarre in their similarity given that experts in different fields presented them. In the ethics presentation I blogged about last month, Jacob Blass reported that 93% of ethical violations are committed by people with no prior record. On Feb. 2, a column in the Raleigh News & Observer by a social work professor stated that 96% of sexual crimes are committed by first-timers. As someone said from the audience at the Blass talk, you are only increasing your risk by 7% (or less) when you hire an ex-offender.

Furthermore, Blass said, ex-offenders often are excellent workers because they are so grateful for the second chance. Logic indicates an ex-offender knows he or she is being watched and thus is likely to toe the line even more carefully than workers who feel more secure about their career options. A “blanket ban” on ex-criminals may well harm your company by cutting out the best possible hire without reducing your overall risk. If you consider yourself an ethical or religious person, you have plenty of other reasons to respect each individual on a case-by-case basis.

Do make the person explain their crime, when it was, what the circumstances were, and what the person has done to make up for it. Listen to the words they use, to see if they accept responsibility. Make sure the explanation matches the background check results. Consider how long ago it was, and how similar the situation was to anything they will face in your workplace. Then use your best judgment, lest even in these times of worker surplus, you miss out on hiring the best team member for the job.

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The holidays slowed things down enough for me to get back into the library, and I came across a set of recent studies on workplace diversity in the Academy of Management Journal. It’s a depressing topic for me. The most obvious reason is what it says about human beings, the mere fact that we are still having to discuss the issue in the 21st Century. Our inability to look past differences that genetically amount to a fraction of a percent of our genome and are literally skin deep is ridiculous. Whether biological, cultural, or learned, the average behavior and aptitude differences between men and women or blacks and whites are swamped by the differences caused by education. The behavioral differences between a Type A and Type B white guy or Type A and Type B black woman are far larger than those between the average white guy and black woman.

That said, diversity advocates have a problem in both over-reaching and, often, over-simplifying the effects. I consistently hear that diversity improves creativity, team performance, problem-solving, and so forth. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a myth, as there is no clear scientific evidence supporting this position. A “meta-analysis” of diversity studies in which researchers reviewed the results from 63 studies over five years found that overall, personal diversity neither helped nor harmed team performance (see summary). Functional diversity—having a range of educational specialties, skills, and tenure within a company or industry—usually helped team performance.

But those are averages. Other diversity studies I’ve summarized in TeamResearch News show the answers are not that simple. And the two I just came across provide more context. One found that teams of people who like mentally challenging tasks did better when diverse, but age diversity hurt performance and educational diversity had no effect with people who didn’t. In another, diverse teams in industries that weren’t diverse tended to struggle. As I note in the summary, that’s not because the minority members aren’t as capable as the majority members. It’s because majority members don’t know how to work with the minority members.

This is not entirely, or mostly, their fault. In an industry dominated by one gender and race, one or two minorities on a team generally learn the unwritten codes of the majority and follow those to fit in. (I’m not saying they should do this, or that it’s fair, but merely that this is what usually happens.) The majority members never have to learn about the cultural norms of somebody else. When placed on a team where they are not the majority, not only do they not know how to act, they don’t know how to learn how to act, because they’ve never had to.

Though the researchers in the most recent study point a manager in that situation toward diversity education, I don’t think that is the first step. As with personality tests and rope-course teambuilding, there is little support in the independent scientific literature to suggest these are cost-effective practices. Put in place the proven best practices of high-performing teams first, because they place the focus on the similarities between humans rather than the differences. Every group in every culture works better if it has clearly articulated goals, rules, and procedures, for example. A Harvard study at a U.S. bank found that training to develop good procedures was more effective at improving team performance than was diversity training. In fact, diversity training had no effect at all on performance (good or bad), contrary to what the Harvard researcher thought would be true.

In short, contrary to what some managers and those who sell to them want to believe, both teamwork and effective diversity require fundamental changes in the way people interact on a daily basis. And that takes more than a seminar or two.

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