Month: November 2021

In high school, I got my first job working at my local big chain supermarket. When I first began working there, I put in maximum effort, I wanted to do my job and I wanted to do it well. This is not the attitude any other employees there had, and my enthuasiasm for working was short lived. As time went on and I got my paychecks, I began to question why I was putting in so much effort for a company that clearly didn’t appreciate my effort. The company that I was working for were all scheduled for just under full-time work, working an hour less than full-time each week. This was an effort to work employees as much as possible without being required to provide benefits to their employees. On top of this, the hourly pay was 20 cents above minimum wage. The closest thing that the organization had to benefits was a 20% discount in the home and garden sections for employees.

Turnover was obviously incredibly low. The organization had zero incentive programs, however they had biannual performance evalutions performed by somebody whom you had never met, meaning they had never seen me work. In the end they gave out pretty much all average performance numbers and getting a raise from high performance was unheard of. During my two years working there, the only time that my pay went up was with a 25 cent increase in minimum wage. Naturally our pay raise was only 25 cents.

I observed a lot of actively disengaged employees and many not engaged employees. It seem like every employee there was on autopilot counting down the hours until they could make it home. Virtually none of these employees had any sort of company loyalty. After working there for two years, I only knew 2 employees in my sections of 50 that had been there since I started. Working there definitely taught me that when good employees are underappreciated they are sure to become average employees, and average employees become bad employees.

After participating in an implicit bias test at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/, I am relatively ashamed of my results. The test that I ended up taking was the Weight IAT. I tested and was placed in the “moderate automatic preference for thin people compared to fat people” along with 28% of other participants. Althought I wasn’t in the worst offending category, my results are news to me. Going into this test, I had assumed I would have an implicit bias to prefering skinny people to fat people but I didn’t know the bias was this present. Going forward, I need to be aware of my biases and how to mitigate them to give every person an equal shot.

In the article How to Take the Bias out of Interviews, comparative evaluations are listed as a way to calibrate across stereotypes and look at information rather than physical aspects of people. In an personal effort to eradicate and mitigate implicit bias I looked for other source that gave tips on how to remove bias from individual to individual, not just in the workplace. The article (2) suggests that increasing your exposure with different experiences with different groups will replace past experiences that you’ve had with other individuals with their characteristics. Those individuals that have limited exposure to individuals with different backgrounds and characteristics have only those experiences to draw upon. The article also states that taking time to pause and reflect as well as adjusting your perspective will help to reduce these biases.

In the future I plan to take more bias tests and actively work to find out what my biases are, how strong they are and work to consciously change my stereotypes.

Rewferences:

[1] Bohnet, I. (2016, July 18). How to take the bias out of interviews. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved November 19, 2021, from https://hbr.org/2016/04/how-to-take-the-bias-out-of-interviews.

[2] Cherry, K. (2020, September 18). Is it possible to overcome implicit bias? Verywell Mind. Retrieved November 19, 2021, from https://www.verywellmind.com/implicit-bias-overview-4178401.