Illicit bias awareness, often referred to as implicit bias awareness, is about eliminating discriminatory behavior. While commonly associated with hiring new employees, biases extend into everyday conversations that impact the performance of individuals and teams.
In this training you will:
- Receive 2-4 hours of training (minimum 2 hours)
- Conduct hand-written exercises
- Hear a training session tailored and designed for your company, team, or organization
- All of Vantage Point Consulting’s illicit bias trainings are limited to 30 attendees or less.
- Longer sessions include videos.
- Bias series trainings are data-driven and evidence-based.
Attendees will participate in activities that help to identify biases and help bring awareness of these biases.
At the end of the course, attendees will complete an evaluation of what was learned and how to proceed in the future.
Implicit Bias Training
Start here to request more about illicit / implicit bias training for your team.
What does implicit bias training consist of?
Evidence and studies suggests people who are more aware of a problem are more likely to adjust their behavior to remedy that problem. Illicit bias training helps people identify stereotypes, subtle biases, and learned or acquired behaviors through two steps:
- A pre-course assessment. This implicit association test pushes people to think about ways they perceive of others through unintentional or automatic response. This could be by race, gender, geography, ethnicity, age, religion, creed, sexual orientation, hair color, weight, or appearance.
- A training task. This includes videos in a longer class, but both short and long sessions push individual participants to analyze and write down their attitudes, thoughts, behavior, and characteristics of others.
What is the meaning of implicit bias?
People hold biases toward others and organizations that shape decision making and social behavior.
For healthcare providers, police departments, or other public-serving organizations, these biases can be harmful or lethal. They endanger careers and the public.
For private organizations, they can mean lost revenue or profits, decreased team performance, and worse. Given time, these biases can become systemic and structural. A common example being the prevention of women from rising to executive leadership positions.
Bias training can help managers and workplace leaders understand the need for further cultural change, inclusion, understanding, and diversity.
Participants in this course will learn about biases that affect small teams, a large department, or a series of concepts. Trainings are designed to match the needs of your staff.
How do you counter implicit bias?
Mitigating implicit bias is possible through sustained effort.
But long-term efforts to root out more sinister forms of racism, discrimination, and exclusionary behavior requires more discretion.
This training course can help decision-makers inside healthcare providers, schools and universities, private and nonprofit organizations, and other public institutions develop plans for new processes. It can also be paired with existing internal or external diversity training.
For instance, health care providers may find bias interventions in hiring practices and switch to a blind decision making process.
Supervisors and managers making decisions based on people’s performance may choose to institute objective criteria. If they are rigorously applied through blind or peer review processes, teams can change the ways they promote and manage staff.
What are the 5 unconscious biases?
Throughout this implicit bias training, we review five common, unconscious biases.
- Affinity biases, like having positive or negative associations with a person’s hometown, school, or familial connection. Participants will explore how affinities can change attitudes in the workplace and change perceptions.
- Halo biases, like forming an opinion based on someone’s past achievement, award, or other glowing performance. This may be well deserved, but can also link how we think of someone despite other evidence to the contrary.
- Horn biases, which changes the perception a person has of someone based on outward appearance. We’ll explore how body appearance and outward dress can link to diversity, ethnicity, religion, gender, and stereotypes.
- Attribution biases, which form from concepts relating to people’s past successes and failures. We’ll discuss how your hiring, promotion, and evaluation practice or HR Department might be forming perspectives of others based on luck or chance or personality.
- Confirmation bias, perhaps the most common and deeply ingrained, is how we perceive individuals as part of broader community members based on race, gender, or other stereotypes.
