Three Things Managers Could Do to Be More Inclusive

Leaders and Managers can do a lot to mitigate bias at work, promote inclusive practices and help their team to experience inclusion and respect.

Here are 3 smart ways for leaders like yourself to interrupt bias at work, enable others to feel empowered, included and like they belong.

1.Reconfigure how you conduct meetings

There are people who can get left out in meetings, get talked over or ignored for their ideas. Think about introverts, those in minority who don’t feel as included and women. While women are at the receiving end of various kinds of bias, one of the rampant ones is to do with their intellect or the assumed lack of it. Women are interrupted more often. Various studies support the “woman, interrupted” phenomenon: one of them was conducted in 2014 at George Washington University which showed that men are 33% more likely to interrupt women than they are to interrupt other men. Even women interrupt women more often, the study found.

What you could do: Set expectations right at the start or in the agenda email or invite you send out to attendees. Call it a ‘no interruptions’ meeting if interruptions have been tough to handle and people feel unheard and offended with each other. Or give everyone two minutes at the start and at the end to have their say, so they can’t be interrupted.

This is an indirect way to send the message that you are keen to hear everyone and haven’t been able to do so in past meetings. It also makes everyone listen better, stay thoughtful and get on board with waiting their turn. You could also have some time set aside for objections, questions and concerns, so those can be brought forward.

2. Share the responsibility to be inclusive

Team leaders and HR alone can’t be tasked alone with watching out for bias at work. An unintended consequence is that everyone is on their own, they need to watch their words and their backs and report anything that offends them. When people feel they are on their own and are almost always in a defensive and protective mode, they aren’t looking out for others. Diverse teams are likely to falter if they constantly stay cautious of each other.

What you could do: Research has shown that social support can make a huge difference in people’s lives during stressful times. Encourage and experiment with a buddy system in highly diverse and dispersed teams. If you are part of a diverse team, you might have a buddy either in your own or on another team. You could check-in with each other to stay connected.

When you feel responsible to understand how someone else is doing, you make an effort to put yourself in their shoes and find out what affects them negatively and impedes their ability to be productive and positive. The other person is then likely to feel motivated to do the same for you. Empathy helps mitigate bias over a period of time. More and more people begin to understand how seemingly insignificant actions affect others’ wellbeing and happiness at work. This is a long-term play in helping interrupt bias without making people feel like bigots for being biased.

3. Encourage celebrating team diversity

Workplaces can turn colourless and transactional, especially, the ones that work at a quicker pace in high stress industries. No one has the time to celebrate or pause long enough to ask questions that aren’t work-related.

What you could do: Cultivate the culture of celebration. Don’t spend a lot of money or this practice will come to an end soon enough. Let it be a mutually supportive celebration, for example, a pot luck on a Friday afternoon. Keeping it informal increases the chances of sustaining it. Food is a powerful connector for teams and people. It helps have conversations that otherwise would never come up during the day.

Most people love to share where the recipe came from, if and how much they love to cook, who taught them to cook and more importantly, information about their culture and practices that others don’t know or understand. Celebrating festivals from various cultures is a great way to bust myths and prejudices about that culture. When you experience something first hand, you are more likely to have your own opinion about it, instead of work with borrowed ones from the past.

Related posts:

The Word of God is filled with promises for His people. As His people, there are spiritual exchanges that are mentioned from Genesis to Revelations regarding the actions we should take in order to…

Many of my classmates have left India to other countries such as Canada or Australia or the U.S. However, few like me cannot leave the country for the love of the land, the food and the freedom. But…

Learning means to incorporate something in your life by observing your surroundings. It is a life long process which never ends, even in our 40’s we can learn new things. e.g. my mother learned how…