This week in membership: Building an antiracist company, part two

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🤔Here’s Why

 1️⃣ Diversity can serve as a competitive advantage. 2️⃣ Design choices may help combat bias.  3️⃣ International principles of conflict resolution can help companies promote inclusivity.  4️⃣ Open hiring is one radical way to combat discrimination in the hiring process.

📝 The Details

1️⃣ Diversity can serve as a competitive advantage.

Dating and relationships are a common conversation topic for many coworkers—but particularly so at S’More, a New York City-based dating app founded last year. The company’s head of operations, Sneha Ramachandran, recalls one eye-opening exchange she had with her teammates about cultural norms surrounding the questions people ask each other on dates. One woman explained that in her home country of South Africa, it’s common to ask early on whether the other person has been tested for HIV. For Ramachandran, who’s originally from India, “if someone asked me that, I would be so offended—that was my bias.” It was a classic example of how diversity serves as a competitive advantage, allowing colleagues to anticipate and plan for possible reactions from a broad user base.

2️⃣ Design choices may help combat bias.

S’More is designed to make appearances less central to first impressions. The dating app initially blurs the photos on users’ profiles to prompt them to instead browse the other person’s interests or favorite band. As users interact with the profile, the photos gradually unblur. People still get to determine whether or not they find the potential match attractive, but the process gets slowed down.

The app is still new, and it’s yet to be seen whether it will succeed in nudging users to move past ingrained biases. But research suggests that online dating behavior is malleable which means that it’s possible for design choices to affect it. For example, one 2013 study analyzed the messages sent between OkCupid users who chose to self-identify their race. It found that people who received a message from someone outside their own race were then more likely to initiate new inter-racial conversations themselves. (Here’s even more on how UX decisions can combat racial bias.)

3️⃣ International principles of conflict resolution can help companies promote inclusivity.

In countries from Nigeria to Sri Lanka, the conflict-resolution nonprofit Search for Common Ground aims to facilitate dialogues that allow people to connect across ethnic, racial, and religious divides. Its philosophy—“Understand the differences, but act on commonalities”—can inform the approach of companies looking for better ways to manage diversity, as can stories of how its Nigeria office dealt with the cultural differences that arose between Christian and Muslim employees at lunchtime and during after-work activities.

4️⃣ Open hiring is one radical way to combat discrimination in the hiring process.

A resume is not just a piece of paper and an interview is not just a conversation. Both can be shaped by lifelong privilege, from the circumstances of a person’s upbringing to their access to education and networks. Greyston Bakery, which supplies the brownies for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, is a pioneer of “open hiring”—a recruiting approach which does away with questions about an employee’s prior education, experience, or criminal records. “There’s no interview, no questions asked. We don’t do background checks, drug tests—you show up for your first day of orientation, that is your first day on the job,” says Joseph Kenner, the president and CEO of the Greyston Foundation. The nonprofit guides other prospective employers through what open hiring might look like for their business, including the training and support employers must provide for it to be successful.

📚Read the field guide

The principles of conflict resolution can help build antiracist workplaces
How a diverse team came up with a dating app designed to combat bias
What hiring looks like without resumes, cover letters, or interviews

Pieces from last week: 

What an antiracist workplace looks like
Why diversity initiatives fail
Lessons on building an inclusive culture from HBO’s “Watchmen” writers room
The case for using literature to kickstart conversations about race at work
How to have more productive conversations about race in the workforce 
Multinational companies can’t be woke in the US and silent in China anymore
Is your business model antiracist?
Some common diversity initiatives actually decrease diversity, data show
What the corporate world can learn from South Africa’s post-apartheid struggles

📣 Sound off

Has your company adopted any practices to make it more equitable in light of the Black Lives Matter protests?