War in the Middle East forces companies to expand diversity programs to faith groups

When Nabeela Elsayed spoke at a company conference several years ago and explained that she would miss the group dinner because she was fasting for Ramadan, she recalls, her manager responded, “Just don’t fast.” Ms. Elsayed, an executive coach who previously served as chief operating officer for Walmart Canada, said she heard many such put-downs as she walked away to pray during the workday.

For years, she told company leaders that their diversity, equity and inclusion programs should teach employees about anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Semitism and other threats to religious groups, but rarely received meaningful responses. In recent weeks – since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas – Ms Elsayed has noticed a keen interest from them in this issue.

Executives are facing increasing calls from their employees to talk about beliefs in diversity programs. They do their utmost to ensure the safety of Jewish and Muslim employees, while also trying to promote a sense of belonging between religious groups. As a result, they face long-standing challenges in talking about religion as part of workplace diversity – at a time when companies’ commitment to diversity programming more broadly appears to be on shaky ground.

“In my 16 years here, I have never seen the kind of help we have received from companies trying to respond to the needs of their employees,” said the Rev. Mark Fowler, head of Tanenbaum, a non- profit organization. that focuses on interfaith understanding.

Across the business world, investments in diversity, equity and inclusion have skyrocketed following the 2020 killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests. According to data from job site Glassdoor, postings for DEI positions increased 174 percent between June and August 2020.

The growth was short-lived. Layoffs and attrition since 2020 have hit DEI positions at a higher rate than other positions, according to a study from over 600 companies released by Revelio Labs this year. According to a report from LinkedIn, Chief Diversity Officers were the only C-suite positions to see a workforce decline last year.

Even as enthusiasm for DEI work grew, companies have been reluctant to include faith groups in their diversity programs. The principle of separation of church and state – as well as civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of religion – has prompted some business leaders to also separate church and office. Many have left employees to facilitate conversations among themselves through employee groups, usually informal communities that gather for holiday celebrations or packed lunches.

“The U.S. has always had trouble dealing with faith in any context, whether it’s education or workplaces,” said Stephanie Creary, an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She noted that companies even struggled with labeling certain office spaces as “prayer rooms,” “meditation rooms” or “wellness rooms,” as they wondered: Should prayer be explicitly welcomed in the office?

Because leaders tend not to address faith-related issues directly, they have not developed expertise about what terms to use and what not to use, or about the specific needs of faith groups.

“When it comes to anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim language, we have less experience of what can and cannot be said,” Ms Creary said. But with some business leaders speaking out about threats to religious groups, she hopes an uptick in DEI programming more broadly could follow.

“We’re seeing many Jewish leaders who may not have been as involved with race-related issues really want to understand how the issues affecting the Jewish community can be incorporated into DEI practices,” she said. “There’s an opportunity there.”

Take Ivan Kaufman, the CEO of Arbor Realty Trust. Mr. Kaufman, who is Jewish, has never made it a priority to speak out about anti-Semitism in the workplace, he said, but in recent weeks his own concerns about anti-Jewish hatred have increased. He heard from friends who had taken off their mezuzot at home so as not to be openly identified as Jewish, or who wondered out loud whether it was safe to go to synagogue.

“I can’t tell you how many calls I get: ‘Are you going to shul?’” he said.

That fear has reinforced Mr. Kaufman’s belief that his company must loudly condemn anti-Semitism, including by joining the Anti-Defamation League.Workplace pledge to fight anti-Semitism,” which the Jewish advocacy group started over the summer and widely distributed in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks.

“Anti-Semitism is something I haven’t really talked about much because it has been in the shadows,” Mr. Kaufman said. “It is clear that we are now speaking out about it.”

The wave of hatred in recent weeks has also given rise to personal reactions for many Muslim leaders.

“As a Muslim believer, there are always experiences you go through – many of us went through experiences after September 11 where we explained to everyone that not all two billion Muslims are bad,” said Armughan Ahmad, Appen’s CEO. , an artificial intelligence company with approximately 1,000 employees. “How do you explain this discrimination in the workplace?”

