This reporting is featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
A New York Times executive stepped in it last week when she seemed to encourage a Slack room full of LGBTQ staffers not to raise workplace concerns in the channel dedicated to… raising employee concerns.
“I just wanted to share a note about discussing or reporting about your workplace experience to ensure everyone knows about our resources,” wrote Natalia Villalobos, the Times’ vice president of inclusion, strategy, and execution, in an April 3 post to TimesOut, the paper’s LGBTQ-focused employee resources group.
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The HR exec directed employees to several HR-approved methods of expressing concerns: an “ask-the-company” Slack channel, a one-on-one with a manager, or the ever-helpful recourse of going directly to HR reps. “Going forward, I want to encourage folxs here to raise concerns or issues via the places above ^^^^ rather than in this ERG channel,” she wrote.
Suffice to say the post rankled staffers in the Slack channel—especially as the paper deals with continued fallout over its handling of internal and external criticism of its trans coverage. Several Times employees directly replied to Villalobos to question what prompted her post’s timing and how her suggestions could make LGTBQ staffers feel unsafe at the paper.
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“I can’t help but feel lately like I’m expected to just shut up and deal with the negativity because it might make some of my coworkers feel uncomfortable if I speak up,” one Times staffer wrote in the messages reviewed by Confider. “It feels completely surreal and disrespectful to get corporate swag branded with a pride flag at the same time as we’re being instructed not to publicly discuss our experiences as queer people in the workplace,” wrote another staffer in a comment that was pinned to the channel’s page.
Villalobos addressed the concerns a day later, acknowledging the optics of corporate HR pushing more HR-approved routes of voicing concerns over a room dedicated for such conversations.
“My post was meant to support the community by offering channels for reporting workplace concerns like discrimination and harassment so that they are received by HR and other partners who can help address them efficiently,” she wrote. “It was not meant to reduce sharing, eliminate community support, or tamp down community building.”
Villalobos also promised to host office hours upon her return from a personal leave to hear out the employees’ concerns. Left unclear was what prompted her initial message in the first place, but it came just three days before Times contributors sent a letter directly to the paper’s publisher admonishing the paper’s response to past open letters about its reporting on trans issues.
The Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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