Personal development
Biases, at work
Raafi-KarimAlidina, associate of Frost Included and co-author of Building an inclusive organisation , discusses the issues and solutions
W hether or not we realise it, we all have our own positive and negative biases. Most of us profess to like diversity, but if we reflected on our closest friends, our closest colleagues, our partner and neighbours, would we find that we liked diversity as much as we profess? What would this ‘in-group’ tell us about our real attitudes? The world over, in varied cultures, environments and countries we tend to prefer sameness to difference. This phenomenon – homophily – is natural and normal to human beings. If you have a relatively homogenous in-group in terms of race, political leanings, disability and other characteristics, you are like 90% of the population. That’s great and should be celebrated. We need space to be ourselves, to relax, to have commonalities with people, norms and protocols that require no deep understanding or effort. But in a professional context, homogenous in-groups can be dangerous. They lead to unconscious biases that can negatively affect the way we work and the decisions we make, which can be disastrous for payroll professionals. For example, when women do ask for more money – when they negotiate in the same way that men do – they receive an incredible level of backlash. We now know that exhibiting strong negotiating behaviours is seen for men as ‘knowing their value’ but as ‘cold and abrasive’ for women. This is such a common phenomenon it even has a name: the warmth-competency bias. Even just among executives, University
of Exeter researchers have shown that when companies perform well above the industry average, male executives get bonuses at 80% of their base pay, while female executives in the same positions in similarly-performing companies get just 40% of their base pay. The biggest difficulty is that these biases like homophily and warmth-competency are so deeply ingrained in us that they’re almost impossible to get rid of. However, recognition of this fact presents us with a more effective approach: rather than trying to get rid of our biases, we can adapt the way we work to help prevent our biases from coming into play at all. At Frost Included we have worked with companies all over the world and assessed what makes their cultures more or less inclusive. Here are three key actions leaders can build into their day-to-day work to build a more inclusive culture: ● Build a psychologically safe team culture – This is a culture where all members of a team feel they can be their authentic selves without fear of backlash. This means feeling they can disagree with their boss, make mistakes, and dissent with decisions without feeling like it will be held against them in the future. Leaders can do this by having a dedicated devil’s advocate in meetings or including ‘rotten tomatoes time’ in meetings where the goal is to poke holes in decisions or ideas that have come up. This creates a culture where disagreement and debate are welcome, and guards against blind spots and groupthink. ● Recognise and reduce microaggressions – Microaggressions are the constant and continuing everyday
reality of slights, insults, invalidations, and indignities visited upon marginalised groups by well-intentioned people they interact with. For example, we know members of such groups are more likely to be interrupted in meetings and have their ideas attributed to other people. Microaggressions often go unnoticed by those who perpetrate them, and can have negative consequences for work performance, job satisfaction, employee engagement, and mental health. If leaders make a point of ensuring that interruptions aren’t tolerated, or that when a good point is repeated that they give proper credit to the original person who made the point, it would go a long way to making sure that everyone feels welcome at work. ● Create a culture of transparency – When managers and executives make decisions that affect members of their teams – including personnel decisions, salary decisions, bonus decisions, or work delegation decisions – ensuring that everyone knows about the process that led to that decision can be extremely important. When the reasons for workforce decisions are transparent employees tend to feel more valued and involved, which increases conscientiousness, job involvement, and innovativeness. We have also found that leaders are often transparent only with majority groups, and less with minority groups. This is likely not intentional, but managers should make extra effort to ensure transparency for minority employees so it is clear across all of their reports regardless of background. It’s not always easy, because considering inclusion is not always a natural tendency. Yet if we can remind ourselves to slow down and think about diversity and inclusion, it can help us remember to do these small but extremely important and impactful actions that help everyone feel like they belong. n
...adapt the way we work to help prevent our biases from coming into play...
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 60 | May 2020
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