潜意识的偏见如何拖了你公司的后腿

领导力内部网络是一个在线社区，最具思想和影响力的商界人士会在此及时回答关于职业生涯和领导力的问题。今天的问题是：在促进职场平等上，你应该扮演什么角色？回答者是Udemy的首席执行官丹尼斯·杨。

近年来，涌现了许多关于职场多元性的论述，但实质性的进步却不太明显，领导层的性别差异尤其能体现这一点。这个问题并不容易解决，考虑到它需要改变许多人的理念，其中还有一些人可能都没有意识到现状存在着问题。

在这样的情况下，我对我们公司里员工背景和经历的多样性感到无比自豪，尽管我们在这方面仍然有工作要做。我们在人员和想法上的合理配比是自然出现的——没有人说我们需要多少名女性副总裁。我们只是向那些我们遇到的最适合那些职位的人发出邀请。如今，我们的领导层（主任及以上）有42%为女性，这样的表现十分突出，尤其是在科技界。

我们在发展时，必须时刻保持警觉，确保自己处在正确的轨道上。这不只是一种让自己感觉良好的举动。研究已经表明，员工越多元化，公司的表现就会更好。

然而，在着手改善职场的性别平衡之前，你需要关注并直面公司员工潜意识里存在的偏见。它是真实存在的，而且就在我们所有人当中。

我们最近分小组观看了Facebook制作的一部视频，其中解释了潜意识的偏见以及克服它的方式。潜意识的偏见会让我们依据根深蒂固而不自知的观念先入为主地评价某人或某群体。例如，一个著名的研究表明，如果管弦乐队的乐师在幕布后面演奏，评委不知道他们的性别，那么他们就会得到更加公正的评判。

随后，我们进行了坦诚乃至有时不适的讨论。员工谈了自己受到的潜意识偏见，其他人则承认自己并不总像自认为的那样思想开明。

帮助人们理解潜意识中的偏见，并营造一个安全的空间来自由谈论它，是根除这种想法的第一步。随后，长时间地仔细地研究你招聘、管理和与员工互动的方式。

公平的招聘

想要扭转职场不公或实现职场公平，你不可能单单通过宣布把它们作为重点就达到目的。你需要通过面试，深入了解每名候选者的思想和观念，而不仅仅是他们的职业技能和过去经历。

这要求你的面试官做好准备。他们需要问出很棒的问题，然后倾听偏见思维的迹象。例如一名候选者表示：“我上份工作的老工程师动作太慢了。”或“我们没办法完成项目，因为我的主任总是惦记着她小孩的棒球比赛之类的事情。”

他们也需要当心自己的潜在偏见。在Udemy，我们有筛选候选人的详细流程，迫使面试官寻找特质，而不是“跟随直觉”。我们有一张在线反馈表格，会让面试官回答详细的问题，而每名面试官的评语都会与整个面试团队共享。

公司也可以参照管弦乐队的那个例子，去掉简历上的名字和教育信息，这类信息可能会不公地淘汰掉一些不同种族或毕业学校不那么有名的候选者。如果这类人群无法获得进门面试的机会，你永远不会在职场多样性的问题上取得很大进步。

包容的文化

如果你有着远大的目标并为之努力，那实现多样化还不够。员工需要在每一天都感受到自己的价值，知道机遇面前人人平等。无论是让他们参加备受瞩目的项目、进入管理层，甚至是批准他们在家办公，决策的方式都需要体现出公平性和一致性。

根深蒂固的行为和观念可能很难改变。你的公司文化或许会自然而然地忘记奖励那些受到忽视的群体，或者一名固执己见的沟通者会被某位管理者不公平地贴上“爱出风头”的标签，又被另外一位管理者贴上“自信”的标签。人们未必意识到自己已经做出了这些评判，但它们的破坏性不会因此而减轻。因此，我们有必要鼓励员工注意到这些问题，当场指出它们，告诉他们如何更好地合作。

在公司中推进性别平等的过程不会让你感到舒适，不过如果你想让公司繁荣发展，这却是必须的。（财富中文网）

译者：严匡正

The Leadership Insiders network is an online community where the most thoughtful and influential people in business contribute answers to timely questions about careers and leadership. Today’s answer to the question, “How can you play a role in advancing workplace equality?” is written by Dennis Yang, CEO of Udemy.

There’s been plenty of talk about workplace diversity in recent years, but less evidence of progress, particularly when you examine leadership ranks. This is no easy nut to crack, considering it requires changing the mindsets of large groups of people, some of whom may not realize anything’s wrong with the status quo.

With that in mind, I’m incredibly proud of the diverse set of backgrounds and experiences represented throughout our organization, though we still have work to do. Our healthy blend of people and ideas occurred organically—no one mandated that we needed X number of female VPs. We simply extended offers to the best people we met for those roles. Today, our leadership cohort (director-level and above) is 42% women, a strong showing, particularly in the tech world.

As we grow, we must exercise constant vigilance to stay on the right track. It’s not just a feel-good move either. Research has shown companies perform better when they are more diverse.

Before you can begin improving gender equality at work, however, you need to become aware of and confront the unconscious bias at your company. It’s real, and it exists in all of us.

We recently broke into groups to watch a video produced by Facebook that explains unconscious bias and how to overcome it. Unconscious bias leads us to form assumptions about people and groups based on deeply held attitudes we don’t even know we possess. For example, one well-known study showed that musicians auditioning for an orchestra were evaluated more fairly when they performed behind a curtain and judges didn’t know their gender.

Afterward, we had honest and sometimes uncomfortable discussions where employees talked about being on the receiving end of unconscious bias and others admitted they’d not always been as open-minded as they’d thought.

Helping people understand unconscious bias and then creating a safe space to speak freely about it are the first steps in rooting it out of your organization. Then, take a long, hard look at how you hire, manage, and interact with your employees:

Fair hiring

You can’t reverse-engineer workplace fairness or achieve equality by simply announcing it’s now a priority. You need to use the interview process to dig into each candidate’s mindset and attitudes, not just job skills and past experience.

This requires preparation for your interviewers. They’ll need help asking good questions and listening for signs of biased thinking, such as a candidate saying, “The older engineers at my last job worked too slowly,” or “We couldn’t complete projects because my director was always out for things like her kid’s baseball game.”

They’ll need to watch out for their own potential biases too. At Udemy, we follow a detailed framework for sizing up job candidates that pushes people to cite specifics instead of “going with your gut.” An online feedback form walks interviewers through detailed questions, and each person’s comments are shared with the entire interviewing team.

Companies can also replicate the orchestra example, and remove names and education information on resumes, which could unfairly eliminate people of different ethnicities or who went to less prestigious schools. If those kinds of candidates can’t get in the door for an interview, you’ll never make strides around diversity.

Inclusive culture

Diversity isn’t enough if you’re filling a quota and moving on. Employees should feel valued every single day and know they have an equal shot at available opportunities. Whether it’s being involved in a high-profile project, moving into management, or even getting permission to work from home, there needs to be fairness and consistency in how such decisions get made.

Engrained behaviors and attitudes can prove difficult. Maybe your company’s culture has conditioned people to reward a work style that doesn’t come naturally to people in underrepresented groups. Or perhaps an assertive communicator is unfairly labeled as “pushy” by one manager but “confident” by another. People aren’t necessarily aware they’ve formed these judgments, but it doesn’t make them any less damaging. That’s why it’s so important to encourage employees to notice these incidents, point them out in the moment, and talk about better ways of working together.

Improving gender equality in your company is not a comfortable process, but it’s essential if you want to thrive.