In our increasingly diverse professional settings, it’s crucial to acknowledge and address the unconscious mental shortcuts that can unfairly influence our perceptions of others’ capabilities or character. These biases can skew workplace decisions, affecting who is considered for promotions, who leads projects, or who is scrutinised more closely.
Understanding Workplace Bias
Workplace biases, whether overt or implicit, harm not only individual employees but also the overall organisational culture. When people perceive a work environment as biased — favouring some over others without merit — engagement, morale and productivity plummet, fostering a negative workplace. These biases restrict diversity, limit opportunities, and compromise fairness and equity.
Unfortunately, many biases may be present in the workplace.
The Role of Intersecting Bias
Additionally, biases don’t always come in ones, but can often overlap resulting in intersecting biases:
People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group, or a belief.
Someone may have a bias against people from a certain community.
They may also have a bias against a specific gender.
Workplace Bias in Action
Let’s stick this with this example, suppose someone thinks people from community X are lazy, and people from gender Y are aggressive.
Due to intersectional identities, this person may have a colleague from community X and gender Y as part of their team. If they let such biases impact their opinions about this colleague — without giving them a chance — this person would assume that their colleague is both lazy and aggressive, without them having done anything to suggest that.
This opinion can result in them not wanting to work with this colleague, not giving them leadership opportunities, or creating a hostile environment for collaboration. Such examples highlight the need for proactive measures to combat such preconceptions before they impact decision-making.
A vital initial step in mitigating these biases is to educate ourselves about them. This task may involve sensitive and challenging discussions, which is where e-learning can play a pivotal role. It offers a safe space to learn about and reflect on these issues at our own pace, and to practise navigating difficult conversations in a safe environment before engaging in them openly at work.
Tackling Bias Together
Our new Technology Enhanced Collaborative Activity (TECA), “Tackling Bias in the Workplace,” aims to equip individuals with tools to recognise and understand common workplace biases. This learning experience is designed not to replace existing training programmes but to complement them with scenario-based, active learning. It’s accessible via a mobile-friendly app and employs concise, practical, micro-learning techniques to seamlessly integrate into any schedule, enhancing the learning experience.
This TECA helps participants identify some of the biases they might encounter or exhibit themselves in professional contexts. It also offers multiple opportunities for self-reflection and interaction with peers, enhancing the learning process. Discover how this innovative approach can change the way we think about and handle biases in the workplace.
Comments