Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Subtle Signs of Unconscious Bias

When I talked to a gender-bias researcher at a prestigious U.S. university off the record, she informed me that I should not take my success for granted. Based on the researcher’s experience, being a short woman in Corporate America requires that I'm twice as smart, twice as competent and twice as hardworking as a tall white man.

It's not like people readily believe that tall white men naturally make better leaders. But that's the thing about unconscious bias—it's an automatic attitude or perception about a person based on a single attribute like gender, ethnicity, race or sexual orientation that we are unaware we have and act upon. 

Unconscious bias is as old as human beings, as our ancestors developed it to quickly categorize threats in a hostile environment. In other words, we usually don’t have ill intentions when we discriminate.

The good news is that people are getting better at spotting subtle bias at work, as well as mastering business process improvement techniques and strategies that root it out before it does too much damage to a company's culture. 

Let's examine a few places bias at work commonly show up.

Resume Filters

You may not realize it, but people don't review resumes and profiles on merit alone. When unconscious bias creeps in, we can negatively assess a candidate based on their name, address, photo or educational institution.

For the rest of the piece, check out the AMEX Business website.

Doing Right By Your Customers in a Crisis

Around the world, large companies are making unprecedented moves on behalf of their customers. Dunkin' is awarding its loyalty program members bonus points for using their drive thrus; luxury product manufacturer LVMH switched from making perfume to producing hand sanitizer.

But the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent quarantining procedures present a dilemma for business owners. How should one engage with customers during this frightening period? Is there a right or wrong strategy? Here are three dos and don'ts for effective interaction.

DO offer cancellations and refunds to the best of your ability.

Even if you have a policy that expressly states that all sales are final, recognize that these are extenuating circumstances and err on the side of generosity, especially if products haven’t been used or services rendered. 

Andrew Maff, who runs a digital marketing consultancy, understands why many of his staffing agency customers have pulled their orders as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The job market is a big question mark," Maff says, "so to help our clients do whatever they can to make it through this, we’ve had to be creative.

"For example, while we didn't give outright refunds, we basically offered a hold. Most of our clients have a minimum of a six-month contract. We volunteered to hold the monthly payments for up to 90 days, and then re-evaluate," he explains. "We did have two clients start in March and we voided those contracts, saying we'd revisit in the next few months. For clients who paid us already, we stopped working for the time being and will use the funds as a pre-payment for future services."

DO send a small gift or coupon to make their immediate situation easier.

If your product or service correlates to pandemic-related needs, consider providing something for free or at a discount. While this strategy may help you upsell, this isn’t the goal. You can show your customers that you’re thinking about their well-being by sending a food delivery, a subscription or even a simple handwritten card.  

Lisa Barrington, an employee engagement strategist, realized that her clients could use her advice in their newly created work-from-home roles. She responded by developing and delivering pro-bono webinars as well as free, downloadable videos and resources. The response was positive.

"People wrote on my LinkedIn to thank me for the great resources on my website, and one of my students who'd never worked from home before commented that he really appreciated and found the video useful," Barrington says.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the AMEX Business site.

How to Spot the 5 Subtle Forms of Workplace Bias

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a tall, white man.

While I am Caucasian, I’m not tall or male. And because depending on who you ask, between 70-80 percent of leaders have all three attributes, I’m wondering just how much my lack of two of them has held me back.

When I talked, off the record, to a gender bias researcher at a prestigious U.S. university, she informed me that I should not take my success for granted. Apparently, being a short woman in Corporate America means I must be twice as smart, twice as competent, and twice as hardworking.

Most clients wouldn’t tell me that outright as they don’t understand it to be true. It’s not like people readily believe that tall, white men naturally make better leaders. And that’s the thing about unconscious bias – it’s an automatic attitude or perception about a person based on a single attribute like gender, ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation that we are unaware we have and act upon. Unconscious bias is almost as old as humans, as our ancestors developed it to quickly categorize threats in a hostile environment.

In other words, we don’t mean to discriminate, but we can’t help it.

The good news is, we’re getting better at spotting subtle bias at work, as well as the business process improvement techniques and strategies that can root it out before it does too much damage to your culture. Let’s examine a few places bias at work will commonly show up, now or in the near future.

Resume Filters

We often don’t realize it, but we don’t review resumes and profiles on merit alone. When unconscious bias creeps in, we can negatively assess a candidate based on their name, photo, or educational institution. Therefore, using software to blind your applicants’ resumes, profiles, and sample interview tasks is the first element of your first business improvement plan. Full candidate details should not be revealed until your recruiters or hiring managers have had an opportunity to get to know them as an individual.

