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[tiwaripoojaaa]

INTRODUCTION TO RACISM

Race can be defined as the attributes, traits and features which differentiates one group from the other existing social groups. In simple words, races are the physical qualities that one inherits biologically and serves as a way of self-identification from the other groups. Racism is a theory that one race is superior that the other based on the physical attributes, caste, creed, ethnicity or origin.

WHAT IS RACISM ?     

Racism is not just an added stress to individuals of minority ethnic groups, but is a pathogen which generates depression.Racism usually occurs at workplace and schools and is mostly experienced by immigrants and refugees.The immigrants and refugees are often taken advantage as labour force, human trafficking and even cases of rape and child marriage.Their human rights must be protected, so they will have the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education to eradicate poverty, and end child marriage.

Even preteens and teenagers have experienced racism at school and on social media platforms.Being racist towards someone can impact that person a lot, as it can cause depression, low self-esteem, losses in a psychological sense and a sense of helplessness.If we search on the net we can get a lot of results about teenagers' suicide due to racism and discrimination, because they felt isolated, hated, not accepted in their own society or even worthless.Racism and discrimination should be stopped because we should be ONE to make this world a greater place. The planet is for everyone to live in, because everybody is equal as we all bleed the same color.Everyone should change their mindset to treat everyone equally, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status.It's up to the parents to nurture their children because racism isn't something you are born with, it is taught.

ROOT CAUSE OF RACISM :-

Cause #1: Self-interest.        

 Many experts believe self-interest is the root cause of racist beliefs. Through the 17th and 18th centuries, people from Africa were kidnapped and forced into slavery.                                    

Cause #2: Scientific racism.    

It’s important to note that “scientific racism” is junk science. It relies on physical anthropology, craniometry, and other discredited methods.  Cause #3: Maintaining the status quo.                    Maintaining a status quo that protects racism is often justified as “keeping the peace” or maintaining law and order.  

Cause #4: Discriminatory policies.

Policies that discriminate by race and keep people in poverty reinforce racist beliefs. Housing laws are a prime example of this. 

Cause #6: Media representation

How the media (books, TV, music, movies, etc) represents race has a big impact on how society views race. While the media is a reflection of a culture at large, it keeps racial stereotypes alive and well and therefore fuels racism.

BLACK LIVES MATTER: AN ACTIVIST MOVEMENT

Black Lives Matter is an activist movement which began as a hashtag (#BlackLivesMatter) after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teenager killed in Florida in July 2013. The movement became more widely known and popularized after two high-profile deaths in 2014 of unarmed African-American men (Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY and Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO). Neither of the police officers involved in their deaths were indicted (i.e., formally charged with a crime).

WAYS TO COMBAT RACISM :-

1.Learn to recognize and understand your own privilege.                                         

2. Examine your own biases and consider where they may have originated.              

3. Validate the experiences and feelings of people of color.                                           

4. Challenge the “colorblind” ideology.   

5. Call out racist “jokes” or statements.   

6. Find out how your company or school works to expand opportunities for people of color.                                                               

7. Be thoughtful with your finances.           

8. Adopt an intersectional approach in all aspects of your life.  

A TEACHER'S ROLE IN FIGHTING RACISM :- 

Race is something that can’t be avoided and it is better understood when discussed honestly. Children are social beings, sensitive, and easily influenced. When teaching sensitive lessons such as civil rights, we cannot step away from the truth, but we must provide space to talk and ask questions. You do not have to be an expert to do this, as there are great online resources to help you facilitate conversations with your students. By providing education that moves beyond the facts, we help promote character traits like the empathy to identify with the humanity in others, the courage that it takes to be upstanders, and the resilience and perseverance to keep pushing when the odds feel against you.                                                                       

If we teach students to see racism as an idea that's expressed through behaviours, institutions and cultures rather than an immutable character trait, we free them to see things more accurately and with more openness to change. Thus, to help our students gain a more accurate understanding of racism, we would do well to focus on racism as an idea rather than as a trait or personality characteristic.

[tiwaripoojaaa]

WFH is great until your mom yells from behind “uth chai bana de”

If you’ve ever been stuck in torrential rain waiting for a delayed train after a long day at office, the chances are pretty decent that you’ve thought about working remotely at least once or twice.

