Research highlights specific areas where bias is present across corporate America and the input of BIPOC talent in our agencies reinforces similar pain points: recruitment and hiring, giving feedback and promoting, and producing and distributing content. Our UNBIAS series tackled critical biases that exist in our agencies and impede our ability to be best places to work for BIPOC talent.
Session One: Unbias Your Agency
This session featured a panel of young talent sharing the bias they experience. It highlighted the bias happening in our agencies today. Carmella Glover, President, Diversity Action Alliance, moderated this important discussion.
Session Two: Unbias Your Leadership
Led by: Lori Nishiura Mackenzie, Co-founder, Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab and Lead Strategist, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Stanford Graduate School of Business
As leaders and managers, our bias not only determines our expectations of employees but also insidiously seeks confirmation of that bias in everything these team members say and do. Learning to identify bias and prevent it from creating serious errors in our decisions about people is critical to hiring extraordinary diverse talent and leading them to deliver extraordinary performance.
Session Three: Unbias Your Recruiting and Hiring
Led by: Jennifer Tardy, Chief Executive Officer, Jennifer Tardy Consulting, LLC
Tardy uncovers how and where bias hides within common policies, practices, and behaviors and how this leads to underrepresentation. She then provides guidance on the actions leaders must start and stop doing to increase diversity.
Session Four: Unbias Your Content
Led by: Parris Bowe, Managing Director at the award-winning integrated multicultural marketing and communications agency, EGAMI Group
Bowe shared a number of examples of biased content and best practices to ensure your agency engages instead of enrages. She reinforced the opportunity to not simply avoid criticism from underrepresented groups but to go one step further to communicate true belonging.
PRC partner, Talkwalker, sponsored this series and shared thoughts and guidance on the impact of socially conscious audiences like GenZers on brands, politics, and society and their willingness to cry foul when and where they see bias. You can find the discussion here.