Starbucks is taking a powerful stand against racialinequity: The coffee giant is closing its US stores on May 29, 2018, to offeranti-bias training to 175,000 employees.
That’s a good start. Training is an important element of anystrategy to combat unconscious or implicit bias in a company’s culture. But theroot problem is deeply ingrained habits and behaviors; serious behavior changerequires serious, long-term effort.
“Obviously, I’m not privy to the details of the trainingthat Starbucks will do, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the training itselfdidn’t do that much to change behavior; I think the main thing is that this isthe ‘serious face’ action from management,” said Julie Dirksen of Usable Learning. “They are saying, ‘Weare closing every single store to try and fix this’—whether the training worksor not, that’s a pretty substantive message from Starbucks about how seriousthey are about trying to fix this. That’s millions and millions of dollars inlost revenue,” she said. (MarketWatchestimates that the shutdown will cost Starbucks $12 million.) “That’s not asmall investment on their part, so that message from upper management mayactually have a bigger impact that the training itself,” said Dirksen, whostudies behavior change.
Understanding and acknowledging implicit bias
The Starbucks training will address implicit bias, accordingto The New York Times; it’s a responseto an April incident in a Philadelphia store where two African Americancustomers were arrested.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy definesimplicit bias as “relativelyunconscious and relatively automatic features of prejudiced judgment and socialbehavior.” Individuals can explore and uncover their own implicit biaseswith tools like the HarvardIAT (Implicit Associations Test), which measures how strongly a testsubject associates two concepts. All humans have associations, preferences, andbiases. Even very young children develop preferences and associations, forexample positive associations with the face and voice of their primarycaregiver—and, often, people of the same gender and race as that caregiver. TheIAT is just one tool to help people identify biases they might not even beaware are influencing their behavior; somesay it is a flawed tool, while acknowledging that implicit bias can be verytricky to measure.
Biases are a product of our upbringing and culture, of thetime and place we live. They might be created or reinforced by experience andexposure to the beliefs and behaviors of trusted family, friends, or other rolemodels. A defining characteristic—and what makes implicit bias so hard toeradicate—is that the attitudes and resulting behaviors are unconscious; infact, many people who consciously profess non-prejudiced attitudes andintentions harbor implicit biases that color their behavior, according to a study byPatricia Devine and three other researchers.
In the workplace, implicit bias can—and does—result indiscriminatory treatment of employees and discriminatory outcomes in hiring,pay, and advancement opportunities, and in unequal opportunities to socialize,network, and interact with both co-workers and managers. Researchers have evenfound that implicit biases can result in reduced access to lifesaving medicalcare.
Training to counteract implicit bias—and its limitations
Numerous approaches are suggested to “train away”undesirable behaviors, including those resulting from unconscious bias. Intheir study, Devine and her coauthors had participants learn and practice usingfive strategies for combatting stereotypes and replacing undesirable behavioralresponses to incidents that activate those stereotypes:
- Stereotypereplacement: Recognizing that a particular behavioral response is based ona stereotype, reflecting on why one responds in that way, and coming up with anunbiased way to respond to a similar situation.
- Counter-stereotypicImaging: Detailed imagining of famous or familiar individuals who do notfit stereotypes of members of their group. This strategy enables learners tochallenge stereotypes by bringing to mind positive examples of members of thestereotyped group—examples that refute the stereotype.
- Individuation:Obtaining specific information about members of the stereotyped group toevaluate them as individuals, rather than making assumptions about the group asa whole.
- Perspective-takingexercises: Putting oneself “in the shoes of” members of the stereotypedgroup, attempting to see a situation through their eyes.
- Increasingopportunities for contact: Seeking ways to increase interaction amongmembers of different groups. Positive interactions can challenge implicit biasby “altering cognitive representations” of the group.
To succeed, these and other behavior-change strategies requiremotivated participants. Some individuals are strongly motivated by their ownvalues to avoid behaving in prejudiced or biased ways; others might need educationabout the negative effects of prejudice or inequality on their co-workers andother members of their communities. However, many individuals believe that theyare not biased or that bias is not a problem. These individuals may not bewilling to undertake the sustained effort needed to change ingrained habits andbehavior.
Thus, as Devine and her co-authors wrote, “First, peoplemust be aware of their biases and, second, they must be concerned about theconsequences of their biases before they will be motivated to exert effort toeliminate them. Furthermore, people need to know when biased responses arelikely to occur and how to replace those biased responses with responses moreconsistent with their goals.”
Starbucks deserves kudos for taking a whole-company approachto eradicating biased behavior. Sending individual employees or departments todiversity or anti-harassment training in response to an incident—a commonapproach—can cause those employees to feel singled out. Rather thancontributing to a more respectful environment, the training can cause employeesto feel resentful and can even exacerbate biased or undesirable behaviors.
But short-term training is unlikely to change ingrainedbeliefs or behaviors. Identifying and eliminating implicit bias or changingunconscious—and deeply ingrained—attitudes and the behaviors they influence ishard work that individuals must do over time. “Traditional diversity classesoften produce good intentions but little behavior change, and rarely addressthe deep level of unconscious bias,” Dirksen wrote in a blogpost. She cites Devine’s study as a “remarkable and rare” example ofchanging deeply ingrained behavior. That intervention took place over 12 weeksand included education and training, along with opportunities for participantsto discuss their experiences.
And other research has identified limitations and risksinherent in one-time experiences with both immersiveand perspective-taking approaches to combatting stereotypes. So, whileanti-bias training can prod individual employees to assess their own biases andbehavior—and perhaps make changes—training and behavior change are only part ofthe solution.
Eradicating bias—and changing behavior—requires broad effort
When Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, agreed to an audit onpay equity in his company, he was sure that no gender gap existed—but it did,and Benioff spent $3 million to address the problem. That was just the firstyear.
Benioff was disturbed to find, in the next year’s audit,that inequality had crept back in, partly due to acquisitions of companies withgender pay gaps. Benioff told60 Minutes that ensuring equal pay requires constant vigilance; anannual audit is insufficient. Furthermore, he said, that’s only one componentof gender inequity. Equal pay “is part of a total package. You can’t look atone of these things independent of the other,” Benioff told 60 Minutes,describing his company’s multifaceted approach to ensuring gender equity.
“You can say equal opportunity is one critical part ofgender equality. Then you can say equal advancement, that’s a critical part ofgender equality. Then you can say equal pay, that’s the third door. And thefourth door is preventing sexual harassment. All of these things together isgender equality,” Benioff said.
A similar approach would be needed to address racial and otherinequities that result, in part, from implicit bias. Anti-bias training is agood place to start, though, and critical to that “fourth door,” preventingharassment of any kind in the workplace or business. To learn more aboutcreating effective anti-bias training, join Julie Dirksen at her one-dayworkshop, Designfor Behavior Change, on October 22, 2018. This Certificate Workshopprecedes The eLearning Guild’s DevLearn2018 Conference & Expo, October 24 – 26, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
