Provide education and mechanisms to enable people to more easily recognise and call out bias and unhelpful/unacceptable behaviour.
A recent Deloitte study found that 92% of workers claim to have witnessed bias or prejudice in the workplace.
According to this 2019 CIPD report, 'progress on D&I requires managers throughout the organisation to be held to account, both through the KPIs they are measured against and through unhelpful and unacceptable behaviour being called out'.
Google has conducted research which shows that education, action, and a platform to call out unconscious bias are a powerful combination to inform unbiasing strategies.
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/0a594e53-9f39-41a7-92f7-6f35b37d0ecd/Having_difficult_conversations_-_final_(002).pdf
Elisabeth Kelan says 'Calling out bias does not mean to aggressively confront others but rather to be aware of bias and ensure that it does not influence the situation or decision. It takes great political skill for men as middle managers to call out bias, verbally or non-verbally, and this is only possible if they understand the underlying dynamics and know how to counteract them'.
Empower bystanders to act on sexist and sexually harassing behaviours.
Commit at board level to zero tolerance of harassment and bullying. Share stories of how leaders respond. An example of a powerful story was shared by blogger and CEO at Crossword Cybersecurity, Tom Ilube.
Provide printed handouts of unbiasing checklists in key people processes to interrupt bias. Google ran a controlled experiment to test whether giving managers an unbiasing checklist changed their perceptions of fairness and voice in performance calibration meetings (where managers discuss and evaluate the performance of their employees). Read more about Google's experiment here. The results of the study showed that participants who were given printed handouts of the unbiasing checklist reported significantly greater perceptions of fairness than those who were not given these, as they were given the “right” to call out unconscious bias and the tools to do so effectively.
For International Women's Day 2021 LeanIn launced '50 Ways to Fight Bias' whic is a free digital programme to empower all employees to identify and challenge bias head on. The programme is optimized for virtual workshops and consists of two parts: a short video that explains the most common types of biases that women face and a digital card activity where small groups of participants discuss specific examples of bias, brainstorm solutions together, and learn research-backed recommendations for what to do. The digital cards highlight almost 100 instances of workplace bias, including the compounding biases women experience because of their race, sexual orientation, disability, or other aspects of their identity. Read more
'It’s important to create an environment where allies feel that they have permission to call out bias in the moment. If you feel that you’re not in an environment like that and if you feel that if you speak up that may actually act against you, you won’t take action. It’s really important to create an inclusive environment where that’s considered to be a trait that you’re going to expect individuals to live up to, where they want to feel empowered to support one another and that’s rewarded. We need to provide people with that comfort level' Dr. Terri Cooper, Deloitte U.S. chief inclusion officer in this Forbes article.
According to many reports including this World Economic Forum article, 'Unconscious bias training is money ill-spent. But it is just one particularly striking example of a wider issue. There is a lack of evidence about what actually does work to improve gender equality and diversity at work'. About $8 billion a year is spent on diversity training in the United States alone, read more in this McKinsey article
Use a nudge to create buy-in and engagement from leaders/managers who have not personally experienced microaggressions, harassment and/or discrimination and who may find it difficult to grasp the impact. An example of an inclusion nudge is below (shared by Tinna C. Nielsen in the Inclusion Nudges Guidebook):
Display real-life and personal experiences from employees (with first-person quotes) on a wall, have the leaders read them to feel the pain of their colleagues. Also show the reverse business case (the loss) of not changing the current state.
How: Collect real-life examples/personal experiences from the organisation Convert each example into first-person quotes like, ”When my colleagues go to lunch they never invite me. They often keep important information from me.” Display these on the walls in a meeting room (make sure to have enough or duplicate to cover a wall or more) and have leaders walk around in the room to read them. Convert the percentage of people who have experienced this behaviour (from internal employee survey) into an actual number of people (12% = xxxx employees in our organisation) going to work every day feeling miserable and underperforming as a result. Make this number visual: show, don’t tell.
Impact: Senior leaders were shocked by the real-life examples and by how these issues played out in their organisation. The result was immediate support. Resources were prioritised to take action immediately. The actions are to empower all leaders and employees to change this, and to strengthen the formal grievance and case-handling procedure to deal with critical situations.
Intel is an example of a company that has launched a confidential online hotline where employees are paired with case managers to resolve any workplace concerns or struggles before they resign. "We wanted to get on the front end of what was happening in retention and have a proactive way to address employees' concerns before they were ready to exit out the door," said Barbara Whye, Intel's chief diversity and inclusion officer. The WarmLine data helps Intel to understand what they need to do differently, and then take specific actions as a result. They break data down by organisational departments enabling more targeted conversations depending on the area of the business.