unconscious bias

18 – HRmonthly – july 2011

battling the biasA diverse workforce offers A competitive AdvAntAgereport by Emily Ross

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unconscious bias

july 2011 – HRmonthly – 19

Companies, including Commonwealth Bank, Citigroup and Freehills, are already training their senior executives in uncon-scious bias and now NaB is on the bandwagon, with 200 more of its top talent about to embark on unconscious bias train-ing after a successful pilot program.

Products and services around unconscious bias are hot commodities. in February, Deloitte acquired a market leader in diversity consulting aequus Partners, clearly hoping to capitalise on the demand for diversity training and aequus’ reputation for uncon-scious bias training.

“This notion of unconscious bias may be the answer to the diversity conundrum,” says Citigroup’s head of human resources australia and New Zealand, Jo allen. “it could be the key to unlocking diversity.”

Know youR biasEsevery one of us has deep-seated unconscious biases, our own personal meritocracy if you like, and these values have a major impact on (and taint) the decisions we make. People have their favourites. in the workplace, this individual bias becomes magnified at a group level and the organisation is typically run through a narrow perspective on who is tal-ented and who can get the job done.

“We think we make objective assessments of people,” says Juliet Bourke, partner in human capital at Deloitte and a former owner of diversity consultancy aequus Partners.

“Unless we acknowledge that we don’t always do that, and we don’t put in place programs to stop that bias, we are prone to keep repeat-ing the mistakes of the past.” in other words, you need to know your biases so that you can change them.

Companies might have all manner of policies and procedures in place to promote diversity, but if people’s fundamental beliefs don’t shift, how can progress be made? “Unless uncon-scious bias is addressed, the talent pipeline will remain in peril,” says chief executive of Diversity Consulting, Heather Price.

The NaB’s unconscious bias session at the melbourne conference is the start of a new approach the bank is taking in an attempt to limit biases, improve decision-making and increase diversity at all levels of the bank. and it’s using heavy artillery to get the job done. Right on 2pm, the management guru’s man-agement guru, tom Peters, pops up on large video screens around the room. (Now there’s a way to start a session.) He is sitting in a cosy study and wants to talk diversity.

it’s time for the tom Peters fireside chat. Peters doesn’t waste any time, as per usual.

“if you are not sitting down with a diverse group, you are screwing it up big time,” he says. For the next few minutes it is not so much a fireside chat, but an urgent appeal to take diversity seriously. Peters passionately and pragmatically argues the case for diver-sity as a business imperative and the need to take responsibility for biased decision-mak-ing. He argues that mixing up the talent pool is a better, more productive and more profit-able way to do things. He cites Scott Page’s The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies, (Princeton University Press, 2007) as a critical piece of research on the benefits of genuine workplace diversity. Says Peters, diverse work groups do better. Period.

a faiR goLike a genie in a bottle, Peters disappears from the screens and one of the leading play-ers in unconscious bias training, Heather Price takes centre stage. Price has been work-ing in the field for 25 years and she wastes no time in hammering the audience with more data about diversity, quotas, gDP growth and productivity gains through diversity and research that shows the risks of business decisions contaminated by unconscious bias. There is nothing fluffy about this presenta-tion. She knows it is a room of bankers so she takes a no nonsense approach.

Part of the session includes a series of inter-active Q&as with the audience. everyone must answer multiple-choice questions, as table groups and also through individual wireless voting devices. The delegates are asked, for example, what does equity mean in the workplace? Does it mean equal treatment for everyone always, or does equity mean that equal treatment is not always acceptable or fair? Price’s question is designed to explain how equity does not mean equal treatment, it means being treated fairly.

There was rarely consensus in the room at any stage of the 60-minute session, with intelligent people picking very different responses, an important indicator of the

“This notion of unconscious bias may be the answer to the diversity conundrum ... It could be the key to unlocking diversity”

Jo Allen HeaD oF HR aUStRaLia aND NeW ZeaLaNDCitigRoUP

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magiNe a mammoth audi-torium in melbourne (that plays host to the Logies each year) on a wintry Thursday afternoon. inside, more than 600 National australia Bank business bank-ing staff are attending a one-day diversity conference. and while there’s nothing groundbreak-ing about that, there is one

session that stands out. it is a session about unconscious bias, a sign of the increasing value being placed on this approach to cul-tural change.

unconscious bias

challenges around creating a culture that genuinely champions diversity.

