.png?width=1280&name=SEO%20Blog%20(7).png "How unconscious bias can destroy your performance management programme")
It’s human nature to pick favourites.
We can’t pretend that managers never have favourite employees – but some managers are much better at hiding it than others.
But even those managers who make a concerted effort to treat everyone equally and avoid special treatment, it’s still likely that at least some degree of unconscious bias will seep in.
This can damage morale, lead to divisions within the team and result in lower engagement – but on top of the impact on your people, it can also hurt your business.
Let’s explore why unconscious bias can be so damaging for businesses – especially when it comes to performance management.
Unconscious bias is the assumptions we make on a level we don’t even realise. It may be based on traits like gender, race, religion, sexuality, age, neurodivergence, heritage or personality type. We may not think we’re biased for or against certain groups, but our backgrounds, past experiences and current working environments mean it can be tricky to unpick certain ways of thinking or biases.
For instance, if you’ve only ever seen men in senior leadership roles, unconscious bias might make you think that men are better suited and more capable of these roles, which can lead to women being overlooked for promotions.
Another example is a manager only choosing younger employees to attend events because they assume that older employees will have family responsibilities and won’t want to or be able to attend. These assumptions can mean that certain groups of employees get excluded from valuable development opportunities.
There’s already a power imbalance between managers and employees. Even in businesses with relatively flat structures, managers still hold more power than their employees, and in many organisations, it’s still the case that what the manager says, goes.
When unconscious bias comes from managers, it can cause huge problems at the individual, team and organisational levels. It will most likely show up in their day-to-day actions (such as consistently choosing employees with certain traits for the best opportunities, or dismissing ideas from those from a certain group), but it’s most obvious when it comes to performance management.
In performance management programmes, unconscious bias might look like:
The manager most likely won’t even realise they’re being biased (hence unconscious bias), but if left unchecked, this bias can become more and more ingrained, leading to preferential treatment for some employees and growing frustration for others.
The thing with unconscious bias is that it can run rampant through an organisation, resulting in a snowball effect. If one or two managers hold certain biases, others can unconsciously pick up on them over time and adopt them into their own thinking and behaviours.
Let’s take the example of male-dominated leadership teams. If a business of 100 people has 90% of its leadership roles filled by men, it could lead others to believe that men are better placed to lead the business, which could affect future hiring or internal career development decisions. And this isn’t just theoretical – just 11% of FTSE 100 CEOs are women, and research proves that women must work harder than their male counterparts to progress in their careers.
While these biased views may not be conscious, they’re still damaging, and because they’re unconscious, they can go unnoticed for a long, long time.
So what can businesses do to ensure that unconscious bias doesn’t become entrenched under the guise of ‘this is the way we’ve always done things’?
Unconscious bias can be tricky to identify (because it’s unconscious!), and requires ongoing ‘rewiring’ of thought processes. That’s why you need specialist unconscious bias training – a one-off elearning module isn’t going to cut it if you really want to focus on long-term diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Storytelling is a powerful tool in unconscious bias training, so weaving in content from expert speakers will help make your training resonate with your managers. Interactive activities, discussion groups and peer-to-peer learning will also help maintain focus on eliminating unconscious bias over time.
Clear, structured frameworks, including a company-wide skills matrix and a consistent process for giving feedback will help reduce the likelihood of unconscious bias slipping through. For instance, if certain employees get more feedback opportunities than others, it can give them an unfair advantage, while measuring employees against different standards creates an uneven playing field which naturally favours some people over others.
Every single manager should know the company’s standard performance management process like the back of their hand. Everyone should be on the same schedule, with the same cadence of performance management conversations and measured against the same standards.
A good way to minimise the impact of unconscious bias is to bring more people into the performance management process. Instead of a single one-on-one review between a manager and their employee, opening it up to the wider team can help bring fresh perspectives and help managers think about their employees differently.
360° reviews invite feedback from a range of colleagues, not just an employee’s direct manager. It could be teammates, colleagues from other teams or even the manager’s own manager, ensuring the direct manager gets a holistic understanding of an employee’s performance. For instance, perhaps the employee often works with another team and displays expertise in a ‘hidden skill’, which can be revealed as part of the 360° feedback collection process.
Bias thrives in silence – but often those affected by unconscious bias don’t feel comfortable publicly speaking up about it. That’s why it’s so important to build a culture of continuous feedback, where sharing experiences and recommending improvements is normalised and actively encouraged.
This also ties into a healthy learning culture. A positive learning culture recognises that people make mistakes and uses them as learning opportunities. In a healthy learning culture, everyone will acknowledge that unconscious bias exists, and everyone should feel comfortable starting conversations about it. If everyone feels safe to flag instances of bias, it will be easier to tackle it head-on, ensuring every voice is heard and valued.
If it’s trained properly, AI can stick to the facts of the data it’s presented with, rather than succumbing to human bias. AI doesn’t inherently prefer Group A over Group B, and it can ignore all the context that could lead to bias in human relationships, ensuring it assesses employees based purely on their real performance.
Of course, if the AI isn’t trained correctly and continuously, bias can inadvertently slip in, which is why it’s so important to work with a trusted vendor and conduct regular audits – after all, AI bias is much easier to correct than human bias. But high-quality AI solutions which are trained on diverse, representative data can help flag inconsistencies, detect biased language and highlight trends that humans may overlook, ensuring everyone gets the credit they deserve, as well as unearthing valuable feedback points.
We’ve been busy working on a brand-new AI-powered solution for skills development that will help minimise unconscious bias for fairer, more accurate performance management processes.
Curious? Thought so – join our webinar on 8th May to see exactly what we’ve got planned.
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