For many companies, the past two and a half years have been a real kick in the pants, with jobs going unfilled and employees becoming more outspoken about how and for whom they want to work. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are increasingly recognized as a critical business need, both to hang onto and recruit employees and to drive innovation. Yet research by HR solutions provider Workhuman has found that about 20 to 30 percent of written communications in the workplace, even in the most positive settings, show implicit bias. Language that may be meant as neutral or even complimentary can come across as offensive or negative.
Dealing with all this is not easy. “If you want to keep your talent, you've got to create greater flexibility for that talent. You've got to create an environment that resembles and reflects their values,” says Rosanna Durruthy, Vice President of Global Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at LinkedIn, the career-focused social networking giant.
To be sure, financial rewards play a big role in employees’ job satisfaction and how long they stay. But it’s increasingly clear that feeling valued is critical. “It's how you build policies and processes that can be dynamically responsive to the needs of your workforce, that enable people to feel seen and heard and valued, to allow them to do the best work of their careers,” Durruthy says.
For Workhuman, whose platform makes employee recognition part of the everyday work experience, focusing on how you reward employees and how you talk to them is at the heart of the business. That’s why LinkedIn is a client. “One of the things that I have found great value in,” Durruthy says, “is partners like Workhuman, who provide tools that help us recognize not only our employees, but those leaders who step up every day but often haven't been seen in organizations.”
Now Workhuman has introduced a tool called Inclusion Advisor in its cloud-based Social Recognition platform. Integrated into a tool that encourages employees—whether peers or managers—to thank and reward each other for a job well done, this AI-fueled micro-coach suggests how people can use more inclusive language and mitigate implicit bias. It is based on a sampling of more than 100 million moments of recognition. And although Inclusion Advisor works within Workhuman’s Social Recognition platform, the lessons it teaches can apply to all communications as employees learn the reasoning behind its suggestions.
When users choose to check their Social Recognition messages with Inclusion Advisor, this micro coach applies AI to pick up on subtleties in their language, underlining those words or phrases that some people may perceive as biased. When you hover over the highlighted phrases, Inclusion Advisor explains the potential bias and suggests ways to rewrite the message. After editing the text, you can check it again before sending.
Take, for example, an award message that a corporate executive might write to a team member: “This past quarter has been a challenging one. Your support on the project has been a critical part of why we were able to deliver on our goals. You are a role model for the other women on the team!” Seems pretty great, right? Positive and clear. But Inclusion Advisor flags that last sentence and shows how and why it could be better by noting that calling someone a role model for people of their own gender may suggest that they impact only those people. The tool suggests changing the last phrase to “a role model for everyone” or simply “a great role model.”
Workhuman has found that more than 64 percent of users choose to make a change to their language when this kind of unconscious bias is brought to their attention.
LinkedIn rolled out a pilot of Inclusion Advisor with 1,500 employees across the globe last spring, and their response was extraordinary, Durruthy says. People appreciated the automatic feedback that the tool gave them, suggesting better terms to use and helping them to see their own unconscious bias in their language. “It makes us all better,” she adds. “Having a real-time coach is what I love about the product.”
The employees who participated sent out 5,500 recognition messages during the pilot, rewarding what the company calls “Bravo! Moments.” About 22 percent of these messages used Inclusion Advisor. Durruthy points out that a Bravo! Moment takes place every four minutes at LinkedIn. So if 20 percent of those who make an award apply the tool, and 65 percent of them edit their message in response, more than 20,000 awards each year would be made more inclusive in their language.
Such course correction takes place in what Durruthy calls an “approachable environment” that gives people an opportunity to not feel embarrassed about the way they express themselves. “All too frequently, DEI work carries a sense of shame for doing something wrong or saying something wrong, as opposed to recognizing the cultural humility of it,” she says. On the other hand, Inclusion Advisor is “gentle and really prompts the learning experience.”
Why does this matter? Because DEI is important to the bottom line. One reason is the fierce competition for employees and the need to reduce turnover. “It's very clear there is a cost to losing talent. There's a cost to the time it takes to fill the jobs. There is a cost associated with people who join the company and leave too soon, before they can even be productive and successful,” Durruthy says.
And workplace diversity also makes companies more competitive in the marketplace. “To some extent, we have to look outside of our own organizations to understand how this work of creating a broadly inclusive environment stimulates greater productivity in your teams,” she says.
Perhaps not surprisingly for an executive at LinkedIn, Durruthy sees this quest for greater inclusivity as building a greater social network in the broadest sense of the word. “Ultimately, it's about the human connections that we're forming,” she says, “not just with the people we've always known and been comfortable with, but with the networks that reflect the different world that we're in today.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Workhuman.
