With the tightening labor pool, companies are taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to recruiting and retaining good employees. But, ignorance or carelessness might be undermining your efforts with women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and others.
Subtle bias and “microaggressions”–brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities often directed at members of marginalized groups–can create problems in the workplace, says diversity consultant Gina C. Torino, PhD, associate professor of psychology at Empire State College in Staten Island, New York, and author of Microaggression Theory: Influence and Implications. This type of bias may be unintentional, but it’s no less damaging.
Understanding the Scope
The workplace is not immune to the biases that exist in society, so it’s important to consider the issue in a larger context, says Faye Wattleton, the first woman and first African-American president of Planned Parenthood who now co-leads the corporate governance practice at Buffkin/Baker, a New York City-based executive search firm. Because people come to the workplace with the experience of dealing with these behaviors in everyday life, facing them in the workplace, too, where their livelihoods may be affected, is part of bias’s cumulative negative impact. You can’t simply isolate this as a workplace issue, she says. And because the perpetrator of the bias is often unaware that they’re acting in such a way, the person on the receiving end is left with few ways to address it without seeming like they’re overreacting.
“The psychologists say that these subtleties are more damaging because you can’t encounter them directly. You can’t confront them directly so that there’s a way of resolving the feeling that you have that may be internalized and may affect the way you function as a human being or as you function in the workplace,” she says.
The Consequences of Bias
But just because microaggressions can be vague doesn’t mean that they don’t have real costs, says former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission attorney Stephen M. Paskoff, CEO and president of Atlanta-based ELI, Inc., a training company that addresses bad behavior in the workplace. When people feel excluded, they’re less likely to speak up. Microaggressions can affect everything from the ability to listen to communication about safety issues or other problems. When some employees avoid others, either because of bias or not wanting to deal with biased behavior, productivity takes a hit, too.
“One of the questions I’ll ask groups is, ‘Who does their best work when they’re ignored, embarrassed, not listened to, made fun of, or one way or another treated differently in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable in their team or in their group?’ Those are all variations of what you might call microaggressions or could be,” Paskoff says. “We’ve groomed people to focus on the blatant and the illegal, not recognizing that this other stuff can be just as malignant in a sense.”
The immediate response to a microaggression takes up cognitive and emotional energy that could be used in the person’s work. “Dealing with that microaggression can really take up a person’s resources, because that person has to stop and think, saying, ‘Is this a slight? Did that person actually sit far away from me in the meeting because I’m black or because they just wanted to sit by that person?’ Or, ‘Did they not include me in going out to the bar after work because I’m a woman or because they already knew each other beforehand?’” Torino says. Ultimately, the person experiencing biased behavior toward them may feel excluded, unwelcome, or worse.
And that’s a problem. A 2016 survey by Ultimate Software found that 6 in 10 employees would quit a job immediately if they felt emotionally unsafe, so off-handed comments and biased behavior could affect also your turnover.
Overcoming Subtle Bias
At London-based management consulting firm EY, to help foster a sense of belonging, “we ask our leaders to reflect on with each other: Is a decision somebody’s making a preference, a tradition, or a requirement [called PTR]?And so that it can help surface the thoughts and biases that might be underlying certain processes,” says Karyn Twaronite, global diversity and inclusiveness officer. “It’s also a way to call a colleague out without calling them out.”
Here’s how it works: If she sees a colleague considering hiring someone exactly like them, she can say, “Did you pick this person because it’s your personal preference, or because of likeness and sameness, which is the ease of doing business, which is a very real thing, or is it because the person that traditionally has been in this role always looked and acted this way, and had the same skill set, or are you selecting them because they meet the requirements for the future?” Twaronite says the exercise gets people to think beyond their preferences and consider a broader picture.
Mentoring can be another important step toward fostering understanding and decreasing bias, says Kyle Emich, PhD, an assistant professor of management at the University of Delaware who has coauthored research on how women are perceived in the workplace. But, to be most effective, the mentor and protégé should be different. “What you find a lot of time is that if you look at the entrance, not in every field, but a lot of the time, minorities and women make up about the same percentage as white men at an entry level,” he says. “The problem is getting people to those leadership positions. They trickle out throughout the way.”
The experts agree that one of the most powerful actions individuals and companies can take to reduce subtle forms of bias and microaggressions is to foster awareness of the behavior. When you create an environment where people can learn about bad behavior they don’t even realize they’re exhibiting, you foster communication instead of defensiveness and resentment.
“I think it’s much easier to grapple with this difficult phenomenon when the corporation attacks it from a corporate perspective as we do sexual harassment–a consciousness-building about what can be said and what is said that often is perceived as harassment [when] people may not have encountered that kind of knowledge or that kind of perception,” Wattleton says. And when awareness is raised in the workplace, it may just have a positive benefit in other areas of society, too.
When Angelique Brunner moved to the nation’s capital two decades ago, she was shocked to find neighborhoods with no stores, no services, and burned-out buildings.
