Here's how unconscious bias can affect your company's performance reviewsAs we head into the second half of the year, many managers and employees around the world are probably still licking their wounds after undergoing the biannual trauma of performance reviews. Universally reviled by those on both sides of the table, the standard employee review process has definitely come under fire over the past few years for being an ineffective tool to evaluate an employee's achievements and challenges. © Kitsana Baitoey – 123RF.com Many companies are choosing what they deem to be more effective methods, such as continuous performance management, where short-term goals are set and feedback is far more frequent. There are even apps available – such as Impraise, Reflektive and 15Five – that can assist in the review process to make it more intuitive and easier to complete. The burden of biasYet very few of these performance evaluation methods address a key obstacle that managers have no control over: bias. This isn’t the kind of bias that we are familiar with, such as prejudices based on race, sex, or even age, although they do stem from them. Rather, these are biases that we all have, regardless of how open-minded we think we are. Neuroscience tells us that our brains are actually hardwired to be biased – a result of mental shortcuts our brain takes, so it can avoid being overwhelmed. These shortcuts help us make decisions that avoid danger, help us go faster, and feel good. For example, if we are hijacked at a particular intersection, then our experience bias will lead us to make an unconscious decision to avoid that area. This experience bias proves useful here as it protects us. But this bias can also serve us negatively; for instance, if someone performs poorly at work, our experience bias will cause us to think that this person will most likely not perform in the future, even if it only happened once. Importantly, biases are completely unconscious, so we do not experience ourselves being biased. It is this unconscious bias that can lead us to inaccurately assess someone’s performance, purely because we are unaware of the mental shortcuts our brain is taking to reach that skewed opinion. More importantly this unconscious bias is similar to a natural biological function, such as our pancreas regulating our insulin levels. In the same way that we cannot regulate our pancreas by just being aware of its functioning, we cannot reduce bias by just being aware of this bias. That is why it is important to first accept that we all have biases, secondly to develop a language to label and talk about these biases, and finally to address them through following a set process. The SEEDS Model®A lot of unconscious bias training in workplace settings focuses on generating awareness of bias, or to ‘catch yourself in the act’ of being biased. But this is not sufficient to effect any real change and is the reason that, empirically, unconscious bias training has not generated unbiased behaviour. Dr David Rock, founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, developed a model to address bias that includes processes rather than simply awareness. This strategy, known as The SEEDS Model®, identifies processes that can redirect the five broad categories of bias, along with ways of mitigating them. Here are examples of the three most common biases in performance reviews, and how to address them:
About the authorRob Jardine is the head of Research and Solutions at the [[http://neuroleadershipinstitute.org/ NeuroLeadership Institute South Africa]]. |