It’s very important for companies to put programs in place to work on dismantling conscious or unconscious discrimination bias in the workplace. Discrimination bias could apply to gender, race, religion, and sexuality. It’s important to cultivate a safe and inclusive workplace environment, and one of the ways to do that is to dismantle bias with the following tools:
- Establish mentoring programs
- Review the environment to avoid exclusive activities and scheduling
- Adopt flexible career paths
- Put safeguards on processes that are susceptible to biases
- Focus on outcomes
Breaking it down, this means your company must:
Establish mentoring programs
If people only mentor those who look and sound like them, they aren’t going to learn or grow and will stay stuck in their same discrimination biases. It’s important to establish mentoring programs for employees as well because people who aren’t straight, white, or male often don’t get afforded the same privileges and opportunities in the workplace.
Review environment to avoid exclusive activities
Are your team bonding events always in spaces that are traditionally male? Do you only see certain people attending events? It’s time to look closer at the activities your company is scheduling and see if you’re being unintentionally exclusive to certain groups.
Adopt flexible career paths
It’s important to implement flexible career paths for employees and leadership as different people have different styles and different needs on their growth in the company. It’s not realistic to think that everyone will have the same road map and you need to account for that.
Put safeguards on processes that are susceptible
Processes like interviews, promotions, and more can be susceptible to biases, so it’s important to work with HR or even a third party company that can help implement safeguards against these processes. The whole point of unconscious biases means that people may not be aware of them, so additional help may be needed to protect those who might suffer from those biases.
Focus on outcomes instead of means
The results matter. If a person is doing their job and doing it well, you should be focusing on that instead of the way they do it, especially if those methods are very different from yours. People with varied and diverse life experiences might have learned to produce results in a manner you never even considered.