Three Approaches To Help You Identify Organizational Biases

The first article in this series provided a framework to distinguish between individual biases, i.e., biases that occur as part of interactions between individuals, and organizational biases, i.e., biases that manifest themselves through organizational policies, processes or best practices.

The notion that there are biases acting at different levels—from individual to systemic—is not new. For instance, the National Equity Project has developed a framework to understand how systemic oppression results from the intersection of individual and systemic biases. Learning to recognize the distinction between individual and organizational biases is important because organizational biases have the potential to impact large numbers of people and therefore can have a much greater impact on organizations than individual biases.

This article introduces three different approaches to help you identify organizational biases: retrospective, reactive and proactive. A future article will provide more detailed examples and step-by-step instructions on how to identify and mitigate organizational biases using these approaches.

Retrospective identification of disparities

The retrospective approach consists of reviewing historical data on key indicators to look for evidence of disparities on the basis of personal traits. The primary indicators you should consider are those related to recruitment and retention. On the recruitment side, check the representation of different identity groups at all stages of your hiring funnel: résumé submission, first interviews, subsequent interviews, offers and hires. On the retention side, check performance reviews (both rating and content), compensation, bonuses, promotions and separations. For many of these indicators you should check both overall proportions as well as rates, e.g., how long does it take the average candidate to get to a job offer? How rapidly do different groups get raises or promotions? Any disparities based on identity traits are telltale signs of underlying biases in processes and policies within your organization.

It should be noted that finding a disparity is a strong indication that biases exist, but it may not reveal the underlying organizational biases. Consider, as an example, a company discovering that, on average, men get paid 20% more than women. What organizational biases may be causing this disparity? Is it because individual managers are more likely to propose a raise for men than for women? Is it because women are asked to do more “household” work and are thus judged to have a lower performance than men during performance reviews? Is it because men are more likely to be promoted into higher-paying roles? These and other factors may be contributing to the observed gender disparities. Knowing that disparities exist through a retrospective analysis can help to focus the other approaches described in this article, to pinpoint organizational biases in processes, policies and best practices.

Failing to collect this kind of data is a form of organizational bias because it means that the organization does not realize there are disparities, which in turn makes the organization blind to the negative experiences of individuals who are most affected by biases. While you can use the other approaches described in this article without collecting historical data, the retrospective analysis can be very helpful in guiding your other efforts by shining a light on potential problem areas.

Reactive identification of organizational biases

The reactive approach consists of creating a safe process or system to encourage your employees to report negative experiences or observed biases. It is crucial to underscore that this approach will only work if your employees are willing to share their experiences, which requires two ingredients: psychological safety and a commitment to action from your leadership. First, you must ensure the psychological safety of all employees. You may wish to retain an external firm that can collect information, or at least create an independent group that is not formally part of your HR department. Second, your employees must see that you are committed to taking action in response to problems they share. Make it clear to everyone that you need their help in identifying issues, then share information as you go along and report on progress. If employees feel that you won’t take any action, they will be reluctant to share information.

Also, whether you collect data internally or through an external firm, it is imperative that you ask people to share specific experiences, not feelings, because knowing that your employees have a general feeling of exclusion will not help you understand how to improve matters. Drawing an analogy from healthcare, imagine if your doctors only ever asked you how healthy you feel, without asking you about symptoms that are making you feel more or less healthy! Similarly, feelings of inclusion (or exclusion) are the cumulative result of day-to-day experiences, and it is those experiences that will tell you where problems lie.

A properly conducted assessment will reveal clusters of experiences that are indicative of the most common biases that exist in your organization, whether they have to do with project assignments, compensation, career opportunities, work-life balance, or any other aspects of day-to-day work. Furthermore, you can compare reported experiences with overall retention data to look for correlations between disparities in retention rates and reported negative experiences for different identity groups within your organization. There is a really good chance that you will find a striking alignment between the identity groups that report the greatest number of problems, and the retention (or churn) rates for those groups.

Failing to collect data for reactive bias identification is a form of organizational bias, because it gives leaders the false impression that their organizations are much more inclusive and unbiased than they really are. In fact, one of the greatest obstacles in assessing the true level of inclusion in an organization is that inclusion itself is invisible, especially to those who most enjoy it. If you are a white, male, cisgender, heterosexual business leader with no disabilities, chances are that you never experience exclusion, which makes it extremely hard for you to understand what exclusion really means, and to realize how widespread it may be for those in the organization who do not look like you.

Proactive identification of organizational biases

The proactive approach consists of conducting a review of processes, policies and best practices that are likely to influence employee experiences, and thus employee satisfaction. The proactive approach is great because it can be done without having to involve employees or collecting historical data, and because virtually any process, policy or best practice can be the source of biases and thus can be analyzed and improved with this approach.

To uncover organizational biases effectively, it helps to think about the detailed workplace experiences of individual employees, rather than thinking about population-level disparities. For example, if managers tend to give the better assignments to employees who look like them, employees from different backgrounds will see fewer meaningful assignments, they will acquire less experience, which in turn can lead to disparities in compensation, promotion and retention rates. Hence the retrospective and proactive approaches are complementary: while the retrospective approach focuses on the organization-level disparities that result from biases, the proactive approach focuses on the individual-level experiences that are influenced by biases, and which lead to the observed organization-level disparities.

If you have already identified some disparities through the retrospective approach, you can use the information you gathered to audit the processes that seem most closely associated with problems you identified. For example, if you find that men are getting promoted at higher rates than women, you should review your promotion processes; while if you find that white employees are more highly compensated than employees of color, you should review your performance review processes.

But even if you have not been collecting historical data, you can still conduct an audit of your processes, policies and best practices, by starting with those that are likely to impact the greatest number of employees, or those that are likely to impact employees most frequently.

The next article of this series will go into significantly more details, providing specific examples and detailed step-by-step guidance to help you identify organizational biases. But even without examples you should be able to use the material presented here to start analyzing your data and processes, and to start thinking about how you can use each of the three approaches described here to help you create an increasingly inclusive organization.