To build an inclusive organization, use technology to fix technical problems, not cultural ones, writes Raafi-Karim Alidina, an associate of global diversity and inclusion consultancy Frost Included and co-author of the new book “Building An Inclusive Organisation.“
The world has changed in 2020. First, the COVID-19 crisis caused a global health tragedy and upended how organizations work – perhaps permanently. Now, Black Lives Matter protests against systemic racial injustice are starting to inspire profound, anti-racist change in global institutions and structures.
Between the fact that COVID-19 has been disproportionately affecting people of color, particularly Black communities, many organizations have now come into the spotlight for their diversity gaps. Some of these include:
- Salary and bonus gaps across gender and race
- Diversity “pyramids,†where organizations are diverse at the lowest levels but their most senior teams are still almost entirely white and male
- Gaps in hiring where applicants from marginalized backgrounds are systematically being rejected outright
What steps can organizations take to close the diversity gap and build an inclusive organization?
3 Approaches to Closing the Diversity Gaps in Organizations
Having worked with organizations across multiple sectors worldwide, we have found that there are generally three main approaches to doing diversity and inclusionOpens a new window work.
First approach: Diversity 101
The first approach is what we call Diversity 101. Based around compliance, Diversity 101 is simply ensuring your organization isn’t breaking any laws around discrimination and equal rights. This is essential but is really only the bare minimum of what a firm should be doing.
Second Approach: Diversity 2.0
The second approach is Diversity 2.0. A marketing-led approach, Diversity 2.0 is about having key milestones or cases to prove to consumers and prospective recruits that the company cares about diversity and inclusion and has made progress in this area.
Companies may highlight winning awards, having a diverse workforce, or sponsoring or hosting a talk about disability rights or marriage equality. However, these are more indicative of the image the company wants to portray than the company’s actual inclusiveness day-to-day.
In fact, when the U.K. mandated that all companies with over 250 employees publicly report their gender pay gaps in 2017, we were finally able to show this phenomenon with data to back up our anecdotal evidence and case studies.
We looked at the gender pay gaps of companies often celebrated as the best companies for gender equality: The Times Top 50 Places to Work for Women, the Glassdoor Top 50 Organizations, and the last 10 years of Catalyst award winners. We found that more than 90% of the companies had gender pay gaps worse than the (U.K.) national average.
When we looked again a year later, we saw that this trend hadn’t changed much. What’s more, we found that even those companies that had closed their salary gap often increased their bonus gap.
This just highlights the fact that when taking a marketing-led approach to diversity and inclusion, an organization may win awards or some good press. Still, they won’t necessarily get any reasonable, sustainable change.
But diversity 101 and 2.0 don’t yield meaningful results.
There’s a clear reason for this lack of real progress: both the Diversity 101 and 2.0 approaches see diversity and inclusion as being about “the other†and about helping these others fit in. It’s almost considered like some extra charity work that a company does on the side.
Indeed, diversity and inclusion in some companies we work with are housed in the company’s corporate social responsibility. The consequence of this is that none of these companies ends up being truly inclusive, and all the “diverse†workforce they recruit ends up leaving in frustration at being duped.
Third Approach: Inclusion 3.0
Instead of this, organizations should take an approach we call Inclusion 3.0.
This approach takes the perspective that a diverse workforce is critical to a company’s success, and that inclusion is essential to leveraging that diversity. This is important because while we know that diverse teams perform better than homogenous ones, that only happens when these teams are also inclusive. Teams need to embrace and leverage their diversity to reap all the benefits that diversity can bring. It’s about making everyone feel like they belong, like their voice matters, and like they don’t have to conform to others for their opinions or ideas to be valued.
Inclusion 3.0 considers diversity and inclusion work to be a way of doing business rather than doing something on the side. As such, inclusion becomes a consideration in all actions leaders take, and policies work to make inclusion part of all day-to-day behaviors that employees practice. As a result, this approach creates a culture of inclusion weaved into the organization’s very fabric.
Learn More: Diversity Recruiting Strategies: 3 Long-Term Ideas to Power Your Workplace
Using a Tech-Oriented Approach Our Advantage
The first step of an Inclusion 3.0 approach is for individuals to identify where their biases and blind spots might lie. We can do this through non-technological exercises, such as the “in- and out-group exercise†that we often do with organizations we work with. In this exercise, individuals list their closest friends, colleagues, partners, and neighbors and note the diversity of that group as a whole. The areas where they may lack diversity – be it gender, disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political view, or something else – may be considered areas to watch out for blind spots.
There are technological solutions to identifying biases as well. The most commonly used is the Implicit Association TestOpens a new window , produced by academics from Harvard’s Project Implicit. This test allows people to understand what groups they instinctually associate with positive and negative connotations, which helps them identify where their biases might lie.
Neither of these tests is perfect, and so should not be taken as entirely conclusive. Nor do their results mean that a person who doesn’t have a gender or ethnically diverse ingroup or who has an automatic preference for one group over another is necessarily racist or sexist. But they provide us insight into biases and blind spots we might want to keep an eye on.
Learn More: 4 Areas Where Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Technology Can Enable Organization-Wide Change
Use technical fixes for technical problems, not cultural ones
Once someone has identified where their biases might lie, the natural next thought is, “OK, so how do I get rid of these biases?†It takes conscious, everyday work for years to even begin debiasing the immediate reactions that have been ingrained in you since childhood.
Debiasing people is hard, if not almost impossible. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any evidence that any tech product actually helps with this process. However, we can apply a technical fix to a technical problem – rather than attempting to debias people, we can debias processes.
And that makes sense, as you can’t expect to use a technical fix for a cultural problem effectively.
When we think about all of the different processes and procedures that employees go through in an organization – from recruitment to performance reviews, to team and project allocation, to promotions – there are ample opportunities for individual biases to come into play. Debiasing these processes means removing those opportunities for bias rather than trying to remove the bias from the person.
Job advertisements
We know that job advertisement with a long list of requirements or that use words like “competitive†or “superior†tend to attract fewer candidates from underrepresented groups. These ads subtly indicate that these candidates will not fit in at the organization or that they may not be qualified, even if these assumptions are untrue.
This means organizations are missing out on qualified candidates from different backgrounds. Ensuring that the process used to write job advertisements goes through a check for these potential biases is a good way to mitigate against our own naturally biased language. The good news is that tech products like Textio already exist to help us do this work.
Candidate screening
As another example, we know that applications with stereotypically female or non-white names tend to be judged more harshly than others, even if the applications are identical. To guard against this, one can simply anonymize CVs and applications for all potential indicators of bias (like names and age). Moreover, when organizations ask applicants to do tasks related to the jobs they’re applying for, anonymization ensures that our evaluations of their work are not imbued with bias either. Technological solutions like Applied allow us to embed these debiasing processes directly into our recruitment.
Learn More: How to Foster Workplace Inclusion Using the ADD (Awareness, Detection, Decision) Model
Why Not Just Use Tech to Remove Humans and Their Biases From HR Processes?
Organizations that have tried to replace humans with tech in most HR processes have found that this is easier said than done. Amazon, famously, tried to build an algorithm to do its hiring but found that it was also biased against women due to the way it was coded. This is because our code is only as unbiased as the coders who write it.
As such, while we may not be able to remove humans entirely from the different processes we go through, we can remove the opportunity for their biases to come into play.
We should be careful not to think of tech as a cure-all for out bias problems. But used properly, it could help us guard against our worst instincts and instead push our organizations to a more diverse and inclusive future.
How have you leveraged technology to ensure a more inclusive organization – from recruitment to succession planning to exit? Share your experience with us on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window .