Navigating Social Class in the Workplace

Video Transcript

Lynn Daniel: Welcome, everyone. Today I’m very pleased to have Anna Kallschmidt on our Success Stories. She will be one of our keynote speakers at our upcoming conference, March 4th and 5th, in Charleston, South Carolina. So I wanted to give folks an understanding of what she’s going to talk about so welcome, Anna. I’m really glad to have you today. If you would, just start out by telling us a little bit about your research interests and how you got to where you are with this research.

Anna Kallschmidt: Yes, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here, and I’m excited to join the conference in March. So my PhD is in industrial organizational psychology. So we are the psychologists who look at the behaviors in the workplace and how they influence people and the work outcomes. So we are looking at people, processes, and how that influences the health of the organization as a whole. We want to see happy people at work and healthy organizations, and my research is on the unwritten rules of work, particularly for people from low income backgrounds. And I got into that line of research almost a decade ago, and I have been uncovering what are these rules, and are there any race and gender differences, and what are the class differences as you move up in your work and environment or as you work with people who are in more white collar environments if you’ve been a blue collar employee. And so that is my main passion, and I work with organizations.

I have academic roots, of course. Having a PhD, I am sometimes adjunct faculty, but I have been mostly an applied psychologist. So I’ve worked in academic, and public, and private institutions and applying the knowledge that I have gained in my academic research to help the organizations run better.

Defining Social Class in the Workplace

Lynn Daniel: Good. You used the term class. What is your definition of that? To help our audience, what does that word mean to you?

Anna Kallschmidt: So to, me it means a cultural group. So your social class status is your relative ranking in your society. In the US, we usually think of poverty, working class, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, and then the upper top 10% maybe. And those are social stratifications that have a lot to do with income, occupational status, level of education, but there is some nuance and there is discussion on how do they quite quantify each other. If you have a PhD but you only make $50,000 a year, what class are you in?

But my research looks at what is it culturally, because what class you’re in determines what resources you have access to. This influences the schools you go to, the workplaces you’ve been socialized to be around, the language you use, the values you have what you consider normal. And in the US, our whole identity is we’re famous for the American dream, that you can change classes. And so, in my research I found that when people do change classes, there is still a culture shock even when you cash the checks and you can work in that environment and be in that room that it’s still like, “What’s going on here?” It can still be a very different experience.

Class Differences vs. Race and Gender

Lynn Daniel: That’s interesting. I hear people talk a lot about racial and gender differences among people. I seldom hear people talk about class differences. Is this because we fancy ourselves a classless society? Why this interest in class?

Anna Kallschmidt: So I think Americans, some think we’re classless. I think we also see it as such a big part of our identity that your class is within your control. That is a big part of the ideology. However, who has always had access to paid labor has always varied by race and gender in the US until pretty recent history, that has started to shift. I mean recent history, and we’re only a 250-year-old country, so in the last 50 years. Then we inherited a lot of our work culture from Europe at that time that goes farther back. So I think that is why we have a hard time discussing it, but it can be harder to see.

So one of my first studies was, I interviewed white men who had moved up from lower income backgrounds to higher ones on, “Do you disclose your background at work or do you hide it?” And I also looked at, “Do you disclose it on purpose? Are there other things you do that give it away?” And so, it’s one of those nuances of, I found most of them did try to hide it, but there were other things that gave it away. And I looked at white men specifically because of the history we have in America that if I looked at women or people of color, there’s already an assumption about class there that may or may not be true.

So I think it is less talked about because it’s harder to identify at first, but there are subtle cues that give it away. But I think that because we don’t, and we focus on race and gender without it, that it can cause some frustration. Because if you’re someone maybe a white man from a very poor background and you hear somebody talking at work about how there weren’t a lot of women at Harvard and it’s just kind of like, “Cool.” It doesn’t resonate the same way.

Unwritten Rules in the Workplace

Anna Kallschmidt: That’s not to say that experience isn’t valid. It’s missing a pretty big piece of the puzzle. And inherently with class, because of how our work culture has been built, I find that it inevitably leads to discussions of race, and gender, and class intersections and how those all fit together and what is similar and what are unique experiences so I find it to be actually a medium for a lot of discussion that people find more relatable.

Lynn Daniel: That is really interesting because I think that definition of class is so hard for a lot of people to get their heads around, again, because I think we think of ourselves as the classless society.

Now in our conference in March it will be a lot of our clients, maybe some people from outside. And I think that the issue of the frontline worker who wants to move up in the organization and be successful in that move, maybe they start out as a technician or supervisor, and they’re all of a sudden moving up in the organization is an important issue because developing talent throughout the company is so critical.

Social Class and Workplace Mobility

Lynn Daniel: So, I think one question on my mind is, in what ways does social class affect one’s potential for success, and what are the key factors there that one needs to consider that affect that potential for success?

Anna Kallschmidt: So we also focus… I have to disclose, there is a big money difference on how much risk you can take or maybe how many networking events you can go to if you’re coming from working class background, you have more debt, et cetera, but I don’t really focus on that. I want to acknowledge it’s real, but I focus on more the cultural.

So there’s a theory called cultural mismatch theory. And it’s been examined with class in schools and what my work has done has been applied to organizations. So what we knew walking in was that when first generation students, like high school students who would be the first to go to college, see an organization or a university and it is portrayed as having middle class norms, they are less likely to apply to it.

