Inclusion workshops

Coffee shops, police and universities are are doing it. Could inclusion workshops also benefit your workplace?

Sephora has now joined Starbucks in an unenviable group: high-profile companies that have racially profiled their own customers. So what are companies to do after they get caught calling security or police on black customers without cause? One possibility is closing their shops for inclusion workshops.

Inclusion workshops involve rooting out implicit bias, or the mental shortcuts and hidden judgements ingrained in residents of an unequal society. This is especially pressing for certain professions. Anti-bias training has been provided to police officers in Jacksonville, Florida following incidents of racially divergent policing, including disproportionate ticketing of black pedestrians and shootings of black residents. Such training needs to be ongoing rather than one-off workshops to be as effective as possible.

And it’s not just law enforcement who can benefit. From baristas to doctors, coders to referees, we’re all subject to unconscious prejudices. Sure, it’s easy to scoff at the seemingly touchy-feely, super-PC nature of inclusion workshops, or to dismiss them as a tiny measure that doesn’t address systemic bias and inequality. But attempting to suppress or deny differences only makes stereotypes worse. Diversity training, if thoughtfully implemented, can help to clarify and improve attitudes that affect work life, for instance male professors’ views of women in STEM.

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Image credit: Piero Zagami and Michela Nicchiotti.