Unstructured Interviews

Unstructured interviews are not a solid predictor of employee performance for many reasons, but one is surely the subtle bias that results. When we chat informally with candidates, the conversation may proceed in a direction that takes away from the candidate’s relevant attributes. Your business process improvement plan should combat selection bias by including a new interview approach that asks every candidate the same questions, in the same order, according to the same evaluation criteria. You might also consider using a video-based chatbot assessment of interviewer speech and body language to check for potential bias there.

Female Notetakers

Do you have a meeting methodology in place? If so, use business process improvement methodology to mitigate the effects of unconscious bias. Recognize that in meetings, women tend to be asked to take notes more often than men and are more frequently the victims of crosstalk and credit stealing (men may speak over them or coop their ideas). Leaders must make a concerted effort to ensure that female participant contributions are respected and acknowledged equally, and this may be involve changing the way your meetings are structured.

Questionable Writing

Business communication is becoming more informal, and from a subtle bias perspective, that makes it increasingly dangerous because we are more prone to be lazy about what we say and how we say it. Thankfully, artificial intelligence can help you make business process improvements here. Certain document creation software, for instance, provides guidance 

on potentially sensitive or offensive language (i.e. “May the best man win”) contained in a presentation, and others scans text for inappropriately gendered pronouns as part of a general grammar check.

Homogeneous Teams

When we only have contact with our ingroup – or other people who share our demographic and/or psychographic characteristics – we perpetuate unconscious bias. Strategize business process improvements that will diversify your team both traditionally (gender, ethnicity, race, etc.) and cognitively (point of view, background, etc.). This might mean recruiting teammates from new sources and devising ways to bring forward talented individuals who might not be the perfect candidates on paper.

Even a few business process improvements in this area will help you head off subtle biases at the pass. And, if you question your need to make them, spend a few minutes at the Project Implicit website. Designed by Harvard, University of Virginia, and University of Washington psychologists, the site administers Implicit Association Tests to measure personal bias. While you may be unpleasantly surprised at what you uncover, it may well serve as the motivation you need to address this critical issue.

 

Emphasizing Cognitive Diversity: Can It Be Taught?

A few years ago, I worked with The Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative (BJKLI) and The Deloitte University Leadership Center for Inclusion on a survey that sought to provide modern context around the notions of diversity and inclusion. Among other things, the research asked nearly 4,000 global professionals of all levels, ages, genders, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations how they define these terms.

It might not come as a surprise that most baby boomers and even X-ers (read: the chronologically older people in the workforce today) think representation and assimilation when they consider the notion of diversity. Millennials tend to view it a bit differently, though. For them, workplace diversity and inclusion go beyond ensuring that people of all genders, races, ethnicities, religions, and sexual orientations are welcomed into the organization.

While this form of diversity is obviously important and essential, millennials also value the respect and consideration given to employees as individuals with different backgrounds and perspectives. This is referred to as cognitive diversity, and it means that employees can come to work and share their ideas, philosophies, and contributions as their complete selves – without fear of negative consequences.

Over the last few years, the workplace in general has improved when it comes to fostering cognitive diversity. I think we have the millennials to thank for that, because they now comprise a majority of the global workforce and are entering leadership positions – and disrupting them – and average of ten years earlier than members of prior generations. That being said, it’s not unusual to hear someone like a young, transgender, first generation American raised in a rural environment say they feel misunderstood and ignored in a big city corporation because “apparently I don’t have the background, experience or tenure to be taken seriously.”

Fortunately, though, not only can cognitive diversity be taught, but it can be systematically integrated into an organization’s culture. The first step is to educate baby boomer and Gen X-er leaders about cognitive diversity and its benefits. Once leaders fully understand why it’s good for business to be as inclusive as possible, they can acknowledge the limitations of hierarchies and minimize barriers to communication and engagement.

Rather than making critical decisions in a vacuum, leaders should take care to include voices and votes that are truly representative of the employee population. This is especially important when it comes to innovation, as many of the freshest ideas come from unexpected places. They should establish cross-functional pilot projects or committees that seek to improve business outcomes through diverse collaboration, and finally, they should put online and offline feedback mechanisms in place so all employees feel comfortable and encouraged sharing real-time thoughts.

Of course, if you’re working for a company that hasn’t mastered hiring diverse employees in the first place, you can’t put the cart before the horse. First and foremost, you must continue your work to ensure you have a population from which to solicit cognitively diverse perspectives.

Did you miss our webinar on the next generation of diversity and inclusion? Catch the replay and let us know what you think!

 

Why We Haven’t Fixed Our Diversity Problems

I’ll be the first to say I don’t have all the answers when it comes to diversity and inclusion. I don’t think anyone does, but least of all me. The closest I’ve come to discrimination is being told I had to be three times as smart, competent, and amusing as male speakers because I was a small, young-looking woman. And, sometimes people ask “odd” questions about my religion (Judaism).

