In 2019, Chanin Kelly-Rae, a successful African American professional, experienced a turning point in her career. After spending two decades working in the Washington State governor’s office, she accepted a role as Amazon’s Global Manager of Diversity. The company’s global influence, corporate environment, and extensive network made the opportunity highly attractive.
However, Kelly-Rae quickly discovered serious cultural issues within the organization. She found that Amazon had deep, systemic problems that placed Black employees and other underrepresented groups at a disadvantage. Even after these concerns were raised, she believed that internal experts and company leadership failed to recognize or address them effectively.
According to Kelly-Rae, Amazon was moving backward in its diversity and inclusion efforts. She felt there was little meaningful action from leadership to create a workplace where underrepresented employees felt valued and supported.
Less than a year after joining the company, Kelly-Rae resigned despite the generous salary, benefits, and prestige associated with the role. Her experience was not an isolated incident, as Amazon has faced repeated criticism for failing to foster a truly inclusive workplace for minority employees.
Building an equal opportunity workplace requires more than hiring a diverse workforce. Leaders must address systemic barriers and create an environment where every employee has equal opportunities to succeed. This means developing a resilient workplace that encourages sensitivity, adaptability, and inclusion.
Organizations should focus on strengthening their culture instead of treating diversity as a compliance exercise. Creating an inclusive workplace and overcoming unconscious bias cannot be a once-a-year training session—it must be an ongoing commitment embedded in everyday practices.
People often make assumptions based on characteristics such as race, gender, religion, age, height, appearance, or even hair color. These unconscious biases harm not only individuals but also business performance.
Bias negatively affects employee morale, productivity, and engagement, ultimately reducing customer satisfaction and financial performance. According to McKinsey, companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity achieve 35% higher financial returns than the industry median.
How, then, can organizations build a genuinely inclusive culture? More importantly, how can they move the conversation beyond diversity statistics and create meaningful, lasting change?
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Change the way you hire
Gender and racial discrimination in recruitment have been prevalent for several decades now. However, combating bias in recruitment is the first step to ensuring the workplace’s well-intentioned diversity and inclusion programs.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s “blind auditions” is probably the best-known example of an attempt to fight bias at the workplace. To reduce gender and racial discrimination in hiring, Boston Symphony’s orchestra directors held blind auditions.
Candidates were required to perform behind a screen so the selection panel could hear their performance without seeing them. The jury did not know the candidate’s identity until after the hiring decision was made.
Research found that this approach increased the likelihood of women being selected for orchestra positions by more than 50%. As a result, blind auditions have been adopted by many orchestras around the world.
Inspired by this success, many organizations are experimenting with blind hiring practices. Recruiters evaluate candidates based solely on their qualifications, skills, and experience.
To reduce similarity bias, resumes and applications are stripped of identifying details such as names, schools, and regional backgrounds. Instead, candidates complete job-related tasks or solve practical problems that reflect the skills required for the role.
A study by GapJumpers found a positive bias in hiring female candidates based on their performance at the audition. In fact, 69.2% of preferred candidates from blind auditions, conducted across organizations, were females. Companies can potentially hire a more diverse pool of candidates when they switch to recruitment methods that help them operate without bias. Ensuring that people are recruited for their skills is the first step to building a diverse and inclusive workplace.
Address Microaggressions
The small off-the-cuff comments that reflect our generic assumptions about people based on their identity is called microaggression. They’re almost impossible to notice on the surface. The often-innocuous comments that we tend to ignore can be perceived as an unintentional expression of bias or racism. However, due to their easy-to-miss nature, nobody acts or reports them. When microaggressions make underrepresented groups feel victimized, it could impact the entire organizational culture.
For instance, when you hire a person from an ethnic minority community to work with a group of predominantly white employees, it might give the impression that the person is just a “diversity hire.” This might lead to the new hire questioning their ability and skills at the workplace as they feel less included and more of an unspoken quota hire. While removing bias in the hiring process is the first step, the journey of an inclusive organization does not end there.
That’s just the beginning. Leaders need to understand if they are setting up their diverse hires for success once they arrive in the workplace. It is important to ensure that a person’s skills and experience are the focus of conversations rather than their ethnicity, race, or gender. When organizations use blind auditions for recruitment, it is possible to eliminate this doubt in the candidate and the team members. When everyone understands that their skill and experience earn them a seat at the table and not their race, gender, or color, they are more likely to be engaged at the workplace.
Let Everyone Have a Voice
Hiring a diverse workforce is only the first step. If important meetings, decisions, and opportunities are still limited to in-groups, unconscious bias can quietly affect both business performance and organizational reputation.
A well-known example comes from YouTube. Shortly after the platform launched, developers noticed that five to ten percent of uploaded videos appeared upside down. They initially assumed these videos had been uploaded incorrectly.
What the team overlooked was that many users were left-handed. Left-handed people often rotate their phones 180 degrees while recording, making the uploaded videos appear upside down even though they were recorded correctly from the user’s perspective.
