Facing accusations of unconscious bias in your workplace investigation?

Greg Clark, employment associate, B P Collins LLP, examines the potential repercussions and what employers can do to prevent it from happening.

Unconscious bias can be a systemic issue in the workplace which only reveals itself when sets of data covering long periods of time are reviewed. For example, a company might review its recruitment data and find that it is recruiting a disproportionately high number of people from a certain demographic. Nobody is consciously thinking, “let’s hire this demographic deliberately”, but the data proves that it’s happening.

Sometimes, however, individual employees will raise a complaint of unconscious bias. For example, they might say that the chair of a disciplinary hearing found against them because the chair was unconsciously biased against the employee.