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How To Keep One Bad Apple From Sabotaging Your Company's Diversity Efforts

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One of the best thinkers I’ve read when it comes to the topic of how to eliminate gender inequality is Harvard University’s Professor Iris Bohnet. In her academic research and writings, Bohnet focuses on removing institutionalized bias by making changes to organizations -- rather than to individuals -- and argues that design-oriented thinking can help improve gender equality systematically.

Part of what makes Bohnet’s framework so appealing to me is that from my vantage point as the CEO of Fairygodboss, I see ample evidence that individual behavior can be hard to change, predict and control. Consider the incidents that took place this past summer in the technology industry. We’ve seen the headlines involving former Google engineer James Damore’s now infamous memo, as well as a number of high profile venture capital partner resignations and mea culpas from the likes of Dave McClure and Justin Caldbeck after sexual harassment allegations from female founders.

While individuals are absolutely responsible for their misconduct, organizations and employers, practically speaking, do not — and cannot — ever exert 100% control over every action these individuals take. Whether it’s in a public work meeting, through a personal blog or at a work dinner, individuals — sometimes those in positions of great power — will make mistakes and even commit crimes. While companies can educate employees to try to minimize these incidents and employers can also punish or even fire such individuals after misconduct, that’s only one way of dealing with the problem.

So what else is a company to do? Is training on unconscious bias for naught?

It’s certainly important for companies to demonstrate their legal and ethical commitments and responsibilities by investing in educational efforts that raise awareness of our implicit biases train employees on what constitutes inappropriate and appropriate behavior. But I’d argue that it’s just as important  to do some critical thinking around how to limit the incidence and impact of individual bias in the first place.

For starters, one can and certainly should change internal employer rules to make sure that certain discriminatory actions are illegal, as California’s latest bill proposal to account for sexual harassment by venture capitalists does. However, rules and education are only the beginning. Proactive efforts to recruit, hire and retain women and other minority groups need to be made in order to change ratios and the status quo. Doing this is to some extent simply a matter of commitment and effort. Managerial and hiring incentives can be offered and marketing efforts can be made to recruit and promote more women and minority employees. This relatively straightforward initiative is far from universal.

This effort can be complemented to ensure that bias is removed from systems related to recruiting, hiring and retaining these minority employees whenever possible. Today, technology solutions can effectively mimic ‘blind auditions’ in an interview process, from the resume review itself to the performance and payroll evaluation software that companies use to capture employee data when it comes to promotion and compensation decisions. Companies can choose to work with these tools to act as a check on decisions that might be biased — even if those biases are reduced — with greater training and education.

So what can companies do to make themselves more diverse and inclusive? Employers should understand there are at least four areas to focus on if they want to comprehensively improve diversity and inclusion:

  • Adopting and enforcing rules and policies against discrimination and harassment
  • Educating employees about unconscious bias and inclusion
  • Measuring, setting and executing on goals for diversity and inclusion, particularly around hiring, retention and promotion of minority groups
  • Implementing systems and technology solutions that remove as much individual human bias as possible from the recruiting, compensation and promotion processes as possible

These four areas of focus certainly don’t lend themselves to a nice and neat single solution. But one wouldn’t expect that there’s a silver bullet for how to solve the complex problem of how to improve diversity and inclusion. Companies can’t stop individual bad employees from going rogue, but they can minimize the impact of one bad apple.

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