Page 111 - Harvard Business Review (November-December, 2017)

Their HR teams might then add a layer of career tracking for numbers where there are enough of us for the n to be sig-
women of color, for example, or create training programs nificant don’t reflect the heterogeneity in our commu-
for managing diverse teams. nity. Someone who is light-skinned and grew up in Latin
Another approach is to extrapolate lessons from other America in an upper-middle-class family probably is very
companies’ analyses. We might look, for instance, at happy and comfortable indeed. Someone who is darker-
Red Ventures, a Charlotte-based digital media company. Red skinned and grew up working-class in America is proba-
Ventures is diverse by several measures. (It has a Latino bly not feeling that same sense of belonging. I’m going to
CEO, and about 40% of its employees are people of color.) spend time and effort trying to build solutions for the ones
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems to solve. When I know are at a disadvantage, whether the data tells me
I met with its top executives, they told me they had recently that there’s a problem with all Latinos or not.”
done an analysis of performance reviews at the firm and This is a recurring theme. I spoke with 10 diversity and
found that internalized stereotypes were having a negative HR professionals at companies with head counts ranging
effect on black and Latino employees’ self-assessments. On from 60 to 300,000, all of whom are working on programs
average, members of those two groups rated their perfor- or interventions for the people who don’t register as “big”
mance 30% lower than their managers did (whereas white in big data. They rely at least somewhat on their own in-
male employees scored their performance 10% higher than tuition when exploring the impact of marginalization. This
their managers did). The study also uncovered a correlation may seem counter to the mission of people analytics, which
between racial isolation and negative self-perception. For is to remove personal perspective and gut feelings from the
example, people of color who worked in engineering gener- talent equation entirely. But to discover the effects of bias
ally rated themselves lower than those who worked in sales, in our organizations—and to identify complicating factors
where there were more blacks and Latinos. These patterns within groups, such as class and colorism among Latinos
were consistent at all levels, from junior to senior staff. and others—we need to collect and analyze qualitative
In response, the HR team at Red Ventures trained em- data, too. Intuition can help us find it. The diversity and
ployees in how to do self-assessments, and that has started HR folks described using their “spidey sense” or knowing
to close the gap for blacks and Latinos (who more recently there is “something in the water”—essentially, understand-
rated themselves 22% lower than their managers did). ing that bias is probably a factor, even though people ana-
Hallie Cornetta, the company’s VP of human capital, ex- lytics doesn’t always prove causes and predict outcomes.
plained that the training “focused on the importance of Through conversations with employees—and sometimes
completing quantitative and qualitative self-assessments through focus groups, if the resources are there and partic-
honestly, in a way that shows how employees personally ipants feel it’s safe to be honest—they reality-check what
view their performance across our five key dimensions, their instincts tell them, often drawing on their own expe-
rather than how they assume their manager or peers view riences with bias. One colleague said, “The combination of
their performance.” She added: “We then shared tangible qualitative and quantitative data is ideal, but at the end
examples of what ‘exceptional’ versus ‘solid’ versus ‘needs of the day there is nothing that data will tell us that we don’t
improvement’ looks like in these dimensions to remove already know as black people. I know what my experience
some of the subjectivity and help minority—and all— was as an African-American man who worked for 16 years
employees assess with greater direction and confidence.” in roles that weren’t related to improving diversity. It’s as
much heart as head in this work.”
GETTING PERSONAL
Once we’ve gone broader by supplementing the n, we can A CALL TO ACTION

go deeper by examining individual cases. This is critical. The proposition at the heart of people analytics is sound—
Algorithms and statistics do not capture what it feels like if you want to hire and manage fairly, gut-based decisions
to be the only black or Hispanic team member or the effect are not enough. However, we have to create a new ap-
that marginalization has on individual employees and the proach, one that also works for small data sets—for the
group as a whole. We must talk openly with people, one- marginalized and the underrepresented.
on-one, to learn about their experiences with bias, and Here are my recommendations:
share our own stories to build trust and make the topic safe First, analysts must challenge the traditional minimum
for discussion. What we discover through those conver- confident n, pushing themselves to look beyond the limited
sations is every bit as important as what shows up in the hard data. They don’t have to prove that the difference in
aggregated data. performance ratings between blacks and whites is “statisti-
An industry colleague, who served as a lead on diver- cally significant” to help managers understand the impact
sity at a tech company, broke it down for me like this: of bias in performance reviews. We already know from the
“When we do our employee surveys, the Latinos always breadth and depth of social science research about bias that
say they are happy. But I’m Latino, and I know that we it is pervasive in the workplace and influences ratings, so
are often hesitant to rock the boat. Saying the truth is too we can combine those insights with what we hear and see
risky, so we’ll say what you want to hear—even if you sit us on the ground and simply start operating as if bias exists
down in a focus group. I also know that those aggregated in our companies. We may have to place a higher value on

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2017 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW 145