Unconscious Bias at Work: Awareness, Accountability, and Action

How one high-profile incident sparked a national conversation—and why every organization must confront hidden biases to build a fairer, more inclusive workplace.

In the Pre-pandemic world (May 2018), coffee giant Starbucks closed over 8,000 stores for the afternoon to train about 175,000 employees on bias. This was the aftermath of an incident in Philadelphia in which 2 African American males were waiting for a friend in Starbucks. During that wait, they were not permitted to use the restroom (purportedly because they did not buy anything) and then the store manager called the police on them and got them arrested for trespass. This caused outrage in the community and embarrassment for the company, but it put the phrase “unconscious bias” on America’s radar.

A bias is a kind of prejudice in favor or against a person compared to another -usually done unfairly. It can be towards or based on any group, such as race, weight, hair color, or religion, even if that group is not a protected group under the law (“protected class”). Bias benefits one group and detriments another and is usually rooted in stereotypes that we hold.

Two kinds of biases influence every workplace in this country. There are: conscious (explicit) bias and unconscious (implicit) bias. Unconscious bias is the instinctive categorizations that we make based on observations. Some examples, in the workplace, may include: who gets called for an interview, who gets left out of a meeting, and who gets invited to an industry dinner or conference.

Naturally, we all have both types of biases and it is typical and common to make subconscious, negative opinions about people who are different from us and who are outside of our group or our norm.  Biases affect the vast majority of decisions that we make in the workplace and significantly impact how we treat and manage others. Managers must take steps to reprogram their brain so that they do not let these biases negatively affect their management.  Unconscious bias can negatively affect the way in which managers manage performance, provide advancement, and hire, fire or promote employees. As such, a recent trend in human resource management is a strong push towards blind resumes in the hiring process in which organizations delete potentially influential information on a resume to eliminate bias. Examples may include redacting a candidate’s name; religious association information and graduation dates.

The first step in managing unconscious bias is through personal awareness. We must admit to and identify our own biases and openly discuss them. Be mindful that this is not comfortable or easy as these feelings lie deep in our unconscious brain so they are hidden. A second practice is to provide unconscious bias training to all employees and managers to uncover these biases and to start the all-important dialogue. Organizations can improve the effort by ensuring that the hiring process is equitable and fair and is rooted in hiring the best and most qualified person for the job. Some best practices include: editing policies and job descriptions to include neutral language; removing unimportant demographic information from resumes; giving pre-hire tests or projects that evaluate necessary skills for a particular job; making the interview process and inquiries both standard and consistent; setting ethic-centric goals for your organization; and making diversity and inclusion you own priority.  Make sure you can honestly ask yourself post-hire or post-promotion– Did I choose this person for the right reasons?

Traveling back in time to 2018, we can all take a lesson from Starbucks. The organization recognized the issue, was proactive in their approach; and listened to the community. The entire organization has been “all in” and they are not only learning from their mistakes, but are also trying to remediate them.