5 ways to promote fair opportunities for all

As the DEI landscape continues to evolve, the need to create fair and equal opportunities for all across the employment lifecycle continues. Representation within workplace cultures – covering both access to work and opportunities to progress up the talent pipeline – should remain a key strategic priority within the context of inclusion mainstreaming.

Bias and barriers to fair and inclusive opportunities

Social psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman have long stressed the influence of biases on human thinking and decision-making, and the extent to which ‘heuristics’ – or mental shortcuts – influence hiring, work allocation, and promotion decisions.

There are – at least at the last count – 151 known combined social and cognitive biases, which can be divided into four parts:

1. Information type biases: These help us to filter information as we humans have to process huge amounts of information and data on a daily basis. This filtering process helps with information processing, but it also creates in-group and out-group biases – information that often leads to unfair opportunities at work.
2. Meaning: Although we process significant amounts of information, there are many gaps in what we do process. Therefore, we have a tendency to fill our information gaps and to join together dots based on what we think we know, often based on past experience and ill-informed assumptions about people who are similar to us and groups of people who are different from us.
3. Speed: Often influenced by exaggerated self-confidence and inflated egos, speedy decision-making leads to a lack of self-reflection and a lack of engagement with ‘system 2’ thinking processes. When this happens, we rely on emotions over data to make decisions. This type of decision-making fuels unfair decision-making.
4. Memory: As our memory bank is limited, we tend to remember notable events and people. We are likely to have favourable associations with in-group members.
   
   

3 key biases that impact fair and inclusive decisions at work

Affinity bias.

Also called similarity bias, this bias stresses a preference for candidates who are like us. This can include factors such as gender and ethnicity, but also social background, personal interests, experiences, and even communication style. Affinity bias plays out across the employee lifecycle – we tend to hire people who have similar work experiences, or have worked in a similar job sector.

Beyond hiring, due to the likeability factor, affinity bias influences those who we spend our time with, which can lead to the informal mentoring and sponsorship of colleagues who are ‘like us’. We tend to open up our networks to similar types of people. This impacts work opportunities. In performance reviews, managers may misconstrue likeability with similar communication styles, which they can view as ‘leadership potential’.

Halo effect

This is a cognitive bias where managers and other colleagues place greater emphasis and weight on positive attributes, traits and behaviours of individuals in their team. This leads to a generalisation of skills and competencies. For instance, if a colleague is skilled at data analysis (and this is a skill valued by the manager), the manager starts to assume they are good at unrelated skills, such as client presentations. The halo effect leads to unfair judgements in overall skills and competencies and leads to in-group members being favoured for stretch assignments and fast-tracking promotions. A key aspect of the halo effect is the downplaying of behaviours which do not align to existing assumptions. This is also supported by confirmation bias.

Group attribution error

This is a key bias that affects fair and inclusive decisions in the workplace. It plays into basic group stereotypes and reduces objectivity when assessing talent. Instead of evaluating colleagues based on performance data, managers and colleagues (when using 360 processes) make assumptions that are often based on unrelated factors such as gender, ethnicity, and introversion vs. extroversion. This can impact hiring, but once in a team, it can impact decisions on suitability for new projects, assessment of leadership potential (and therefore sponsorship effort), promotion scores, as well as pay and reward.

Overall, these types of biases lead to unfair distortions of work opportunities, favouritism within teams, and ultimately who ends up progressing through the leadership pipeline.

5 ways to promote fairness at work

1. Start with inclusive job design processes. For instance, this means removing "masculine-coded" words (e.g., "competitive") and replacing them with gender-neutral alternatives like "collaborative" or "resilient". Gender decoder tools can assist with identifying biased language.
2. Implement blind decision-making. This includes removing subjective information from the application process. Best practice suggests that blind decision-making should also be used in performance reviews and promotion conversations. Managers should place a strong focus on data (as opposed to individuals) as this approach can significantly reduce bias and promote fair outcomes.
3. Mentorship and sponsorship. This is a critical approach to promoting fairness and equal opportunities. It supports the building of positive relationships, which reduces distance and biases. Sponsorship is a critical process to opening otherwise closed opportunities.
4. Establish clear and transparent promotion criteria. Clear and objective criteria removes ambiguity from the decision-making process. It supports transparency in judgement and forces managers to engage with system 2-level thinking when advocating on behalf of colleagues.
5. Use data to drive decisions. Data-driven decisions support evidence-based thinking and support reflective processes. It controls subjective thinking and therefore biases. Managers should draw on a wider range of data pools, including KPI measures, 360 processes, and one-to-one feedback loops.

Let’s work together

For more information about promoting fair decision-making, watch our webinar, How to Promote Fairness Across the Employee Lifecycle. Alternatively, our cultural-change strategy programme helps organisations embed effective and data-driven DEI practices into everyday systems and processes for fairer and long-term change.