There was a time when Work from home was a fantasy for everyone until we all got attacked by pandemic. Wherein we actually want the hectic schedule rather than working remotely. WFH is in favor for someone as an introvert like me and a disaster for an extrovert who loves roaming around in the office greeting everyone with a smile and gossiping with every second person in the office. Without having an office where you need to share pleasantries with your coworkers, boss, and clients, you need to find alternative methods of socializing with people on your own time.

  Challenges:

     Sounds appealing right? No more setting the alarm for 6 am. No more sitting in your cubicle all day, your only escape a measly hour for lunch. You can set your own hours and work when you feel it. Freedom is yours!

Expect it doesn’t work that way.

Juggling work, household chores, and parenting responsibilities along with fear of infection and job loss can put a dent in performance, motivation and productivity. On the other side of the coin, when you work from home, you no longer have a clear geographic division between workspace and your personal life. Ideally, your home is a place of relaxation, safety, and security. It’s a place where you subconsciously slip into a calm, easygoing state of mind , putting the stresses of the workday behind you and have a beautiful evening with your family.

Feeling of disconnection and social isolation:

   Even in normal situations, managing remote employees is more challenging than managing regular office workers because Emotional health is a priority now because living and working in confined conditions for a long time takes a mental toll. Moreover, people who have so far been accustomed to working in an office setting may find remote work very lonely. Only now have team members and managers begun to realize how much time and effort it takes to communicate properly across screens. They cannot reach out to each other as easily as they would in a physical office, and this makes people feel disconnected from the company. Direct reports may feel that their managers are out of touch with their reality and cannot help them solve their problems.

Screen Fatigue: You’re probably hearing people complain about ‘Zoom fatigue’ or ‘meeting fatigue’. Managing remote employees via video conferencing has given rise to a new challenge – that of screen fatigue due to back-to-back meetings. People are turning away from their screens in exhaustion, citing headaches and eye strain. It is more tiring to look at a screen for a prolonged time than it is to have face-to-face conversations. It is more tiring to look at a screen for a prolonged time than it is to have face-to-face conversations. In addition to the laptops, team members are also looking at conventional screens like phones, tablets, or television. It fatigues the eyes, causes loss of focus, and decreases attention span. Naturally, people cannot work efficiently because of these issues.

Breakdown of effective communication: Perhaps the biggest challenge of managing remote employees during the COVID-19 pandemic is effective communication.  As you and your team members must have discovered by now, it isn’t quite as simple as shooting off a few emails and calling a meeting. Your direct reports can’t casually walk up to your desk for a quick chat. You can’t see each other in the office and you have to make an effort to know who is working on what. This ‘blindness’ leads to an interesting situation–people tend to think the worst when they receive a negative message. For instance, if you get a brusque e-mail from a colleague who you know is having a bad day, you tend to brush it off. But when you’re working from home, you have no context on what is happening at the other person’s end. This causes more misunderstandings, negativity, and friction within the team.

Communication & Coordination Challenges

It’s hard enough to hold productive in-person meetings to coordinate different team members’ efforts to remain aligned. When everyone works from home, it becomes all the harder to stay on the same page.

Human beings rely on nonverbal communication when they speak. But emails, phone calls, and even video calls remove much of the nuance from how we communicate. Just think back to the last time someone misinterpreted an email or text message you sent for a quick example.

This problem is so inherent in virtual businesses that an entire industry has sprung up to solve it. Team collaboration and communication tools like Slack exist specifically to make it easier for companies to stay in touch and stay organized. GoToMeeting is another popular choice for companies to stay in touch using video conferencing.

  Since the majority of the global workforce is not used to working from home, this sudden change has led to many problems. They are just adjusting their seats to meet the organizational needs amidst everything that is happening around the world. Work from home is prominent but comes with a lot of challenges like communication and coordination with team, failing network is the biggest interruption “Uncle wifi nahi chal raha check karo” which impacts productivity, you may get distracted by your dog or just feel like going through some memes on Instagram (which unknowingly turns from seconds to minutes to even a hour sometimes) or just sibling’s silly fights or just in a mood to workout.

Productivity:

Sitting at home by yourself all day takes a toll. Humans are social animals. They need interaction with other people. Without a water cooler to swap jokes, stories, and shop talk around occasionally, telecommuters can get lonely. People working from home sometimes struggle with productivity. Working away from your co-workers, with only remote online meetings, risks emotional disconnection and apathy. It can also encourage procrastination .