In recent weeks, however, conversations about faith groups — especially the threats of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia — have increasingly come up for Mr. Ahmad and his DEI team. Appen made a statement on the war between Israel and Hamas, reminded staff of mental health support programs and signed the “Promise to listen” from the Coalition of Innovation Leaders Against Racism, which Mr. Ahmad co-founded in 2020.

At Massachusetts General Hospital in recent weeks, several dozen Jewish and Israeli health care workers and staff members shared their emotional responses to the war and anti-Semitism in a series of listening sessions. Dr. Mark Poznansky, a doctor, and Elyse Park, a psychologist, planned the sessions as part of a Jewish workers’ organization formed this year. They said they worried about the well-being of their own Jewish families and felt isolated from some colleagues and friends, whom they felt had not been contacted to check in.

“It starts with the silence,” says Dr. Park, who leads the hospital’s health promotion and resilience intervention research program. “It starts with the lack of check-in, the lack of understanding and connectivity about how much of an impact this is having on us.”

Their sense of isolation left the two physicians wondering: Why wasn’t the extensive DEI programming in their workplace focused on faith groups?

“There really wasn’t a place and it had to be created,” said Dr. Park.

The Anti-Defamation League pledge has more than 200 signatories, including most recently J. Crew, Creative Artists Agency, Google, Apollo Global Management and the PGA Tour. The pledge asks companies to address anti-Semitism in their DEI programs, speak out against hate on social media, provide religious accommodations and support Jewish employees by creating affinity groups.

Diversity programs often target groups that are underrepresented in the business community, says Adam Neufeld, the Anti-Defamation League’s chief impact officer, and that hasn’t been an issue for Jews in many industries lately.

“There is a general lack of understanding of anti-Semitism because it works so differently from other forms of prejudice,” Mr. Neufeld said, adding that the ADL also saw a spike in interest in its workplace programming after Kanye West’s anti-Semitic posts on X in October 2022. .

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has handled more than 2,000 reports of anti-Muslim hatred, including in the workplace, since early October. The wave of Islamophobic incidents has reminded some, including Ms. Elsayed, of what Muslims experienced in the workplace after the September 11 attacks, a wave of hatred that she says business leaders largely ignored.

“What we’re seeing shows that we haven’t made as much progress as I thought,” she said. “It’s hard to maintain tension in the workplace, but we have to have enough compassion to listen to people’s experiences and say, ‘How can I help?’”

However, Ms. Elsayed believes that many business leaders have been quieter about anti-Muslim incidents than about anti-Jewish hatred. This month she asked 11 CEOs whether their organizations had spoken out about the recent waves of hate and found that “in most cases they have either not responded at all or responded specifically to anti-Semitism.”

Goldman Sachs announced in October that it would expand its “religion and culture” staff group, which is open to people from different religious backgrounds. The group was previously only open to employees in Europe, the Middle East and Africa; now, due to new interest, it will also include employees in U.S. offices.

“We think that prejudice or hatred against anyone is unacceptable, whether it is anti-Semitism, whether it is hatred against people in the black community, in the Muslim community, in the Asian community – any form of hatred and prejudice is unacceptable “, says David Solomon, the bank’s CEO, in an interview with Fox Business. (Mr. Solomon has been outspoken about the war between Israel and Hamas.)

Some business leaders are considering whether to create specific employee groups for each religion or an umbrella organization focused on interfaith issues, said Ms. Creary of the Wharton School. Many struggle to determine what kind of language may be offensive to one faith group, even if it is affirming to another.

“There is concern that dialogue is being facilitated by experienced people,” Ms Creary said. “Because so many of these problems go back millennia.”

And as leadership commitments increase – whether it’s people signing the ADL’s letter, participating in the Council on American-Islamic Relations webinar on “Work, HR and Palestine” or, like Mr. Solomon of Goldman Sachs, to Expand Existing Support Groups – Some DEI Leaders Worry: How Long Will This Last?

They note continued frustration over a lack of corporate accountability toward racial justice commitments made in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s killing. “Right now we have Black workers saying companies have dropped the ball on making progress on all the commitments they made in 2020,” Ms. Creary said.

“This could be the moment for Jewish and Muslim colleagues,” she continued. “Organizations are investing all these resources to seize the opportunity to create inclusive workplaces, but in three years this could see a trickle down.”