The way businesses talk and the way they act are often very different.Sportswear brand Lululemon, for instance, has a manifesto that incorporates all manner of life-positive messages from “creativity is maximised when you are living in the moment” to “friends are more important than money”. The brand has a stated desire “to empower people to reach their full potential by providing the right tools and resources, and encouraging a culture of leadership, goal setting and personal responsibility”.
In February 2018 the company announced CEO Laurent Potdevin’s resignation from both his position at Lululemon and its board of directors, with some insiders pointing to a toxic ‘boys’ club’ culture at the brand as one of the reasons for his exit.
This misalignment between saying and doing is a problem for many businesses. Trying to foster a culture of any kind only works if everyone is on board. From environmentalism to wage equality and, particularly, diversity, best intentions don’t always translate to action.
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Trying to instill a culture of diversity is, of course, preferable to burying your head in the sand and ignoring the issue. But bias isn’t always conscious either. In a recent Global Information Security Workforce Study, 87% of the women sampled stated that they had witnessed unconscious bias in their place of work – whereby colleagues made instinctual, incorrect judgements about them based on their gender.
This is critically important when it comes to recruitment – where individuals may be offered or refused roles based on their age, sex, or otherwise. The solution is to communicate the importance of unconscious bias to decision makers, ensuring best practice is implemented and discrimination is avoided.
Diversity starts at the top
There’s no doubt that a culture of diversity starts at the top. Executives shouldn’t only have a policy around workplace discrimination. They should also ask where their business’ leadership could benefit from increased diversity, too.
Most organisations have a long way to go on this front. In 2018, the number of women represented in full-time executive roles in FTSE 250 companies dropped. On FTSE 100 boards, the percentage of women in leadership positions flatlined for a fourth year at 9.7%.
Even worse represented are ethnic minorities. In a list of just over 1,000 of the UK’s top political, financial, judicial, cultural and security figures drawn up by The Guardian in partnership with Operation Black Vote and in consultation with academics, only 36 (3.4%) were from ethnic minorities (BAME) and just seven (0.7%) were BAME women.
To really affect change, business leaders, CEOs and directors have to lead by example. Diversity is always a sore subject and often gets tarnished as filling a quota. However, there is huge evidence to show it makes business sense, too.
“Gender diversity is correlated with both profitability and value creation.”
In its Jan 2018 report Delivering through diversity, McKinsey found that “gender diversity is correlated with both profitability and value creation.”
They found that “top-quartile companies on executive-level gender diversity worldwide had a 21 per cent likelihood of outperforming their fourth-quartile industry peers on EBIT margin, and they also had a 27 per cent likelihood of outperforming fourth-quartile peers on longer-term value creation.”
In short, diversity is important at all levels of the business. And to really put diversity at the heart of the business, you need an inclusive board making the decisions that matter.
Diversity in the recruitment process
Of course, there are other things businesses can do to drive a diverse range of applicants to available roles.
Agree on the skills required – By defining up front what would make for a good candidate in a certain role, you set your stall out for ignoring things that may sway unconscious biases. Have a checklist of requisite criteria so you can evaluate candidates fairly. Your recruiter can help you with this too.
Focus on the job description – Not all job descriptions are created equally. Research has shown that many common words used in job descriptions have male or female associations. Glassdoor recommends avoiding words like ‘ninja’, ‘hacker’ or ‘superhero’ to describe roles, checking your pronouns, and avoiding too many superlatives. Luckily there are tools like Textio or Gender Decoder to check your wording.
Assess where you find workers – So far we’ve spoken predominantly about race and gender diversity, but diversity goes far beyond those two things. Age, socio-economic backgrounds, disability and neuro-diversity are also crucial. Going to graduate open days is not enough, you need to broaden your horizons if you want to find a broad mix of applicants.
Psychometric testing – Assessing personality types and cultural fit in the recruitment process can help battle unconscious bias. If you understand your company culture, psychometric testing can find the people most likely to make a difference to your business, regardless of their demographic makeup.
Diverse interviewers – If you want a fair appraisal of a candidate, having diverse representation on the interviewing board can go a long way. Even the most qualified female candidate may feel uncomfortable when faced with three men at the final interview stage. Having a diverse team gives a more positive image to the interviewee, and is a living testament to your commitment to diversity.
This last point is crucial. For all the talk of culture, diversity policies and company values, at some point, the candidate will have to step inside the building and in front of a person or group of people. These people are saddled with unconscious biases. One solution, as mentioned, is to have a diverse interview panel. The other is to remove humans altogether.
Could AI solve the problem?
Using the right data, AI systems promise to be able to assess whether a candidate is a good cultural fit and likely to stay in their role over the long-term without falling prey to unconscious bias.
Some of the biggest recruiters in the US are already using AI platforms to make first contact with potential candidates by asking objective, performance-based questions and gathering their answers without bias. AI can assess the responses and put forward the most relevant candidates based on their answers.
When it comes to interviewing, could robots really make decisions as important as hiring? Potentially. We are able to assess cultural fit and personalities through intelligent psychometric testing. We can even assess the culture of the business as a whole using the same techniques. Artificial intelligence is all about spotting patterns. Once it knows the company, the person, the role, the experience and the missing pieces for each, it’s doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to imagine a world where we can remove humans from the recruitment process altogether.
It’s a hypothetical, of course, and we’d be very surprised to see any company adopting this strategy. We’re hiring people to work with other people, after all, removing the human element entirely makes no sense. Instead, AI will act as a helper to hiring managers – sifting through CVs and whittling down applications to the brightest, best and most relevant applicants.
The problem with diversity is, simply, one of culture. And this doesn’t mean a mission, vision and values on a piece of paper or a diversity policy that no-one refers to. It means living and breathing these beliefs. It starts at the top, it requires thought about how best to challenge unconscious bias and perhaps a little technology to challenge our assumptions.
You may not be able to completely eliminate bias, but you can take the right steps to mitigate against it and attract the diverse workforce that will improve your business.
