Does Your Company Keep Track of the Race of Its Employees?

Some time ago at firm that I no longer work for, I decided to look at my employee profile on the intranet. It was a boring night and I had just finished the first twelve hours of my work day with about five more to go and I decided to take a look at how happy I looked in my intranet picture. If I were to asked to take that picture over again my looks would be drastically dissimilar to the smiling beacon of energy and brainwashed new employee showcased on the site.

I then take a sigh of self-pity and began to crunch numbers into the night to ensure that a few reports and several tasks that directors at the firm had asked me to do around 8:00 PM before they left for the evening. About a few hours later I glance at the time on monitor and realize that it’s ten minutes past midnight and decide to check my payroll history to see if my money had been direct deposited.

Like most employee self-service human resources sites, they have this one thing in common—they are just as useless as HR themselves. So after taking about eight minutes to figure out how to check my payroll I came across my record in the employee database and noticed an interesting field: “Race.” Believe me when I tell you that as sure as day my race was listed as African-American.

I ran this same test at several other firms and noticed the same thing. Pretty interesting and I wonder if all companies keep track of this information. Check it out next time you’re on the intranet.