Because the development team was primarily right-handed, this possibility was never considered. Their unconscious bias shaped the product’s design and user experience.
Similar biases influence workplace decisions. The halo effect can lead managers to overestimate an employee’s abilities based on one positive trait, while in-group bias may cause them to favor people who share similar backgrounds or experiences. As a result, organizations risk overlooking highly qualified talent.
Fighting unconscious bias is challenging because it rarely feels intentional or obvious. However, recognizing and addressing these biases is essential for building a truly inclusive workplace.
Without diverse perspectives, even the best-designed products—like the early YouTube app—may fail to meet the needs of all users. That’s why leaders must make unconscious biases visible and take deliberate steps to address them.
After identifying bias within its own workplace, Google introduced organization-wide unconscious bias and sensitivity training for more than 26,000 employees. These workshops encouraged employees to recognize their biases, make more inclusive decisions, and help create a stronger workplace culture.
Equal Opportunity at Workplace
First-generation professionals, women, or people from other underrepresented communities tend to hold back their thoughts. Leaders need to consciously encourage and provide them with an opportunity to weigh in. Business meetings need to be made accessible to all the resources on the team and scheduled within the working hours. This will ensure that the business is not putting the primary caregivers and others with a demanding personal life at an unfair advantage.
It is normal for bosses to identify and engage with employees like them and share an interest. Interacting with the employees is essential. It is crucial to make sure everyone feels included and heard. White men might find it easy to approach their bosses and ask for their time or engage in drop-ins to share their ideas, but this puts the others at an unfair advantage. The onus is upon the leaders to ensure they equalize access and reach out to all the team members to ensure no subconscious barriers are dividing the teams.
Change Begins at the Leadership Level
The research found that only 3% of the women make it to the C-suite, compared with 8% of the men. This under-representation of diversity in the leadership roles could be a factor that influences the organizational-wide culture. During her time at Amazon, Kelly-Rae and many of her former colleagues strived to build an inclusive and equitable company for everyone, irrespective of their race or gender. But there’s no possibility for progress unless the company’s top leadership team doesn’t do more. Company-wide goals that the S-team sets influence the entire organizational culture. Focusing on developing an inclusive outlook may have a positive impact on the experiences of black Amazonians and those in other minority and underrepresented groups.
For that matter, Amazon, or any other company, cannot transform into a company with a level playing field for all employees if the leadership teams do not have representatives and experts in the field. Business leaders need to ensure that women, people of color, and other diversity hires have significant role models to look up to in the organization. This would inspire them to perform better, succeed, and reduce the discrimination against them significantly.
Since Kelly-Rae’s resignation and the Black Lives Matter protests, Amazon has created an exclusive group focusing on increasing its diversity hires, aiming to reduce the roadblocks for its diverse workforce. The program aims to increase job satisfaction and feelings of inclusion in their workforce irrespective of race, creed, or gender.
Building a level playing field
While a top-down approach can drive organization-wide change, managers can create meaningful impact within their own teams by ensuring a level playing field and equal opportunities for everyone.
A manager’s responsibility extends beyond delivering projects. They should also help employees understand their career paths and provide the support needed to achieve their professional goals.
Offering on-the-job training, mentoring, and continuous learning opportunities helps employees develop new skills, improve morale, and increase productivity. Managers should also provide fair performance reviews, equal access to development opportunities, and thoughtfully assign employees to high-impact projects.
Organizations should encourage a culture where employees feel comfortable sharing their accomplishments. Self-advocacy helps ensure that contributions are recognized and rewarded.
However, self-promotion can be challenging for people raised in cultures that value modesty and humility. These individuals may hesitate to speak about their achievements or express their ideas confidently. This tendency is often seen among some Asian Americans, Midwesterners, women, and employees from blue-collar backgrounds.
By encouraging employees to advocate for themselves and support their accomplishments with evidence, organizations can better recognize talent and create more equitable opportunities for growth.
Ultimately, a level playing field should exist throughout the entire employee journey—from recruitment and onboarding to training, performance evaluations, and promotions.
In Conclusion
An organization-wide change will not happen overnight. The unconscious bias ingrained in our systems over generations will take time to disappear. However, consistent efforts and conscious decisions to break the barriers will lead to an unbiased, diverse, and inclusive team!
Peterson Technology Partners (PTP) has partnered with some of the biggest Fortune brands to offer excellence of service and best-in-class team building for the last 25 years.
PTP’s diverse and global team of recruiting, consulting, and project development experts specialize in a variety of IT competencies which include:
- Cybersecurity
- DevOps
- Cloud Computing
- Data Science
- AI/ML
- Salesforce Optimization
- VR/AR
Peterson Technology Partners is an equal opportunities employer. As an industry leader in IT consulting and recruitment, specializing in diversity hiring, we aim to help our clients build equitable workplaces.
