We should all be inspired by the commitment of these leading companies in their championing of unconscious bias training
We’ve been running training courses on unconscious bias – a term to describe those prejudices and misconceptions that we have of which we are not in conscious control – for several years, but it’s good to see that some leading tech giants of Silicon Valley are realising the same.
Facebook announced in July 2015 that it would be releasing its managing unconscious bias internal training programme to the public, with the aim of helping employees recognise unconscious prejudices to improve better relations in the workplace and mitigate the impact of unconscious bias.
“Managing bias is an essential part of building diverse and high-performing organisations”, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote in a Facebook post announcing the release, echoing the outline we published in our Introduction to Unconscious Bias.
Facebook’s announcement followed in the footsteps of Google, which has its own unconscious bias training programme, called ‘Unconscious bias at work’. In 2014, Google raised the issue of unconscious bias in the public eye through a video looking at how they go about making their employees aware of their own bias:
We’ve argued that confronting a lack of diversity is not just for tech leaders but, with the global presence of Facebook and Google, the releasing of their managing unconscious bias to the general public will raise a lot of awareness about the issues that employers face and can only encourage more employers to take the right steps in making their workforces more diverse and inclusive.
However, there is still a long way to go if we are to fully tackle unconscious bias in the workplace.
Facebook’s announcement comes in the second year of releasing their diversity statistics, where Facebook and Google saw little progress from the reports they issued a year before. At Facebook, the percentage of women in tech positions increased to 16%, up just one percentage point from the previous year.
This shows that issues like unconscious bias must be part of a multi-faceted approach to addressing inclusion and diversity in the workplace. For example, diversity training programmes are most effective in raising awareness and then setting the stage for more formalised approaches to addressing bias
That’s why we’ve developed an unconscious bias tool to give HR, organisational development and talent managers a taster of unconscious bias in their own organisations.
Developed in partnership with the Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion (enei), the free tool – for managers to ask staff to reflect on their own bias and help businesses achieve a clear understanding of how best to manage their employee’s personal biases professionally – is imperative for creating discrimination-free, fair, inclusive and commercially competitive organisations.
The unconscious bias tool is a taster of our whole unconscious bias eLearning course.
The course is delivered as an online eLearning module and takes approximately 30 to 45 minutes to complete. It includes an introduction to unconscious bias, practical ways of recognising different types of unconscious bias, and exploring different strategies for tackling unconscious bias in the modern workplace.
We should all be inspired by the commitment of these leading companies in their championing of unconscious bias training. Every forward-thinking employer should be embracing unconscious bias training, and we’re here to help them do so.
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This content was initially published on Marshallelearning.com and has been uploaded to and lightly amended on Ciphr.com as part of the brand amalgamation in August 2024.