Removing workplace biases with 'behavioural design'

Q. Do diversity training programs work?

We don’t really know, because most organizations don’t measure the results—and the few that do have generally found that they don’t work. We have some correlational data looking at whether or not a company has a diversity training program and the actual diversity of its workforce, and in short, that correlation basically doesn’t exist. So the picture is not optimistic, and the little evidence we do have has not found any impact—which leads me to believe that these programs are not effective. A few companies are trying innovative approaches—from implicit bias training to programs aimed at specific inequalities.

Q. What should an organization focused on achieving real results do? 

Carnegie Mellon’s Linda Babcock and George Loewenstein have researched the effectiveness of various de-biasing techniques, and their findings provide some hints. One intervention they studied is  ‘perspective taking’, which simply means trying to walk in your counterparts’ shoes, take their perspective and understand where they are coming from. For example, ‘walking in an elderly person’s shoes’ by writing an essay from their perspective was shown to reduce stereotypes about the elderly. 

Babcock and Loewenstein also experimented with a ‘consider the opposite’ strategy, which involves being your own 'devil’s advocate' and questioning your assumptions—actually  coming up with arguments for why your thinking might be wrong. This has been shown to work—but it requires a lot of maturity and self-awareness to be able to question yourself. It’s easier if someone else does the ‘heavy lifting’ for you.

Given all the evidence, I would urge companies to focus their training programs on capacity building and adopt the ‘unfreeze-change-refreeze’ framework—a method borrowed from my Harvard colleague Max Bazerman. Successful ‘unfreezing’ happens when people start to question their current strategies and become curious about alternatives. Once unfrozen, you spend some time on what your organization is currently doing and what could change. Finally, you think of ways to ‘refreeze’ the new insights gained and the new behaviours learned. In the end, the pathway to behavioural change may not be a change in individual beliefs, but instead a change in the socially-shared definitions of ‘appropriate behaviour’.  

Q. One of the more recent applications of Big Data in the workplace is ‘people analytics’. Please describe how it works.

This basically entails bringing the rigor of your finance or marketing department to HR, arguing that data can help us better predict, for example, the future performance of a particular job candidate than the best interview could ever do.  It involves moving away from intuition and building on data. 

The question is, What kind of data? Organizations can use all sorts of data points, but one powerful example is ‘looking backwards’:  You can use data and machine learning to basically learn from the past. For example, you could take a close look at the data points for ‘individuals who have been highly successful’ in your organization: What are their shared characteristics? You might look at which universities they went to, and find that it’s a good thing not to come from an Ivy League school—or maybe that it’s better to have an Engineering background rather than a Math background. 

Q. Many industries still suffer from a ‘leaky pipeline’—a metaphor for the continuous loss of women as they climb the career ladder. What can be done to address this?

The leaky pipeline argues that we don’t have, for example, enough female engineers, or engineers with racially-diverse backgrounds, and that is still true. One critical use of data is to use it to understand what is broken in your organization. For some—for example, law firms—the leaky pipeline is no longer an issue in terms of gender. We now have more than 50 per cent women graduating from law schools—as well as an increasing number of people of colour, so for law firms, I would say that we don't have to talk about the leaky pipeline anymore; it’s more an issue of  progression within each particular firm. 

However, in sectors such as science, engineering and technology—the STEM fields—women and people of colour are still under-represented, so that’s where we still have a leaky pipeline. We need to go into our schools and universities early on and start to nourish interest in these fields. That might include de-biasing our classrooms, de-biasing the way we teach, and providing counter-stereotypical role models. For example, bringing in female math teachers or engineers to speak to a class—as well as male nurses and male English teachers. For both boys and girls, this experience can be extremely powerful. 

Q. Google’s HR department has been referred to as an ‘employee science lab’. Describe some of its innovative practices.

In terms of using data to better understand what is broken at the company, Google has done great work, and it has also made progress in terms of fixing what is broken. One example relates to gender. By doing a data analysis, Google realized that women were more likely to leave the firm or quit. When they dug a bit deeper, they noticed that most of these employees were young mothers, and this enabled them to design an intervention targeting this group: They dramatically increased parental leave, both for young mothers and young fathers.

Beyond gender diversity, they also found some really interesting patterns in terms of their hiring practices. Obviously, Google has grown dramatically in recent years, and it has had to adjust to that enormous growth. Initially, it would have groups of current employees interview new job candidates. But when it did some Big Data analytics, it found that the magical number of interviewers was actually just four—at which point the rankings started to converge, and a fifth person didn’t add much value. Recently, they published some fascinating work around, What makes an employee perform well? They found that the biggest factor was psychological safety within teams.

Q. What are the initial steps involved in ‘designing diversity’?

Instead of just throwing money at the problem, you should start by using data to understand what is broken. Once you understand whether the problem is a leaky pipeline or progression within the organization, you can start to design and test interventions. I’m hopeful that organizations will learn from their marketing departments and do more ‘pilots’, A/B testing and other experimental approaches, to try things out and measure the results. 

Another thing you can do is move from unstructured interviews to structured interviews and see what happens, or pro-actively de-bias the language you use in your job postings. Maybe you can take a traditional version of a job posting and a de-biased version, and examine what difference the latter makes to the type of people you attract, and learn from that. 

If your problem is not attracting talent, but progressing within your company—which is still is a big issue for most organizations—you  might want to look at your performance appraisals and promotion procedures, and de-bias them, as well. One idea is the practice of sharing self-evaluations with managers before the manager makes up his or her mind in a performance appraisal. Of course, behavioural insights tell us that this will create ab 'anchor' and influence the manager; and when people differ in their self-confidence or their willingness to brag, they will evaluate themselves either less or more harshly, and that will then translate to how managers see them. In this regard, there are differences not just across genders, but also across cultures, so there’s a lot to look out for.  

1.Training: Move from ‘training’ to ‘capacity building’.

2.Talent Management: Move from ‘intuition’ to ‘data’ and ‘structure’.

3.School and Work: Move from an ‘uneven’ to an ‘even’ playing field.

4.Diversity: Move from a ‘numbers game’ to ‘the conditions for success’.