Unconscious bias is a common problem in today’s world. No matter how objective we try to be when making decisions, particularly in the workplace, our backgrounds and experiences often influence us. We’re hard-wired to make decisions based on what we’ve learned about the world over the years.
Unfortunately, unconscious bias can have a negative impact on your finance company and your team. It can prevent you from objectively assessing the value of each candidate you consider hiring and even lead to issues with company culture and employee engagement.
In a world where 80% of employees say they want to work with diverse, equitable, and inclusive employers, unconscious bias can prompt turnover and harm your employer brand.
Fortunately, there are ways to address this issue.
Unconscious Bias in Finance: An Overview
The first step to overcoming unconscious bias is understanding what is happening. Unconscious bias is the automatic attitudes, stereotypes, beliefs, and prejudice formed throughout our lives; even when we’re unaware of what is happening.
Our backgrounds, experiences, social connections and more can all shape our choices, causing us to discriminate against others.
Though employers and business leaders in the finance sector often try to avoid bias, 79% of HR professionals believe it continues to permeate recruitment and succession planning decisions.
Unconscious bias can also appear in many different forms. For instance, we show affinity bias when we show a preference for people who are similar to us in some way. For instance, you may hire a new accountant because they look or speak similarly.
Confirmation bias encourages us to look for evidence that backs up our initial opinion of someone while overlooking data that contradicts our views. For example, you may focus on an employee’s lack of experience with a certain financial tool if you don’t initially like them but ignore their incredible success at previous companies.
We can even be exposed to issues like “conformity bias”, which involves taking cues from others to drive our decisions. When multiple people are involved in a hiring decision, you may go with the crowd’s opinion rather than forming your own perspective.
The Importance of Building Diverse Teams
Unconscious bias creates several significant problems for financial teams. First, it harms people’s perception of your employer brand and EVP, making your company seem less welcoming and appealing to existing and future team members.
Secondly, it makes it harder to attract a diverse selection of valuable team members for your company. Research from McKinsey has shown that a diverse workforce can improve your chances of making above-average profits by up to 43%.
However, unconscious bias can prevent you from making objective hiring decisions and even influence the impact of your job descriptions, making them less appealing to a wider range of candidates.
Unconscious bias even has an impact on your company’s overall performance. Surveys show that 60% of people believe their workplace is biased, and 68% say it impacts their productivity. When people feel discriminated against or overlooked at work, they’re less likely to be engaged, productive and efficient.
Overcoming unconscious bias is the key to unlocking opportunities for innovation, greater employee retention, and even stronger customer experiences.
Strategies for Building Bias-Free Teams
Eliminating unconscious bias from your hiring and business decisions can be more complex than it seems. After all, we’re often unaware of the prejudice we show to other people until we look at how we make people-related choices.
Even if you and your team members are aware of your biases, overcoming deep-rooted thought processes that have guided you through your life can be difficult.
Here are some of the strategies you can use to tackle the issue.
Step 1: Develop Awareness
Awareness is the core difference between an unconscious bias that’s difficult to understand and control and a mindful approach to diverse hiring and succession planning. It’s easy to assume you don’t hold any unconscious biases, but this is rarely true.
Business leaders, managers, and anyone responsible for hiring and promotion decisions should be encouraged to consider their decision-making process and search for evidence of bias. Ask yourself what prompts you to make choices based on “gut instinct”.
Speaking to managers, friends, and coworkers to ask for their insights on where you might be displaying unconscious bias can also help open your eyes to the reality of the situation.
Step 2: Invest in Inclusive Recruitment Strategies
Redesigning your recruitment process with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion is an excellent way to overcome the issue of unconscious bias. One excellent option is to work with a financial recruitment company with years of experience in your industry.
The right recruitment company will be aware of the issues of unconscious bias and can take additional steps to prevent the problem when sourcing candidates for your team. They can support you with strategies like “blind recruitment”, which involves removing certain information from a candidate’s application which may influence your decisions.
Hiding unnecessary information, such as a person’s age, Name, location, and even where they went to school, can help business leaders make more objective decisions. Recruitment companies can also help you to create more neutral job descriptions, free of terms which show a preference for employees of a certain age or gender.
Step 3: Commit to Continuous Learning and Development
You need a comprehensive approach to create a truly inclusive culture and eliminate bias from your financial business. Assist managers in recognising examples of bias with formal training initiatives focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, empathy, and emotional intelligence.
Share the same training and documentation with your team members to help them understand when they might be making prejudiced decisions.
Encourage your business leaders to share the same level of feedback and recognition with all employees, and solicit feedback from your team members to determine any issues you might be overlooking.
As your business grows, build on your diversity training initiatives, implementing them into everything from your day-to-day processes to your onboarding strategy. You can even encourage employees to take “bias tests”, such as this one, available for free online, to help them understand the issues they must overcome.
Keeping Unconscious Bias Out of the Workplace
Dealing with unconscious bias in the financial workplace can be complex. It’s easy to make decisions based on the wrong factors, such as a person’s age or where they went to school. However, allowing unconscious bias to thrive in your business can lead to various problems.
Invest in regular training, focus on building a diverse and inclusive company culture, and work with a professional recruitment company to eliminate bias from your workplace.
Thanks,
Rachel
About Rebus Financial Recruitment
Rebus Financial Recruitment provides a specialist and focused recruitment service to its customers, ranging from various organisations, including SMEs, to large PLCs.
We strive to offer both the client and candidate a seamless recruitment experience. Using our expertise, we get to the heart of employer and employee needs, and, in doing so, we match the two perfectly.
To learn more, contact one of our team today or call us on 01282 930930.
