Over 8,000 starbucks to close for several hours for ‘racial bias’ training
STARBUCKS, battling an uproar over two black men who were arrested while waiting at one of the coffee chain’s stores last week, said on Tuesday it would close more than 8,000 of its company- owned stores in the United States for several hours on May 29 to provide “racial bias” training for nearly 175,000 employees. While not the first time the coffee giant has decided to close all of its company- owned stores, the move underscores how important the company sees the addition of a new type of training programme that has exploded in popularity in recent years.
Starbucks’ announcement came one day after executives from the company said they would be adding “implicit bias” training, a buzzword in corporate diversity circles in recent years that teaches employees to be aware of their ingrained biases and as well as strategies for blunting their effects. Yet while some diversity experts applauded the decision – especially to make the bold move of closing its stores to do the training – others expressed surprise that Starbucks wasn’t already offering such a programme to store managers.
“I think this is the most common diversity and inclusion training that’s used nowadays,” said Michelle Duguid, a professor at Cornell University’s SC Johnson School of Business who has studied diversity issues.
Starbucks spokeswoman Jaime Riley said in an emailed statement that the company had offered unconscious bias training to corporate employees, though not to workers in the store, but could not offer any further detail about the training format. It has the potential, at least, to advance how the training is done: The company said it would be guided by several heavyweight names on racial bias issues, including former US Attorney General Eric Holder; NAACP Legal Defence and Education Fund president Sherrilyn Ifill; Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson and Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. They will also help measure its effectiveness, a critical issue that training experts said is often lacking in many diversity training programmes.
Though academic researchers have been studying the topic for much longer, initial interest in corporate training versions of implicit biases began about 10 years ago and began to spike around 2013, said Howard Ross, founding partner of Cook Ross, a diversity and inclusion training firm that says it has worked with about 20 per cent of Fortune 100 companies. But “when it really took off was after Ferguson,” said Ross, speaking of the protests that sprung up in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 after the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown. ( His firm has done work with Starbucks in the past, Ross said.)
After tech companies like Google and Facebook began sharing their own implicit bias training programmes openly in 2015, many other companies followed.
“It became de rigueur,” Ross said. “Everyone says if they’re doing it, we should too. I have no doubt that contributed to it being mainstream.” Ross said that historically, companies have been more likely to offer such bias training to corporate employees than retail workers, but that some employers do offer it even to the front lines.
Diversity experts said one reason hidden bias training has caught on is that unlike older programmes, it doesn’t point fingers, an attribute that’s appealing in the corporate workplace.
“Traditionally, diversity training was largely in the realm of ‘let’s find the bad people and fix them,’ “said Michael Amilcar, a managing partner at Ross’s firm. When it moved away from that, she said, “it became more readily received” inside organisations.
Unconscious bias training, meanwhile, starts by helping workers understand that many biases are ingrained, whether by giving them a test or generally helping them understand the science behind their inherent nature. That’s followed by a discussion around how that plays out in the workplace and – hopefully – some strategies for tackling those ingrained biases at work.
The format of implicit bias training varies greatly, said Calvin Lai, an assistant professor at the Washington University in St Louis who is on the executive committee of Project Implicit, a non-profit collaboration between researchers who study the issue. While some may involve training from live instructors with tangible ideas for taking action, others are “just these online computer modules that H.R. sends you, or potentially a series of PowerPoint slides.”
He says that while there have been a couple of experimental or “quasi- experimental” studies showing a link between unconscious bias training and positive change, there is also research showing it can have unintended consequences. Duguid’s research found that people who were told a stereotype was common were actually more likely to express those biases. “The unintended consequence is creating a social norm where people feel less constricted – it has this ironic effect,” Duguid said. “The message we found was more effective was (to say) most people or the vast majority of people try to put cheques on their stereotypes.” — WPBloomberg