But just because we don’t have all the answers doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep asking the questions. The question I’m constantly addressing with other human capital experts today involves why we haven’t made greater progress with respect to D&I in the organizational setting.

It doesn’t quite make sense. After all, the business case has been clear for decades. Diverse organizations perform better, are more innovative, and have more engaged employees. In terms of our collective degree of tolerance for those different than ourselves, we’ve come a long way. We now even have software that’s supposed to help us mitigate unconscious bias. So why is D&I still such a thorny problem? Here are three speculations.

Issue #1: We focus too much on recruitment.

Most organizations understand the need to solicit talent from diverse sources and are successful at doing just that. Thanks to new partnerships with high schools, universities, associations, and community groups we may never have engaged with in the past, new employees come in the door looking and thinking differently. Here’s the thing, though. What happens after these diverse hires start? Usually, they’re simply swallowed up by the system. We fail to create an onboarding experience that’s customized to be rewarding to the individual, we don’t provide them with the right skill acquisition and we don’t provide mentors to whom they can relate. So they leave – often with  speed and disillusionment – and we are forced to start over with fresh recruits.

Issue #2: We make D&I a program rather than a culture.

This second problem is related to why diverse hires don’t stay. The D&I “function” is often relegated to a single person, or maybe a team, that’s responsible for creating initiatives. Beyond talent acquisition, such programs might include affinity groups and unconscious bias training. But many employees, especially those in the millennial generation, find a narrow focus on D&I stranger than no focus at all. A 28-year-old recently told me: “When I work at a company, I just want to walk into the lobby and see all kinds of people. I should have no idea whether they’re in the c-suite or a cube based on how they look. It’s weird when a company tries too hard, you know? We’re a diverse country, why isn’t this more natural?” And how do we make it “more natural,” exactly? The importance of D&I must be embedded in the organization’s vision and goals, consistently communicated from the top, and reflected in measurement of performance.

Issue #3: We’re creating biased software.

Hiring and performance management software that removes common barriers to inclusion and prompts us to awareness of potential bias is no doubt a brilliant invention. But this software is currently designed and programmed by a very non-diverse pool of people from a limited number of organizations, and this setup has the potential for technology to make bias worse. If we truly want to leverage algorithms as partners in this cause, educational institutions and software companies need to train and employ developers who accurately represent today’s employee populations. This is the only way to ensure that the resulting products come to the table with the right lens.

Want to learn more about the challenges and opportunities of the next generation of D&I? Join SilkRoad’s human capital futurist Alexandra Levit for a free webinar on December 10, 2019 at 2PM EST.

Agile Feedback is the New Performance Review

Many of us remember the days when we only talked about professional development during a once-a-year performance review conversation with our managers. We may have made development plans and set goals, but these were usually lost in the crush of immediate business priorities. And, by the time we got around to discussing them again, they were outdated and irrelevant.

Fortunately, many organizations have, in recent years, moved from the annual performance management model to bi-annual or even monthly models. This increase in frequently certainly benefits the process, but can we take it even further? Can we make learning and performance dialogue even more fluid and agile and therefore more useful considering the pace of change in our organizations and industries?

The Rise of Open and Continuous Dialogue

Today’s most comprehensive HRMS offer the ability for managers and employees to deliver real-time guidance and feedback as soon as an issue presents itself. This type of exchange is far more helpful for growth and engagement because it’s directly relevant to a current project or challenge. Typically, any employee can submit feedback to another regardless of level or reporting structure, so it’s an equal-opportunity endeavor that’s less biased and less restrictive.

Agile feedback systems provide an important mechanism for coaching and collaboration, and in boosting manager awareness of problems sooner rather than later, they aid in retention as well. They also alert leaders when there may be a new skills gap that needs to be addressed. For instance, if a manager sees results that indicate that a group of employees isn’t using a new technology as intended, they can get involved right away, collect more information about the disconnect, and ultimately determine if additional background or training is necessary.

For more where this came from, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

The Forgotten Transitions: New Managers, New Responsibilities

In an ideal world, every employee would be solidly prepared for a transition involving a promotion or new roles and responsibilities. And yet so often, we leave this to chance. We hope that the person in charge will make sure the employee has all of the right information, tools, and support to perform the new job effectively.

Unfortunately, this often doesn’t happen. Employees are expected to figure it out, and many get overwhelmed, burned out, and demotivated in the process. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that – due to baby boomer retirement and other workforce demographic shifts – rising millennial leaders are being promoted an average of 10 years earlier than prior generations and have a steeper learning curve as a result.

Fortunately, providing a high tech, high touch experience for new managers and others transitioning to new roles and responsibilities can be a relatively seamless extension to your existing strategic onboarding activities.  Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Provide relevant, on-demand learning content in a variety of formats

Whether you’ve created online courses in short or long format or have curated resources from other places, use your HRMS to offer employees their choice of training, being as flexible as you can regarding how and where they master the necessary information. Outline essential competencies, track training completion and skill acquisition, and suggest next steps.