You might find that it helps to have particular clothes for working at home. Dressing for work can set the right mental tone for the day – and avoid the awkwardness of being dialed in to a virtual meeting while you're still in your pajamas! Also, avoid going into certain areas of your home, or sitting in certain chairs, for example, so that you know when you're in "work mode," and when you're not.

Productivity at office was optimal as there were no distractions, you had a great working environment and also who doesn’t like working with their colleagues and friends like family rather than completing the given tasks alone. The lack of interaction that often comes with remote work can also be a detriment to team building – something that is built during meetings, lunches, chai/ coffee/ cigarette breaks or even water cooler conversations.

Challenges faced by HR:

HR managers have been at the center of these pandemic-generated changes from the beginning. They had to navigate new health and safety requirements, support managers in the new normal, reduce headcount in some cases, and keep up with required administrative processes. Organizations now have to rely more than ever on their HR departments to ensure their workforce feel as safe as possible during this unprecedented and unpredictable times.

Some of the challenges are-

Performance Appraisal like you actually are not aware if the employee has given its best due to working remotely as compared to work from office.

 Team collaboration like if you have to give any cross training or learn a new process.

 Employee engagement is also affected due to pandemic as there is no connect with the management and just virtual meets or seminar or activities conducted by HR but all of this has been now fixed into a rectangular display which is not giving desired results.

 Health and safety is the utmost priority of the workers and as employee is an asset of the organization especially after pandemic HR also needs to look into health and safety measures.

Promotion cycle is been simulated as company actually doesn’t have the same promotion cycle period which eventually demotivates the employee.

  Challenges in Business continuity

If you’re working for yourself and think you can disregard administrative work, think again. You’ll probably end up doing more mundane administrative work than you ever did at your old day job. Ignoring business basics, like paying your bills, preparing your taxes, and invoicing clients, is a sure fire way to not only ruin your business but possibly trigger an audit with the IRS in the process.

Traditional jobs tend to come with paperwork, such as work reports, time sheets, travel expense reports, and accounts payable requests for freelancers and vendors. Still, each individual worker’s administrative work pales in comparison to the total amount needed to run a business. Beyond administrative work, businesses need systems in place to streamline all repetitive tasks. Otherwise, entrepreneurs spend all their working time on mundane work that doesn’t actually generate revenue and quickly go out of business. 

Organizations are facing unprecedented times as the measures being deployed to slow the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) are impacting capital markets, supply chain, and business operations. The uncertainties of the current environment serve as a powerful reminder to senior decision-makers of the need for risk management and crisis planning.

Business continuity will be on a toss due to few obstacles like technical problems such as data loss, data protection, technology failure, incident management software and so on, Workforce will need to be retrained to be update as per the new changes, taking utmost care of cash flow management like does the organization have sufficient funds to continue operations or have a plan of how to address unanticipated expenses.

This pandemic poses significant challenges and unlike many crises has unfolded much advance warning or scope for preparation. Nevertheless, there is a wealth of information and resources that organizations can use to weather the pandemic and its aftermath and can be accessed here. CEOs and small business owners may find it helpful to bring this information to their boards or other advisors to stimulate discussion on the issue.

 Its just not the cons, here are some pros:

Remotely working comes with a slew of benefits from no setting up alarm, no daily commute in the morning, No strict dress code (unless you have online meeting!), get a more flexible work schedule to being work anywhere in the world, and every benefit comes with a challenge like managing your own schedule and time like we suddenly look at the clock and realize their kids want food, you need to have a proper division between workspace and personal space. Humans are social animals they need interaction with people, occasionally talk or no face-to-face interaction can get people lonely.

  New Learnings from the #NewNormal

As days progress, we see a positive adoption of the isolation, which was initially difficult to adjust to. So be it working from home, connecting with colleagues and teammates at a slightly more personal level, managing chores, and working more efficiently. People are now working around to make way for a new style of living.

Tools such as Zoom, Skype, and facilities such as conference calls earlier used exclusively for official meetings are increasingly used by people to connect with family, friends, and relatives. Every small act of kindness and courtesy, which was earlier absent, is now making a huge difference. People are now more appreciative of life, of things that were taken for granted before.

Let us know what you think of our blog and also how you manage to WFH (might help us :-p).

Blog by-

2020175-Dhwani Thakkar.

2020176- Gaurav Thigale.

2020177- Bhagyashree Tikar.

2020178- Pooja Tiwari.

2020179- Muskaan Verma.

2020180- Sakshi Vijan.

LALA LAJPATRAI INSTITIUTE OF MANAGEMENT.