“I started asking around about what is going on here, people told me it was the riots,” she tells Fast Company. “I said, ‘Oh, what riots?’ They said, ‘The Martin Luther King riots.’ I said, ‘The riots were in 1968. So, this is why D.C. doesn’t have grocery stores, and it’s giving away houses for a dollar?’”
The local city government was, in fact, selling off long-abandoned homes for a buck to developers who had the money to rebuild. Some of Washington’s once vibrant black neighborhoods never quite recovered from the unrest in the days following the assassination of the civil rights leader and the subsequent departure of the middle class.
Brunner was stunned and, armed with her degrees in public policy from Brown and Princeton, started learning the ropes in venture capital and then real estate development—determined to make a difference.
And she is making a difference, bringing jobs, homes, and new business to once blighted streets.
As president of EB5 Capital, which she founded a decade ago, Brunner is now one of the driving forces in the revitalization of D.C., leveraging a controversial program that puts rich foreign investors on a path to citizenship in return for their investment dollars.
Founding her own company
The road to founding he own firm was paved during those first years, initially at a VC firm. “I was the only African American female from New York to Atlanta that was in venture capital.” She later moved to Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association), where she became an expert in community investing.
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“Laypeople might assume that urban areas struggle to get development dollars because no one wants to build there. I learned through the late 1990s and early 2000s that there has always been interest, just not the financing needed to actually execute,” she says.
It was during this time that she became familiar with the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program and saw an opportunity to bring development dollars to neighborhoods that others did not want to touch. So with the gap in money needed persisting to complete urban projects, and the scars from the riots still showing, she founded EB5 Capital.
“I felt motivated to address this, which is why my second project ever was a grocery store on 7th Street in Northwest D.C. that also had an affordable senior housing component,” she says.
Since then, Brunner has helped connect foreign investors with several major D.C. gems, including City Market at O Street, bringing new residential and commercial life to a once dilapidated but beloved historic city site. Brunner is also behind D.C.’s Columbia Place development, bringing two new Marriott hotels to the downtown convention center area.
Jobs creator
Brunner sees her mission as twofold: Rebuilding the capital’s neighborhoods and bringing new jobs to people who desperately need them. And she is an unabashed fan of the EB-5 program, which is up for renewal—and reform—in U.S. Congress. Job creation is at the core of the program, which was founded in 1990 and is administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). It offers foreign investors green cards in return for job-creating investments in domestic development projects.
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“People are willing to invest in the United States for an expedited visa process. The only hitch is that you have to create jobs with the money they invest,” she says—basically 10 for every $500,000.
“We are focused on job creation, but livable cities require jobs and affordable housing,” Brunner explains. Gentrification, like the luxury apartments that now make up the O Street Market, is necessary, but there are ways to mitigate the displacement that sometimes follows.
“First, as a financier of multifamily housing developments, we are able to advocate for higher than required moderate- and low-income housing set-asides,” she says. “We work with a particularly sensitive developers committed to the mixed-income fabric of our neighborhoods.”
EB5 Capital’s latest project in Washington, D.C., has 14% of its rental units set aside as affordable housing–the District of Columbia’s inclusionary zoning program only requires between 8% and 10%.
The company also focuses on bringing living-wage employment opportunities to areas that need them. “Be it working in the construction trades or an entry-level position at one of our hotel projects, I believe jobs that present meaningful advancement opportunities, located in the areas that are being developed, are very important to strengthening the fabric of a mixed-income community,” Brunner adds.
“You can actually have financial gains in a neighborhood that don’t necessarily change the racial fabric of a neighborhood initially. To me, the only way to address the addition of economic opportunity is to consciously create mixed-income neighborhoods.”
“We’re not a manufacturing city. We’re not a place where we can easily absorb a non-educated labor population. We struggle with that, and so we have to bring retail, and we have to bring the jobs into those neighborhoods,” she says.
Preserving EB-5
EB5 Capital is now worth $500 million and has 35 employees with 12 nationalities who speak 16 different languages, and have visited more than 90 countries looking for investors. The company’s portfolio also expands to cities like L.A., New York, and Nashville.
Brunner and her firm have an unblemished history with the USCIS, but the EB-5 program in recent years has come under increased scrutiny. “I think our company has used the program effectively and in a way that creates a cascade of benefits for their respective cities, including new jobs, new housing, and new business opportunities,” she says.
Still, critics have called the sale of citizenship to high bidders unseemly. The AP reported that in return for nearly $8 billion in investment, the USCIS has approved 40,000 visas for Chinese nationals and their families. A company owned by Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, came under SEC scrutiny earlier this year for its dependency on EB-5.
And just this week, more than a dozen Chinese investors in Royal Palm Beach in South Florida sued, claiming they were defrauded by American developers.
Brunner, who has testified before Congress on reforming the program, says she supports efforts to tighten accountability.
“The EB-5 industry has been advocating for new legislation for the program, and I am in full support of strong integrity measures to ensure it’s being used as intended and in a lawful manner,” she says.
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