#BreakTheBias at Work

As much as we desire to be free of biases, unconsciously they always seem to work their way into our thoughts and behaviours. But, as people pay homage to International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8^th March to celebrate the achievements, challenges, and struggles of women, how are you as an individual leader making sure your team is making the most of diverse voices and breaking the bias in your workforce?

Research from the Stanford Women’s Leadership Lab showed there are two small – but powerful – ways each leader can block bias: “First, by closely examining and broadening their definition of success, and second, by asking what each person adds to their teams.”

Arti Kashyap-Aynsley, Global Head of Health and Wellbeing at Ocado Group, says if leaders want to be more inclusive, they need to “keep biases in check by re-examining their assumptions”.

“Conversations around diversity and inclusion should not stop outside of days like IWD,” Kashyap-Aynsley continues. “We should constantly be looking at how we can improve productivity, morale, and collaboration in our teams. These may constitute as small changes, but the payoff can be significant.”

Let’s Talk More About Unconscious Bias

According to the Harvard Business Review, following the public outcry over racist incidents in the workplace and mounting evidence of the cost of employees’ feeling excluded, there is a heightened demand for business leaders to reduce unconscious bias (UB) in attributes and behaviours at work, from hiring and promotion decisions, to interactions with customers and colleagues – and “I’m here for it,” Marie Feliho, Global Head of Promotional Strategy and Customer Activations at Just Eat says.

“IWD allows us to bring the questions around biases, black women at work, and black women in leadership roles to the forefront. IWD is as much a celebration of female leadership as it is of race, religion, and disability,” Feliho notes.

While companies such as Starbucks, Google, Sephora, and Papa John’s have introduced some form of UB training to educate employees in the knee-jerk preconceptions they hold, the consensus is UB training is not enough to mitigate it.

Valerie Alexander, Keynote Speaker, and CEO of Speak Happiness, explains in her TED Talk, How to Outsmart Your Own UB, that businesses must continue to examine their behaviours by visualising situations before they happen and normalise things that are unexpected (“female CEOs, and a black President, for example”), by increasing your exposure to such things.

Breaking the Bias in Contact Centres

In efforts to de-bias processes in contact centres, customer contact leaders from Ocado Group and Just Eat speak to how they are supporting diversity and inclusion practices at their companies:

 “There has been a big step up in how our departments at Just Eat are focusing on inclusion, diversity, and belonging. We have communities such as Women in Tech, and Jetting Colours – people of colour within our organisation – who come together to advocate for how Just Eat can better integrate diversity and inclusion best practices into our day-to-day strategies.

“To ensure all our employees feel an equal sense of belonging you need to do more than talk about the issues, you need to actively implement the solutions too. To do this, every department should start by asking themselves: Am I applying an inclusion strategy in the best way for my team? Are the same strategies inclusive of our contact with our customers? How are we evolving as a company and what does that mean for our employees, our colleagues, and ourselves as leaders?"

Marie Feliho, Global Head of Promotional Strategy and Customer Activations at Just Eat

“In the UK we have just started to collect diversity data at Ocado to get a sense of what our workforce demographic looks like. This can be quite a contentious method because you are not able to ask these questions globally yet because of Labour Law, but the beauty of data is that, in and of itself, it is not biased.

“The theme of IWD this year is great, it is helping to change the narrative towards allyship. Being a non-gender diverse business is not a woman’s problem, it is a business problem, and a business problem means it is everyone’s problem. This is the narrative and the language we should be using now and going forward.”

Arti Kashyap-Aynsley, Global Head of Health and Wellbeing at Ocado Group

Find out what IWD means to the team at CCW Europe Digital and continue the conversation around diversity, inclusion, and belonging on our LinkedIn community page.