CIICPD 2023

when one of the participants observed that “women were able to organise their time during home office and finish their tasks better than men . ” Age stereotypes, both, referring to the employee status or seniority, appeared in the discussions with a similar frequency. Many participants observed a general “unwillingness to accept student interns into the teams” across the whole company based on a belief that “the young do not know anything” or would not “complete the same good job as a permanent employee” . Again, even in these cases, the managers raised the contrary, i.e. a positive experience with the students. One of the managers accentuated “appreciating” students as a contribution to his team, observing that “the interns frequently bring new, unusual solutions” . Another participant recalled a diploma student from India whose “opinions were not considered relevant by his team in the beginning”, even though he turned out to be “very bright and hard-working” . A similar experience with age stereotypes was raised in relation to one of the manager’s employees in his 50s. This manager noticed that his team saw this colleague as “not energetic and productive enough” disregarding the fact, it was the “experience and knowledge of older colleagues that balanced the enthusiasm and energy of the young” . Besides gender and age, the existence of stereotypes aimed toward various company internal groups proliferated the discussions. Referring to the organisational structure of the company, one of the managers observed biased attitudes across departments: In our company, diversity is spread over many professional divisions, and this is the origin of the possible prejudices. This means for example, in a meeting, we have production people, quality experts, marketers, project managers, and product managers. And each of these groups has been assigned characteristics given by history. And of course, some perceive the people from a group according to these typified characteristics. The prejudices are somehow there. The data also shows that the tendency to stereotype selected groups of employees within the company worsened during the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. A forced change in the forms of work created strong tensions between people sent to work from home or online and those who had to continue coming to work. Vivid discussions raised during the training sessions disclosed an obvious antagonism between the so-called blue-collar and white-collar workers based on each side’s subjective interpretations of their situations. Employees working in production, or still in their offices during the lockdowns, believed that “ during home-office, people do not work and enjoy a free time” and therefore, their “work must be monitored” , which, as one of the managers objected, was based just on “a single negative experience from the past” . Biased attitudes toward white-collar jobs were unfortunately invigorated by a senior manager from the highest ranks. In one of his public speeches, he took the stance of the blue-collar employee groups during the pandemic, a step which raised strong emotions within the managerial structures, and publicly labelled them as “lazy bones with white collars sitting at home while poor production workers toil like hogs” when working online. In response to this, one of the participants accentuated the unacceptability of the type of leadership selecting or prioritising one group against the other. This again accentuates the significance of professional and empathetic leaders when managing diversity, able to unite he teams in companies and cultivate motivated employees engaged in

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