Match employees with those already doing their new jobs

Your HMIS is a great place to pair newbies with seasoned managers or those performing especially well in a job function. Both formal and informal mentorship is useful in helping transitioning employees see a clear path forward and feel comfortable, supported, and confident in their new roles.

Document expectations and goals

Employees with new roles and responsibilities should understand exactly what they need to accomplish in the context of the larger organization, when specific goals must be achieved, how performance will be measured, and how other people (managers, reports, colleagues, etc.) will be involved. These details, highly customized to each new role, should be proactively communicated and reinforced.

Schedule and execute more frequent check-ins to accommodate assimilation

Managers of transitioning employees should be prompted to pay extra attention to those ramping up in a new position. This might include weekly in-person or video discussions that address both the personal and professional demands of the new job. Topics might include time management, cross-departmental rapport building, and leader-facing communication.

Demonstrate psychological comprehension

While there’s no substitute for a leader taking a new manager to lunch with inquiring after her well-being, software can go a long way in illustrating that your organization understands the obstacles and pressures of a new role and wants to be a partner in alleviating them.  For instance, an embedded app that serves up a motivational “quote of the day” could set an important tone for an employee’s new journey.

Did you miss last week’s webinar on managing effective transitions? Catch the replay here and let us know what you think!

Humanity Works Book Tour: Glimpses of the Future

One of the highlights of the last year was my #humanityworks tour in the UK, from which these six videos resulted. Check them out for short and sweet advice on what's to come in the workforce of 2030 and beyond.

Episode 1: Don't Worry about AI Stealing Your Job, Worry about Your Lack of Skills

Episode 2: Why You Should Develop Your Interpersonal Sensitivity Skills

Episode 3: Technology Will Create New Jobs

Episode 4: Will Technology Develop Consciousness?

Episode 5: Workplace Agility: The Crucial Skill for Your Career

Episode 6: 3 Important Technologies for HR and L&D

 

AI's Relationship to Team Collaboration

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is all the rage in business. Owners hoping for more efficient operations and better team collaboration are eager to take advantage of smart machines, but where should you start?

First described by Stanford computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956, artificial intelligence refers to computer simulation of human intelligence. Let's explore the categories of AI most businesses are implementing today, as well as the things to keep in mind when considering AI-based collaboration tools.

We can place nearly all available AI programs into two categories: narrow artificial intelligence and general artificial intelligence. Narrow AI completes simple, routine tasks and can usually do so more quickly than human counterparts. This form of AI does not possess understanding or insight—it does exactly what it's programmed for. (Most automation in manufacturing and business environments is the product of narrow AI.)

Narrow AI is transforming team collaboration by taking over administrative functions and freeing human workers to focus on more mission-critical tasks. Alexa for Business and Google Assistant, for instance, are intelligent assistants your whole team can use via a shared console. These AI assistants interact with your team's other digital systems to set up meetings, send reminders, print necessary materials and run your presentation in a conference room.

Artificial general intelligence possesses greater cognitive abilities. A system using this form can come across an unfamiliar task or situation and generate solutions, although currently not to the level of abstraction possible for human workers. Still, as computer scientists devise increasingly sophisticated machine learning applications, which actively learn from prior experience by recognizing patterns in their own data, the productivity of team collaboration skyrockets.

For the rest of the article, please head over to the AMEX Business site.

These Business Process Improvements Saved My Company

My business success depends on working efficiently with other companies and individuals. Still, in the past, I structured my business processes as if I were a lone wolf. Every time I developed a process that didn't take others into account and was effective for me alone, I risked catastrophe. Fortunately, as a business process improvement writer, I've been exposed to a bevy of tools that I've adapted for the size and scope of my business and used to future-proof my operations. 

I hope these innovations are as helpful for you as they've been for me!

Low Code App Development

Mobile apps are all the rage, but it never occurred to me that I could build one. Instead, I spent hours pouring over existing solutions that I could never quite customize the right way. 

Low or no-code application development involves leveraging a software solution to create an app that solves a specific business problem without prior coding or programming knowledge. 

I built my first app for financial reporting in less than two weeks. It's designed precisely for the way I work with my accountant, and greatly streamlines our interactions!

Workflow and Collaboration Tools

I work on multiple virtual teams, all with different workflows. Although I'm an organized person, using too many collaboration tools (or worse, no tools at all) was confusing and led to small tasks slipping into the ether. 

Today, I employ a tool that allows me to manage several teams and projects at once and do so according to individual needs. By updating and visually displaying tasks, communication and project goals in real time, I maintain a space shuttle view of my own master workflow and make it easy for team members to work with me no matter where in the world we are.

For more strategies, head over to the AMEX Business site.