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attitudes among the able-bodied
executives. In follow-up interviews
and focus groups, participants
revealed that working with people
with disabilities, connecting with
them, offering and receiving
assistance and being exposed to
their abilities and competencies
rather than their limitations, resulted
in their feeling more comfortable
and confident when meeting people
with disabilities. Immersion had
made them less likely to view their
crew mates’ disabilities as their
defining characteristic.
n the UK’s Civil Service,
bias training is
compulsory for anyone
with a responsibility for
recruitment. But for Jane Nicholson,
former HR director for D&I at the
Home Office, it was apparent
that, while the training created a
culture of awareness, it wasn’t
leading to a marked change in the
department’s make-up.
“The HR team was winning
awards for the D&I infrastructure
we had in place, but we needed to
move beyond D&I being seen as the
exclusive preserve and responsibility
I
of HR,” she explains. “We had to
find ways to integrate D&I into our
business strategy more widely.”
The breakthrough came by
focusing on diversity data. Nicholson’s
team presented functional heads
with detailed breakdowns of their
staff by gender, ethnicity and
disability, showing the differences
by grade level and comparing the
results against national and even
regional population data.
She reports that “focusing on
the micro-level enabled managers
to see clearly where there were
discrepancies, which allowed us to
support teams with programmes
and improvement plans to target
specific groups”.
In one group, two women from
BAME backgrounds were awarded
temporary promotions to give them
the experience they would need to
apply for more permanent roles at
that level. In another, the tendency
only to appoint team members with
an elite education was challenged
by new approaches to the pipeline,
including apprenticeship schemes.
“By giving managers ownership,
and providing the data to underpin
smaller-scale and more manageable
Understanding
D&I is not a
nice-to-have,
it is a business
priority
programmes for improvement, we
created a much wider network
of inclusion champions,” says
Nicholson. “D&I is now seen as a
form of talent management in its
own right.”
BT is based on the
reasonable assumption
that it’s important to
recognise and address
the attitudes and stereotypes that
make up unconscious bias.
And there is evidence that,
carefully deployed, it can be useful
for awareness raising. But deployed
in isolation, its ability to change
behaviours – the real drivers of
change – is limited.
For organisation-wide change,
long-term, top-down cultural change
must be driven by everything
from tone and language to
organisational structures, policies
and procedures. For that to happen,
businesses need to experiment
with and deploy a whole range
of strategies, techniques and
tools, such as the examples
highlighted here.
Ultimately, we need to view bias
training as the tool that it is rather
than as the silver bullet it’s often
perceived to be. FT
U
March – May 2019
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