P2P

10 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | F A L L 2 0 2 2 recruit and retain a diverse population unless there's an inclusive and welcoming environment for them to engage with on a day-to-day basis. How do organizations create that inclusive environment? Several ways. For starters, leadership should make clear what it expects from managers and other employees when it comes to creating a positive and inclusive work environment – and then they need to hold people accountable if they fall short in this regard. This approach can be seen as an extension of the "no jerk" philosophy (to use a slightly cleaned up euphemism) that was popularized by Stanford professor Robert Sutton nearly a decade and a half ago as a way of ensuring that people who create a toxic work environment aren't "rewarded" for that behavior and are instead held accountable. As Maya Angelou put it in one of her well-known quotes: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." This is why it's so important to strive for inclusion. Another step towards creating that inclusive environment is embracing the concept of equity that was briefly touched upon earlier: the idea that you sometimes have to give different people different things in order to create a truly equitable situation. A popular visual explanation of equity shows three children of different heights trying to look over a fence to get a view of a game; one is tall enough to see without having to stand on anything, but the other two aren't. In order to reach an equitable arrangement, the solution isn't to give all three of them exactly the same box or stool to stand on – different people will need different resources to achieve equity. How might this concept translate to the workplace? If your organization hired a non-sighted employee and gave them the same standard-issue company laptop as the organization's sighted employees, that wouldn't be equitable. They'd need something different than what you're providing everyone else to achieve equity, which would be the proper way forward. Likewise, having a mentoring program or networking group for certain historically underrepresented groups isn't a way of trying to give a group something "more" than everyone else – it's a way of bringing everyone up to the same level and creating a level playing field. Investing in equity – by identifying and eliminating barriers that would prevent the full participation of some groups – will naturally lead to more diversity. In this way, D, E, and I all work together and reinforce one another. Tackling implicit bias When inclusion and equity are prioritized, it becomes easier to bring in and maintain a diverse workforce. In order to successfully do this, however, organizations need to successfully steer around the pitfall of implicit bias. Everyone has some type of bias within them – that's simply part of being a living, breathing human. More often than not, however, we're not even aware of the biases we're carrying – which makes identifying any implicit bias all the more important, lest it interfere with decision making. Here's how unaddressed implicit bias can cause problems. In many organizations, "gut feelings" are used to help decide who gets hired, who gets assigned a high profile project or a key client along the way, and who gets promoted later down the road. While it'd be reassuring to say that these "gut feelings" derive from a keen ability to discern certain intangible qualities, they're often just deep-seated biases that are coloring our perception and influencing our judgment. As humans, we tend to want to help people who are like us – people who went to the same schools we F E A T U R E S

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