Breaking down barriers – How to spot bias and remove it from your workplace

Unconscious bias doesn’t just resolve itself once you’re through the hiring process. There are probably barriers peppered throughout every level of your organisational structure.  

Whether it’s being flexible with your daily meeting times, considering alternate staff for promotions, or accommodating the needs of employees with caring responsibilities, we help you eliminate bias altogether. 

Andrea Ho, Discipline Lead at Australian Film Television and Radio School, can help you re-structure your policies with a few simple strategies. 

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Getting It Right is a Jobsbank podcast. It was produced by Deadset Studios and hosted by Rae Johnston.  

To find your downloadable Getting It Right Guide click here. Visit the Jobsbank Resource Centre for more information on inclusive employment and social procurement.    

CREDITS

Host: Rae Johnston 

Deadset Studios executive producers: Kellie Riordan, Ann Chesterman, Rachel Fountain 

Deadset Studios producer: Luci McAfee 

Sound Design: Scott Stronach 

 

We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the land on which this show was made. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Ari's boss (00:04):
Hey, Ari.

Ari (00:06):
Uh hey boss.

Ari's boss (00:07):
Look at us. Huh? 3 p.m. right on the dot.
The two Amigos, couple of cowboys ready to ride.

Ari (00:14):
They never miss a meeting.

Ari's boss (00:16):
Love it. I love when you do the cowboys accent
and the finger pistols. Ah. Aanyway, Ari old chum, why are
we always the only faces on this call? No-one has
any respect for meetings since we let them work from home.

Ari (00:30):
I mean, it could be the timing.

Ari's boss (00:33):
And I think you can hear the inverted commas around
the word work. Ari, my partner in crime, pew pew.

Ari (00:38):
Have you thought about rescheduling?

Ari's boss (00:40):
It's like every person I employ, man, woman and child has somewhere
better to be at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday? Something
they'd rather be doing, some other life event that's more important,
more appealing. Like where's bloody Gwen?

Ari (00:52):
School pick up.

Ari's boss (00:53):
Hm. What about Rashid?

Ari (00:55):
Pretty sure he drives his mum to physical therapy on Wednesdays.
He sent us that email.

Ari's boss (00:59):
Likely story. Mac?

Ari (01:01):
Uh, he works part time. He has to stay with the kids.

Ari's boss (01:03):
Does literally no one want to work anymore? Unacceptable.

Ari (01:08):
We could always ask around, find a better time and reschedule.

Ari's boss (01:14):
Fine.

Rae Johnston (01:21):
I vividly remember the panic of knowing I was being
charged a dollar for every single minute that I was
late to pick my son up from daycare. But requests
to leave work even five minutes before the official knockoff
time were just pushed aside and ignored. Even though I
was always 15 minutes early. I'm Rae Johnston and this

(01:50):
is Getting It Right. A podcast from Jobs Bank. We're
helping you design your workplace to attract job seekers, unearth
the untapped talent market, keep those hires and accelerate their
growth through your organisation or company. Andrea Ho spent many years
working up the ranks at the ABC, helping them to

(02:12):
create and build a more diverse culture. She's currently discipline
lead at the Australian Film, Television and Radio school. Andrea,
when we talk about unconscious bias within an organisation, what
exactly does that mean?

Andrea Ho (02:28):
It's really about the way that we as human beings
relate to one another. We have ideas in our head
based on our own understanding and experience of the world
about how other people and situations work. But because we are
limited in what we have seen and experienced, we form
certain fixed views about people and we tend to carry
those for a very long time. A way to explain

(02:49):
them is thinking about people as stereotypes, stereotypes are a
kind of bias. So very often we are not even
aware that we have these kinds of biases, but we do,
everybody has them. That's what unconscious bias is. The reason why
we want to get over them is so that we
make better decisions in the long run. And so the
business of dealing with our unconscious biases is really important

(03:12):
if we want to change and improve the way our
workplaces work, and we need to start by accepting that
each of us has unconscious bias and working with ourselves
and our limitations to expand those.

Rae Johnston (03:24):
What parts of an organisation or company do you see
unconscious bias in?

Andrea Ho (03:29):
Unconscious bias happens in all areas of an organisation, but
the two areas that I tend to think about are
leaders talking to their employees, their team members, and leadership itself.
And the pipeline to leadership is an area which is
clearly suffering from unconscious bias across Australia. You only need

(03:50):
to look at board rooms and board makeup in Australia
to show you that it happens to the very highest levels.

Rae Johnston (03:57):
And what about looking below the leadership level on a
day to day basis?

Andrea Ho (04:01):
You can see examples across organisations in big and little
ways every day. So I'll just give some examples and
some examples of how easy it is to solve those biases.
So you need to do a team meeting and you
need to do it at a certain time of day.
Why don't you consult with your team and find out
who's working flexibly and then set the meeting at that
time of day. Don't set it at 3 p.m. if

(04:21):
it doesn't need to be at 3 p.m. because one
person is having to go and pick up their children.
Why not set it at 10 a.m. or 11 a.m.
It's a very, very easy thing to do. When you're
thinking about growing the skills within your organisation, looking at
that leadership track, asking somebody to act in another job,
are you considering everybody on the floor or are you
only considering certain people? So let's just say, for example,

(04:43):
you've got a front line management position that's going to
be vacant for three weeks because somebody is taking leave.
Have you thought about the person who's working part time
who's just back from maternity leave? Don't rule them out
just because they are coming back from maternity leave and
they're part time and they're caring for children. They may
actually really want to be on the leadership track because

(05:04):
they were before they had their child. And it is a
good thing for them to be able to do. And
so they are able to organize some care for three
weeks and do that particular job. Don't rule people out
simply because of the assumptions that you make about them.
There's a lot of different ways in which we make
assumptions about the people who we see every day. So

(05:24):
something that you can do for yourself instead of saying, well,
I think only these people will be interested in acting
up in that particular job. Why not instead ask?

