Redundancies and DEI: Removing performance management bias

Redundancies are tough and can leave both individuals and companies struggling. However, care should be taken not to impact other areas of the business, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

There are a variety of benefits that can come from healthy DEI, such as:

• Creativity: A diverse team of employees can bring new ideas to your company.
• Culture: Increasing workplace diversity can help improve the overall culture by making your company a more desirable place to work.
• Company reputation: Hiring and retaining a diverse team of employees can increase the quality of a company’s reputation by showing that the company is inclusive and welcoming.
• Overcoming challenges: A diverse team is better able to solve problems with different perspectives.

When redundancy decisions are rushed and the proper care isn’t taken, the rollover effects can be detrimental. Considering the impact decisions can have should be on every employer’s list when letting people go.

“Making staff redundant is not an easy task. But when mandates come from above, HR leaders and senior executives need to work together to understand what a restructure looks like and who will be impacted,” commented senior principal, HR advisory at Gartner, Jasleen Kaur.

“There are usually three standard approaches organisations take to rationalise choices and to take the sting out of who is selected.”

“The first is performance, which aims to identify those in the business whose contributions are the least valued and whose loss will therefore be seen as less regrettable. The second is the classic, ‘last in, first out’ approach, while the third is to cut from the bottom – targeting entry-level and frontline roles.”

She continued: “The issue with any of these approaches is that underrepresented groups tend to be disproportionately impacted. This can be as a result of indiscriminately targeting job types or tenure lengths, or more seriously, through biased performance management processes.”

A variety of biases can arise in performance management processes. Culture Amp listed the top 10 as:

1. Recency bias: The tendency to focus on the most recent period instead of the total time.
2. Primary bias: The tendency to emphasise information learnt early on over information encountered later.
3. Halo/horns effect bias: The tendency to allow one good or bad trait to overshadow others (i.e., letting an employee’s congenial sense of humour override their poor communication skills).
4. Centrality/central tendency bias: The tendency to rate most items in the middle of a rating scale.
5. Leniency bias: Occurs when managers give favourable ratings even though they have employees with notable room for improvement.
6. Similar-to-me bias: The inclination to give a higher rating to people with similar interests, skills, and backgrounds as the person doing the rating.
7. Idiosyncratic rater bias: Occurs when managers evaluate skills they’re not good at highly. Conversely, they rate others lower for skills they’re great at. In other words, managers weigh their performance evaluations toward their personal eccentricities.
8. Confirmation bias: The tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms a person’s pre-existing beliefs. Confirmation bias is a type of bias that is pretty similar to primacy bias but can tend to go much deeper.
9. Gender bias: When giving feedback, individuals tend to focus more on the personality and attitudes of women and feminine-presenting individuals. Contrarily, they focus more on the behaviours and accomplishments of men and masculine-presenting individuals.
10. Law of small numbers bias: The incorrect belief that a small sample closely shares the properties of the underlying population.

Eliminating bias from performance can help to make more informed and fair redundancy decisions. Consider this before jumping headfirst into any major issue.