Speaker 1
Hello listeners. I’m excited to have a guest with us this week, Katryn Wright, who was a behavioral science lead in charge of social impact and organization more than now and I’m excited for you to meet Catherine. Has she spent 10 years working in responsible business? Human rights before retraining as a behavioral scientist and she has a masters degree in behavioral change, she’s across the. Owned in the UK and currently leads the Diversity, Inclusion, ethics and leadership portfolio at more than now. Katryn, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2
Hi, Julie. Great to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 1
Well, tell us about, you know what a big, ominous subject behavioral science tell our listeners how that applies to an ever changing field like diversity, equity and inclusion.
Speaker 2
Gosh, OK. Just a small question to get stuff.
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So
Speaker 2
I mean, we think about behavioral science more than now in two ways. The first is sort of how we understand why people behave the way that they do and why that often means that people don’t behave in ways that we might want them to behave in organizations, right? So how do we understand what barriers might be getting in the way? What obstacles people might be facing, and and what gets in the? Way of people’s often. Own desired behaviours, right? So New Year’s resolutions is always a great place to start with these great intentions. To change our behaviour, but why do we often find that hard to by January the 13th, so have followed through on those on those behaviours. So. That’s the first. Bit sort of understanding why and then the second part is understanding how do you go about and change behaviour and there there’s an incredible body of of literature and evidence around. How we can go about doing that that’s rooted in theory, rooted in evidence and rooted in practice. Within the DIY. World within the the workplace and organizational world. What we do is sort of take that theory, that evidence, that practice, that’s often sitting within academic communities and research communities, and apply that in real world setting in real organizations. So we work with lots of different large organizations to put this into practice. And that means being really specific about, OK, if we have diversity, equity and inclusion objectives, what are the behaviours that people need to be doing be performing in order to get us there? So what is? What does it mean to sort of run an inclusive hiring process? What does it mean to have equitable performance review processes? What does it mean to for people to feel belonging at work, and what does that mean that they would do differently? So it’s really about figuring that out and then tweaking as much as possible to optimize that.
Speaker 1
Yeah, we’ll send. We’ll send Maria. Often. You know, we’re kind of in the midst of transition on what we call this work, at least here in the US, and I often think about diversity is the representation piece kind of the lagging indicator inclusion? Is the behavior to your point, if we have the behaviors, we have a conducive environment and that’s where belonging comes in, that’s not, you know, byproduct of that. Hopefully and equity right, the equitable. Outcomes as well, but systems need to be designed for equity. So I’m curious, Katryn right now like knowing the science that you know on those behavior tweaks. What are some of the? What does the science tell us about what helps facilitate that inclusive environment from a behavior perspective?
Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, gosh, great, great question, right. And again, a really big one. I’d say again, we think about this similarly in two ways as well. So the first is around when it comes to what, what those different aspects of DIB that you mentioned in organizations. I mean, we can think of it in two ways. The first is around processes. So what are? Some of the day-to-day. Processes, experiences, moments that people, whether managers or employees, are going through where we have this opportunity to optimise that for diversity, for equity, for inclusion, for belonging, whatever aspect of of that it might be. So that might mean, you know, really focusing in. On hiring processes and really using data to understand. OK, we don’t have a challenge with diversity with representation and who’s applying for the organization, but we actually do seem to have issues when it comes to interview stage or CV screening. And so we have opportunities there to really debias from a behaviour change perspective, not from a sort of and take. Buy us out of your mind and change your attitude and hope that that, that, that things get better around. Here, right. But but. From a behavior change perspective, how do I get people to move? The representation needles through their hiring process more specifically, and we can do that in hiring. We can do that in performance. We can do that in team meetings. We can do that in one to ones we can do that in any of those moments and and then the other piece would be thinking about culture, right. So I described this the other day. And sort of culture often gives me the sort of heebie jeebies because it seems so unbelievable. It seems so woolly and fluffy and is my culture different to your culture and my experience of the culture at this organisation different to yours? It can feel very vague. It’s.
Speaker
That when we.
Speaker 2
Think about it. Culture is the result of the behaviours that people around US display all the time. So what is it that people need to practically be doing differently in project kick offs in work allocation meetings in whatever those sort of cultural moments might be, those discussions around the water. Rulers that people can do differently. So that’s the sort. The twin lens that we would apply to getting really practical from an evidence based perspective. There are lots of sort of disparate pieces of evidence as to how to do that really well. But I think generally if you focus on really specific processes where you’ve got a great chance to intervene and to try to optimize and change those outcomes. And then those sort of cultural moments. Then we know that we’ve got the best chance of having. The most impact?