Rae Johnston (05:34):
So once we've identified the bias where's the best place
to start trying to get rid of it?

Andrea Ho (05:42):
That's a really interesting question and I'm not sure that
I've got a full answer because it's clearly a work
in progress all around Australia. Nobody's kind of cracked that
nut in a large way. But I would encourage everybody
listening to contribute to that change over time. One of
the biggest challenges that organisations can choose to address and

(06:03):
should choose to address is looking at their leadership pipeline.
Another example of unconscious bias is sometimes in some organisations,
some people think that if you are from a different
cultural background, you can't possibly be a good leader. I
get this a lot around being Asian Australian, that Asian
people are really great workers, but they just don't have

(06:23):
leadership and you just think well, entire countries of Asian
people run perfectly fine and they've got leaders and they've
got workers. So people talk about cultural fit; when we
talk about inclusion, the idea is to broaden culture, not
to narrow culture. So having a better understanding of what
leadership can be and can look like as opposed to
what it currently looks like is actually something which is

(06:46):
really important. The structural issues that I have seen in organisations
and I certainly have experienced myself are ones that organisations
have to think about very deeply. And the biggest one
is that people in organisations often think a lot about
the pipeline to do with new recruits. Everyone talks about
the pipeline for the next generation. So there's a lot
of effort going on right now in many organisations to

(07:08):
bring people of more diverse background into the organisation at
an entry level. And then they will, it's assumed, slowly
work their way up the chain. But this has been
said over and over and over again, including through my
lifetime where the stated objective was to have more different
kinds of people at the table. However, what most organisations

(07:31):
don't do is take a strategic approach to appointing leaders.

Rae Johnston (07:35):
If there are diverse people within the company, but they're
not moving up the ranks into leadership, what steps or
structures do you recommend companies put in place to make
that happen?

Andrea Ho (07:47):
That's a very common situation where people of diverse backgrounds
don't always put themselves forward. So there may be cultural
reasons and so those cultural reasons may be to do
with that person's ethnic culture, but it may also be
to do with their gender. Lots of us are socialised
not to put ourselves forward if we don't think we
can do the job 110 per cent. So just take

(08:09):
into account those stylistic differences. If you think that person's ready,
but they haven't put their hand up, why not ask them? Again,
don't assume, ask. If you're the leader and you're shaping
your organisation be proactive, not reactive.

Rae Johnston (08:23):
It's really opening up a dialogue with your employees isn't it?
And making them feel comfortable enough to come forward and say, look,
this is something I'd like to do. How can you
help me get there rather than them saying, well, you know,
I'm not the kind of person that I normally see
in those roles, so I'm not right for it.

Andrea Ho (08:40):
Exactly right. And dialogue is such a great work because
it involves two of you, di. It's not a monologue,
it's not you talking to your staff, it's you listening
to your staff, which is terribly important and a dialogue doesn't
happen just once, it happens over and over and over again.
So think about the formal opportunities you have to have
a dialogue with each staff member. It's usually around appraisal

(09:03):
or feedback in that formalised sense. But think about the
informal opportunities too. Sometimes people are a bit scared in
those situations or apprehensive, nervous is probably the right word
to say. But when you're both fixing coffee at the kitchen,
why not have a little chat there?

Rae Johnston (09:19):
Just don't send last minute impromptu calendar invites to meetings
that say quick chat.

Andrea Ho (09:26):
Exactly right, because again, if you've been there, you know that,
that conjures up all kinds of things in people's heads.
Instead say, hey, this is just a formal thing that
I want to set up on a regular basis. What
you can actually do then is take some of that
fear and apprehension out because people know it's coming every
couple of weeks and they feel pretty comfortable or if
you do set it up at the last minute, say

(09:47):
what it's for. Can I have a quick chat to
discuss X or Y? And then it takes some of
that apprehension away and you can have a much more
open and trustful dialogue with your employee.

Rae Johnston (10:00):
I hope every employer out there listens to these tips.
I think it would make for some very more comfortable workplaces.
Let's put it that way.

Andrea Ho (10:07):
I hope so too.

Rae Johnston (10:09):
Andrea Ho who's spent more than two decades working in
the media helping to create an inclusive workforce. Don't forget
there's more resources to help you with inclusive hiring and
procurement on the Jobs Bank Resource Centre website. That's at
jobsbank.org.au . There are plenty of practical tips there on

(10:30):
the Resource Centre , whether you're a big company, a small business,
a government department or a not for profit. And if
you want to know more about unconscious bias in your organisation,
you can also check out series one of Getting It Right.
It's available now in all podcast apps and on the
Jobs Bank Resource Centre . That's at jobsbank.org.au .

Speaker 5 (10:57):
I'm Rae Johnston. Getting It Right is a podcast from Jobs
Bank and is produced by Dead Set studios. This episode
was recorded on the unceded lands of the sovereign Darug,
Turrbal and Jagera Peoples where it was also produced and
edited and we wish to pay our deepest respects to
their elders past and present. We ask that you too

(11:18):
acknowledge the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander lands that you're
listening from.