Why is diversity important?
In many parts of the world, bigotry is on the rise. Attacks, both verbal and physical, against various groups are being reported more frequently, especially since the COVID outbreak began. Economically, the gap between groups due to discrimination is resulting in a reduction in growth – the US projects a loss between $1-1.5 trillion from 2019-28, and France predicts a possible economic bonus of $3.6 billion if they reduced racial gaps in access to employment, work hours and education.
Organisations can play a major role in helping combat unconscious bias to support diversity in the workplace and wider society.
What is unconscious bias?
Main types of unconscious bias
There are three main types of unconscious bias that can influence our decisions.
1. Moral license
This is when people derive confidence from past moral behaviour and consider it provides permission to engage in immoral or unethical ways later. Or more simply, your good behaviour in the past on an issue makes you feel you don’t need to behave that way again.
For example, if you promoted a member of a minority group in your workplace, you may feel you have “done your bit” in contributing to diversity and not do so again.
2. Affinity bias
Affinity bias is our tendency to get along with others who are like us, and to evaluate them more positively than those who are different. Our personal beliefs, assumptions, preferences, and lack of understanding about people who are not like us may lead to repeatedly favouring ‘similar-to-me’ individuals.
In organisations, this often affects who gets hired, who gets promoted, and who gets picked for opportunities to manage people or projects.
3. Confirmation bias
This is the tendency to seek out, favour, and use information that confirms what you already believe. The other side of this is that people tend to ignore new information that goes against their preconceived notions, leading to poor decision-making.
It can hinder efforts to create and nurture a workplace culture that supports diversity, and together with moral licensing and affinity bias, limit the effectiveness of unconscious bias training.
How to overcome unconscious bias
1. Change systems, not individuals
The main reason unconscious bias training programs fail to have the desired effect in creating lasting change, is that they are focused on changing individual behaviours while leaving largely untouched the systems that enable those behaviours to thrive.
Individual biases are difficult to shift in the long term, and the academic evidence suggests that knowing about bias does not result in changes in behaviour by managers and employees.
The whole social environment – rather than the individual – needs to be addressed. This can be done by implementing company policies and programs designed to mitigate bias through all stages of the employee’s journey, from selection processes to performance ratings and promotion.
These structures, which should be audited regularly, are important in ensuring that any individual’s own bias is limited and does not influence decisions at an organisational level.
Such structural initiatives may end up influencing social norms within organisations, so behavioural change happens on a larger group level, leading to improved compliance from individuals as they gain a new understanding of socially-acceptable behaviour.
2. Slow down and act deliberately
Bias is most likely to affect decision-making when decisions are made quickly, guided by our instincts (unconscious). When we slow down and control our thoughts, we are able to consciously overcome our first impressions and the biases that come with them.
This is where unconscious bias training may have an impact, as self-awareness and education are key to shifting mindsets.
At work, ensuring a diversity of feedback during recruitment processes, and establishing structured interviews with the same set of defined questions and evaluation criteria for each candidate is an example of how this could be applied.
3. Set concrete goals and work towards them
Data is essential to making real progress on diversity goals, and especially important when it comes to mitigating the effects of bias because it provides an objective measure of what has improved – or worsened – over time.
Data is key to buy-in, and companies can increase accountability by collecting and analysing data on diversity over time, comparing the numbers with those at other organisations, and sharing them with key stakeholders internally and externally.
4. Promote positive imagery and don’t focus on difference
When training courses present stereotypes associated with particular groups before calling for their suppression, they often end up reinforcing these stereotypes in participants’ minds. Sometimes they even implant new stereotypes.
Workplaces do better when they instead focus on exposing employees to an abundance of positive associations. The more people see and experience positive associations about a group of people, the more their instinctive responses to that group turn positive.
This helps explain why increased work interactions and mentoring can be helpful drivers for greater understanding and reduction of bias. So can images that celebrate people from various groups in a positive light. These experiences and images get “glued” to the cumulative memories of the group, replacing negative associations with positive ones. As a result, people’s instinctive reactions to those groups change.
Instead of confronting the conscious mind, these kinds of efforts collaborate with the unconscious mind to leverage the brain’s own behaviour-change mechanism.
Conclusion
Of course, this does not mean that tackling entrenched bigotry is in any way easy. But the activities organisations engage in can be an important part of the solution – addressing unconscious bias through taking the path of least psychological resistance.
At Xseed Lead diversity is valued and differences seen as an opportunity for learning. If you would like help addressing unconscious bias, contact us.
Author Bio
Deborah Knight is the founder of Xsead Lead with a background in organisational and individual leadership and executive coaching.
As a coach, Deborah aims to create an inclusive and respectful space where individuals and organisations can do the work necessary for growth and change. She is also passionate about helping women be valued for themselves while also contributing and being successful.
Apart from her company which she is deeply passionate about, Deborah also loves bushwalking, reading, travelling, and learning new things.
For any coaching or organisational support enquiries Deborah can be contacted via email: info@xseedlead.com.au or via her company website which is www.xseedlead.com.au.
