Because of the way they were raised and educated, most people have natural biases toward or against others. They may inadvertently prefer some people over others. They may not even realize they have these biases until they join the corporate world.
While biases are somewhat natural to most people, they can also be to your workplace. They can impede productivity and cause tension among coworkers. They also can put the integrity and trustworthiness of your business at risk.
When you want to minimize or eliminate biases altogether, you may decide to hold a company wide unconscious bias training session. This session can help people overcome biases they have grown up with and still harbor to this day perhaps without even realizing it.
Rather than host and lead the unconscious bias training session yourself, you may want to bring in third-party consultants who specialize in corporate workshops and education. If you were to lead the sessions, you could come across as too strict and overbearing to your employees. They may feel like they are being rebuked for something that they were not initially aware that they were doing wrong.
Alternatively, they may not take you seriously enough and think that your lessons can be easily forgotten or overlooked. They might go back to harboring biases even after they finish the training lesson. You may not make any headway with changing the atmosphere in your business.
Third-party consultants, however, can exhibit the right amount of authority and assertiveness to catch your employees’ attention. They can provide crucial lessons to your staff to teach them to discard of biases they have against others with whom they work. They can also help people reshape their perceptions of others in the workplace and avoid hard feelings or suspicions that prevented them from working together.
