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Here Is Why Unconscious Bias Should Be The Least Of Your Worries

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Almost exactly four years ago, Starbucks closed more than 8,000 stores across the US for racial bias training, after an incident involving two Black men being arrested at one of their locations. Two years later, the murder of George Floyd sparked a wave of increased corporate sensitivity to issues of racism and other forms of unconscious bias. Since that time, unconscious bias training has become the primary type of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program in corporate America, with estimates suggesting that many billions of dollars are spent annually on unconscious bias training, in spite of mounting evidence that unconscious bias training programs have limited effectiveness and can even lead to backlash.

There are many kinds of unconscious bias, but all of them can be classified as individual biases, that is, biases in the way an individual thinks or behaves. Individual biases can be conscious or unconscious—meaning that the person exhibiting the bias may or may not be aware that their thoughts or actions are biased— but, in either case, individual biases impact workplace DEI primarily through interactions between individuals. Examples of individual biases include: an executive who is uncomfortable mentoring women; a recruiter who does not believe candidates from a community college are worth interviewing; a manager who tends to assign better projects to younger reports; an employee who uses racial slurs against a co-worker.

What few seem to realize is that there are many other kinds of biases within an organization that are not individual biases. The goal of this article is to introduce the notion of organizational biases, to provide some examples, and to show that organizational biases can have a much greater impact on workplace DEI than individual biases. A separate article will also show that, in many cases, it is possible to identify and mitigate organizational biases, yielding a much greater positive impact on workplace DEI than unconscious bias training.

Defining organizational biases

We define as organizational biases those biases that operate at the level of the organization rather than the individual. These biases typically manifest themselves through organizational policies, processes or best practices.

Just as there are conscious and unconscious individual biases, organizational biases are not always “visible” or easy to identify even when they are pointed out. To understand this, let’s consider four common examples of organizational biases: a policy to recruit only candidates from Ivy League schools; holding team meetings early in the morning or late in the day; relying on informal or unstructured processes for performance reviews; fostering a culture of meritocracy.

The first two examples describe policies or practices that are visibly biased. In the first example, Ivy League school students tend to come mostly from socioeconomically advantaged groups, which clearly makes the recruiting process biased (it also happens to be a poor business decision). Similarly, holding meetings at either end of the workday is clearly unfavorable for employees with childcare responsibilities, which tends to impact women disproportionately.

Often, the most troublesome organizational biases are invisible, as shown by the other two examples. The example of informal or unstructured performance reviews may not seem to create bias in and of itself; however, this is known to be a primary source of inequities because it allows the individual biases of those conducting the reviews to creep in. The meritocracy example may also seem confusing, as there are many people who are convinced that a meritocracy is unbiased because it rewards those who perform best. There are in fact many reasons why meritocracy is an illusion, but the easiest way to see where bias creeps in is that a meritocracy requires someone to decide what constitutes superior performance, which makes it extremely likely that the merit criteria will reflect conscious or unconscious biases of those who define them.

Why organizational biases are more harmful than individual biases

All of the previous examples of organizational biases should make one thing clear: organizational biases are particularly damaging because they have the opportunity to impact large numbers of people. Referring to the four examples above, the first one impacts all potential job candidates who did not attend a top school; the second impacts anyone with caretaking responsibilities, most often women; the third is likely to impact any employee whose personal traits differ from those of the individual conducting the review; and the fourth one can impact literally everyone in the organization who does not fit the mold prescribed by the company’s leaders.

Organizational biases are particularly harmful because they can be hard to notice, especially for companies whose leadership is homogeneous. For instance, a white, male leader with a degree from an Ivy League school may have an individual bias favoring Ivy League graduates. If the rest of the leadership team is homogeneous, they may not realize the nature and potential impact of this individual bias, and allow it to become an organizational bias by turning it into an accepted practice. In contrast, the bias would be less likely to be adopted as a practice by the organization if the leadership team included people from a wide range of personal backgrounds. Similarly, a company dominated by male managers may think that holding all-hands meetings at 8:30am is very efficient because it avoids interfering with the rest of the workday. The leaders of such a company may have no idea of the inconvenience that this causes, and may find themselves wondering why retention rates are much lower for women than for men.

What can make organizational biases even more difficult to notice is that, often, they may result from omissions within the policies and processes, and in some cases even from the absence of a process or policy that should have been there. As an example, most companies have policies spelling out what constitutes acceptable workplace conduct. However, many companies do not establish processes for employees to report problems in a safe and anonymous fashion, they may not have a clear policy for responding to conduct violations, and even if they do, they may neglect to enforce these policies, especially in response to inappropriate conduct by senior employees or “toxic rock stars.” Hence, as we can see from this hypothetical example, organizational biases can arise from omissions, such as failing to enforce policies about conduct violations, and also from absences, such as the lack a mechanism for submitting complaints.

The tangible impact of organizational biases

The impact of organizational biases is far from hypothetical. It is estimated that Starbucks lost more than $16 million in revenues when they closed their stores for unconscious bias training. In a more recent example, the State of California brought a lawsuit against Tesla for racial discrimination, not long after Tesla lost another racial discrimination lawsuit. Interestingly, much of the media coverage focused on managers and other individuals who exhibited inappropriate workplace behaviors at Tesla factories. According to the article linked above, Tesla has attempted to deflect blame by saying that “Our company has more than 33,000 employees, with over 10,000 in the Fremont factory alone, so it is not humanly possible to stop all bad conduct.” This kind of statement makes it clear that Tesla believes that the problem lies with the individuals who behave inappropriately, rather than recognizing the impact of organizational biases that result when the company fails to discourage such individual events from occurring in the first place, or to take swift and decisive action when such events are reported.

Tesla is certainly not alone in having lost tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars because of lawsuits arising from inappropriate behaviors. And they are not alone in failing to recognize that the responsibility falls upon the organization, not upon individual employees. Companies of all sizes need to become aware of organizational biases, and they must understand that these biases are much more likely to have a negative impact than unconscious biases.

But there is an even more compelling reason for companies to learn about organizational biases: because they are so much more damaging than individual biases, fixing even a small number of organizational biases can have an outsized positive impact, and any success in identifying and removing organizational biases is likely to yield significant returns.

The good news is that organizational biases can be identified systematically, and, in many cases, mitigated. This will be the subject of a separate article.

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