The first and most fundamental flaw, which leads to poorly developed strategy and policy is in pretending that we, or at least most of the people like us do not have prejudices which routinely impact our work behaviour. 

In reality we all have prejudices and without our prejudices (pre-judgments about groups of people) our lives would be intolerably complicated. Cognitively, we simply cannot cope with making new judgments and predictions about everyone we meet, so we have rapid mental processes by which we categorise (stereotype) people to make life manageable. We have to recognise that simple biological fact and to deny this flies in the face of 50 years of social psychological research. 

Attempts by employers to protect themselves and their employees/customers by eradicating all signs of prejudice and discrimination among their staff without understanding the underlying cause and effect is doubly doomed to fail. The research tells us that by suppressing the stereotype for example by insisting people use the ‘right’ terminology, pretending we are a colour blind organisation and creating a culture where staff are afraid to talk about their differences we enhance the effect.

Known as the stereotype suppression or ironic rebound effect the research tells us that what people get forced not to do in the office is then even more likely occur when they walk out of the door to make a site visit or attend a meeting. And the worrying thing is that this effect is most prevalent in people who beforehand were relatively low in prejudice; we actually make it worst among the people who are most on our side to begin with.

The organisational colour blind approach has also been seen to have a rebound effect.  By pretending that we are all the same, that we don’t see people as black, old, gay, overweight or disabled, this runs counter to the evidence that our eyes are processing.  Research has shown that ‘colour-blind’ organisational culture tends to contain people with greater prejudices than those with a more multi-cultural culture. 

The employer ‘de-categorisation’ of pretending that people are all the same is destined to fail because it runs counter to the way we are hard wired to categorise people. But this is a balancing act. Some organisational practices identifying some staff as ‘different’ can inadvertently activate and confirm stereotypes, especially to those with prejudice (all of us). 

Casual categorisation such as ‘Black History Month’, specific staff associations or support arrangements for minority groups may well be strengthening the categorisation processes which lead to stereotyping, prejudice and ultimately discrimination.

The final organisational activity of concern is the ubiquitous diversity course. A recent review suggests that much of what they do in terms of trying to enact attitude change is unproven. Called the clown fallacy because in one hospital well intentioned decorators painted clowns on a nursery wall only to find rather than entertain the children, the images terrified them.  

A special place is reserved in this clown category for the confrontational techniques used by some trainers aimed at creating feelings of guilt in majority group members around the power and advantage they may have enjoyed. As Bianna Kandola notes in his recent book on eliminating bias in organisations, some trainers seem to judge the success of a course on the basis of how many people they have made to cry. 

These poorly researched, undirected interventions may have profound positive effects on a few individuals but they are more likely to have profound negative affects on the attitudes of many more majority group members. And it is suggested that minority group members also suffer feelings of guilt and anguish from being forced to witness the pain inflicted on their colleague in the name of their equality.

If organisations are inadvertently fuelling the fires of prejudice in the belief that they are doing the exact opposite, what could they do instead? The first thing is to be honest and acknowledge that we have prejudices. By doing this we are not condoning them, but we allowing them to be held up for scrutiny and possible change or intentional control. 

Secondly, we can be more intelligent and honest about the diversity interventions we use. Most diversity training imparts knowledge; some imparts skills in dealing with diversity issues and conflicts. Few interventions attempt to deal with the underlying cause and to change attitudes. This is partly because it is difficult and partly because before we can do that we have to know we have a prejudice. The result is that staff are sheep-dipped in their knowledge based diversity course which research suggests are largely ineffective and a waste of resources.

Thirdly we can scrutinise our activities to ensure we are not activating or reinforcing prejudiced categories and seek out more powerful categories for staff to share. Research shows that traditional group differences (categories) can be mitigated by the creation of super-ordinate categories for people to use. People are then categorised less as Asian, Lesbian or Young and more strongly as members of a stronger employee or professional group, or even a more geographical category such as ‘Yorkshire’ or ‘British’.  This works with our hard wired mental processes to look for simple categories to use. 

Finally, we can raise employee awareness of their prejudices, not with a large stick and retraining when they transgress, but proactively. I have been working for some time on a series of short psychometric tests able to help people understand their individual prejudices and encouraging them to change them where they can and manage them when they can’t. Raising employee awareness in this way enables change or control interventions such as coaching to be targeted at the specific prejudices and at the magnitude of that prejudice, as well as the core beliefs underpinning them. 

It requires an assumption that we all have prejudices and that there are no bad people, just bad thinking habits we can change or control but that requires awareness, effort and practice.