When 48 per cent of the room respond that flexible workers have equal opportunity for development and career advancement within the bank, Price halts proceedings and says: “you are caught up in the rhetoric, this is part of the problem,” citing the finance sector as one of the worst when it comes to the advancement of women, with the high-est gender pay gap, according to eoWa 2010 statistics showing that women earn 40.1 per cent of their male counterparts, taking base salary and bonuses into account. Despite the realities of these figures, 33 per cent of the NaB bankers think that women are given equal pay and incentives. This set of figures accurately exposes the role of unconscious bias in the current situation. Consciously staff think it’s all fair and equal, but there is stuff happening below the surface that is protecting the status quo.

bREaKing down discRiminationPrice’s programs for 200 NaB leaders will incorporate online psychometric assessment, training sessions and one-on-one coaching.

The education ensures participants under-stand “the intellectual reality that everyone has UB and that no one is to blame for it,” says Price. The assessment component iden-tifies each individual’s hierarchy of bias. The research presented in the program demon-strates the impact this bias has on business decision-making. one-on-one interviews discuss individual biases and the program ends with a final workshop that will bring the leadership group back together. in this session, the group will be presented with the collective hierarchy of bias of the group. “We do that at the end, because they have gone through their own personal assessment, they understand how they have contributed to this collective impact,” says Price.

From there, the group formulates a plan to fight bias on a systematic level with a series of tasks and goals. For example, if performance reviews favour full-time workers, checks and balances are put in place to ensure flexible workers are treated equitably. “There’s high demand to go into the program,” says NaB’s head of human capital strategy Colleen Harris.

Citigroup has started rolling out internal unconscious bias training for all of its 2000

employees in australia and New Zealand; its pilot programs began in June 2011. Despite a range of programs and initiatives around diversity because “the steps are not big enough or fast enough”, Jo allen’s interest in uncon-scious bias has been fuelled by bias research that centres around how the brain makes decisions, how our brains learn to categorise people in order to speed up the decision-making process. “Then you look at how that works in the workplace where we have learned to categorise aspects of people based on gender,” she says. Through the program, staff will be assisted to identify their uncon-scious biases, they will look at case studies of how unconscious bias works, raise account-ability around biased decision-making and adapt essential business practices such as per-formance reviews, recruiting, remuneration and promotion in light of these biases.

The aSX ‘please explain’ legislation has “put a Bunsen burner under diversity activi-ties,” says Bourke, who is settling into her new role at global firm Deloitte. once she knew that her diversity consultancy aequus Partners would struggle to handle the work-load for diversity consulting, she opted for

a joint venture with Deloitte to scale up the business. Bourke has built a reputation for her work around unconscious bias. a former discrimination lawyer, Bourke’s approach to unconscious bias training is to make sure participants understand that there is no judgement involved in the process, as every-one is prone to bias. Her method offers new ways for people to take responsibility and be accountable for decision-making, with the training giving people “a new energy” to connect to different people. “it is designed so that when people walk out of the train-ing room, everyone is aligned to promoting merit and inclusion,” she says. training around unconscious bias for leadership teams includes teaching people how to spot bias, to look at points within the business where change needs to occur – i.e. perform-ance reviews, recruitment, remuneration and promotion. “it comes down to day-to-day implementation,” she says.

among HR professionals there have been some serious wake-up calls that have put diversity on the agenda – obviously the aSX ‘please explain’ ruling, the David Jones, Citigroup, goldman Sachs and Novartis har-

assment cases, and more evidence from the likes of Catalyst, Harvard mit and Stanford that diversity offers a sustained competitive advantage. “There’s been more legislation in the last four years than there has in the last 40,” says Price.

There is clear evidence that unconscious bias accounts for many discriminatory decisions in australian workplaces. at the end of the NaB unconscious bias session, 75 per cent of the room acknowledged that unconscious bias has an impact on the appointment and pro-motion of women in the organisation. time will tell if unconscious bias is the latest HR fad, or an important breakthrough in the bat-tle for fair and equitable workplaces. Bourke does not see unconscious bias as the whole story, or the major story, but as a significant part of the change process.

it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that bias exists in australian organisations, but perhaps unconscious bias theory is the science that will make this important change. and if it works, think of all the revenue growth, productivity gains, cost savings and risk min-imisation. There’s plenty of reasons to explore unconscious bias. HRm

SOUNDS LIKE A BAD JOKE, BUT IT’S NOT

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In 2009, the ANU produced a study that showed how bias influences the Australian job market. It used an identical job application with different male names – a white Anglo Saxon, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Aboriginal and a Mediterranean applicant and measured how skewed the job market was to the Anglo Saxon male. In order for the other ethnic groups to secure an interview, they needed to apply many, many more times. It’s all in the name.

more for Chinese male applications

more for Middle Eastern applications

more for Aboriginal applications

more for Mediterranean applications

Source: australian National University

unconscious bias