Now when the same institution is portrayed as having working class norms, they’ll apply to it. Then similarly, when they’re already in school, first generation, and you show them a pamphlet or something about the school and you portray it as having middle class norms, they don’t perform as well in cognitive task. But if you give the same group of students where it’s more communal and working-class culture, they perform just fine.

Anna Kallschmidt: I’ve translated that into… I was like, “If this is going on in schools, that doesn’t just stop when they graduate.”

And the people I’ve talked to, I interviewed black and white women and men from low income backgrounds who’ve moved to higher ones. They got high up, executive level, and in many different fields. And I asked them about, “What are the unwritten rules that you experienced as you moved up, and what were the consequences for violating them?”

And some of them, it was things like, “I just opted out. I left the company because I just didn’t feel like I belonged.”

And for some of them, it was even termination or just feeling a lot of stress, anxiety, but eventually, they got the hang of it, they started to figure it out. And it’s a whole skill set that you have to learn when it’s not something that your parents already raised you to know is normal.

The Importance of Early Socialization

Anna Kallschmidt: Knowing these skill sets not only can help you navigate the mobility, it can help you even perceive it as an option in the first place and if you want to be in that organization.

Lynn Daniel: So that early background that one has really does affect your future greatly, which we all knew all know, but it’s still what you’re saying is it really does matter.

Anna Kallschmidt: Absolutely. I think and once you say it, it makes sense. It’s kind of funny that a lot of research hasn’t been done on it yet because we know so much of what happens in childhood influences you forever, right? We talk about the inner child, but Yes. What you’re socialized, how you learn to communicate, how you learn to have experienced conflict, you learn all of that in your home and in your schools. And so when you end up doing really well and put in a new environment, it can be like…

I’ve talked to people who are like, “I was top of my class engineering, and then my first day at an engineering firm, I was like, ‘I’ve been put on another planet.'”

Anna Kallschmidt: Right? And they’re brilliant people, right? It’s just culture shock.

And when I first got into this early in my grad school days, I went to grad school in Miami and we had a lot of international students. And their engineering school asked me to train a lot of their Middle Eastern students on what is American work culture. So when we prepare expats to go abroad, there’s tons of research of navigating cultural conflicts and being culturally aware and all those things, but we don’t do that inside America. And this is a huge country with a lot of regional class, racial, and ethnic, et cetera differences, and so I think it just makes sense

Lynn Daniel: No. You cannot escape your background. We both know that. So how does one deal with their class? How do you get someone to start to think about what they need to do? Let’s say they’re that frontline technician that’s got some ambition and some capability and they want to move up in the organization. So how do they begin to deal with the class that they are part of?

Anna Kallschmidt: Yes, so I think a lot of people in that position, in my experience… I’m approached by a lot of people who are looking for resources to learn how to navigate this. It is difficult to ask for them publicly because there is so much shame tied to it. And there’s fear of… Because there is research showing people from working class backgrounds are more likely to experience workplace harassment very early in their lives, like when they’re teenagers for example, because they are targeted because people know they need the job. And so those early experiences can shape a lack of trust later. They can make it hard for them to out themselves. So something I advise leaders to do is to try to learn those techniques of what is helpful for everyone in the room.

So for example, another group that likes my work is people who aren’t necessarily from a lower class but who are neurodivergent. Autism, ADHD, example. And there is more research on that. And so for example, one of the things you can do when you’re hiring to be more inclusive of people with autism is instead of your interview question being, “Do you know how to communicate,” which is a terribly phrased question, but yes, I’ve been asked this, you can say, “Tell me a story of a time you communicated well, or tell me a story of time you didn’t communicate well, and how did you rectify it?” That’s a better question being that has been found research-backed to be much more inclusive of people who are neurodiverse because you’re telling them what to do. You’re telling, “I need to hear the story.”

And I hear that research and I’m like, “See, that’s also a class difference. That’s also inclusive of people from different classes,” because that’s something I struggled with when I first graduated from college.

People were like, “Do you know how to communicate?”

“Yes. You asked me about it. Yes. I finished college. Is there something more specific,” it took me a while to learn because they don’t tell you, “Give me an example.”

I thought, “Maybe I’ll be talking too much or maybe I’ll be going into too much detail.” And I had worked all through high school. I didn’t understand the difference. And then when I started my graduate program and learning how to design jobs and design job interviews, I was like, “Oh, they’re looking for the story. They want to know what’s the situation, task, action result.” And that was a game changer.

And it’s beneficial for the organization to learn how to do this because then you are getting great interviews, right? And then you have an even better group to select from. So I think it goes both ways of, there are people who are looking for this because they know when they’re in a work environment that they want to move up and they know that they don’t know what they’re doing. But they don’t know if it’s safe to ask. And sometimes there are little things you can do as a leader that is going to make your life easier but is going to help, one, show them, “I want you here. It’s okay,” and is going to give you better information in general.

Conclusion: Social Class in the Workplace

Lynn Daniel: Anna, this is fascinating. I am looking forward so much to your presentation discussion at our conference in March. I think the audience is going to find it very helpful and very fascinating also because they want to help their people to grow and develop. The human resource is something critical to all companies and especially the clients that we’re working with, given the fact that people do a lot of the work that generates income for them. So again, looking forward to it March 4th and 5th in Charleston, South Carolina. Thanks so much.