Speaker 1
Yeah. And I know that for a number of your clients, you really dig into the data and make specific recommendations. I’m curious, Katryn, if you have a case study or a use case you could share with us and how the data tells the story?
Speaker 2
Yeah, definitely. So one of the sort of most, I guess, recent and most prominent examples of where we’ve had success around that has been with global telecoms and engineering company based in Europe. And their challenge was that they. They had this sort of issue in the hiring process, so the organization was largely 75% dominated by men. The women that were in the organisation tended to be in those sort of stereotypically female roles and parts of the business. And so the question was, can we move more women through the hiring life cycle through the hiring pipeline. So here we ran an experiment over probably about six months our question you. Know originally was. What can we do to to try to improve this? What we really honed in on was, you know, we knew as in response to your last question, that unconscious bias training was unlikely to work. We knew that the the evidence that we researched there, you could sort of train by a side of people’s minds was was unlikely to work. But but what if we gave people a diversity reminder? What if we gave hiring managers a diversity reminder right before they were about to go through CV, sift through CV’s and decide who to bring in to interview? So that was what we began to do. We rolled it out experimentally. And and we tested a few different things against each other. The first thing that we wanted to test was against the sort of business as usual process. So we had. A group of hiring managers that just. Went through the. Regular hiring process that becomes our control group that we then are comparing everything else against. We then had a diversity focused message where we were really saying as you decide as you’re deciding who to bring into interview, we want you to think about how if you hire people with similar characteristics, similar experiences as you and the rest of your team, your group thinking and decision making are going to be weaker. As a result. So really trying to bring someone into the team who’s got a new background, a new experience perspective that’s currently under represented. In your team. And you know, this was back in 2021-2022 that we were setting up this experiment. But the idea of a sort of diversity backlash wasn’t necessarily new at the time, right? That’s not just. Something that we’ve experienced over the last however many months or years. So what we wanted to test was particularly in an organisation as. Majority Group dominated as this company was. Would we see a backlash to that diversity focused message? And so would we be better off testing a similar message that didn’t speak about diversity at all, but had a very similar message that was saying, think about how to build the most effective team possible, think about what’s going to make you a higher performing team, where are you strong and ready? Where do you need to develop what’s missing? That might make you a more effective high performing team and. And and and we genuinely didn’t know which one of those, you know, we would call them treatments or interventions was going to perform better, but we rolled it out over about a six month period. We got to about 3300 hiring managers who hired for over 10,000 roles over this six month period. It was, it was a global experiment. We were in a / / 100. Countries and yeah, I guess sort of the drum roll the the findings were that, that that both of the videos, both the diversity video and the effectiveness video were better than doing nothing. Right were better than just letting people.
Speaker 1
Interesting. Which one did better of the two, or what was better actually?
Speaker 2
Which one did the well? Exactly. So. So the better video was the diversity focused video. So the diversity focused video led to the 12% increase in women being shortlisted. A 13% increase in what the company called non nationals. So this was the idea that I I would I would be from the UK but applying for a job in India or wherever it might be reverse and and so non nationals we saw a 13% increase in shortlisting and a 20% increase in. Hiring that was global findings, which overall we think are, you know extraordinary as is right if if companies get a 12% increase in in in women and non nationals moving through pipelines that’s fantastic but the effects in the country of headquarters were even higher and we think that’s because of the the salience of who the message.
Speaker
Right.
Speaker 2
It’s coming from the resonance. Maybe that connection to the message and the messengers.
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2
And in that country, we saw that women were 32% more likely to be hired than non nationals, 51%. So really extraordinary effects. This has been written up by our academic collaborators in science, which is one of the top journals in the world. So we’re really proud of it and and and think it’s a real success story for how we begin to. Move the needle on some of the representation challenges. That you were talking about?
Speaker 1
Yeah, I know it. I get a little frustrated when people like TEI training diversity training doesn’t work and it’s like, OK, well, tell me what the training is, right? And like you said, yeah, and conscious bias training, we know one session is not helpful and usually the opposite effect. But if we can really get that message closer to the time when decisions are made to the right people think your use case, your case study really pinpoints. That like, it’s not just the message, it’s the messenger. Where it comes from and how that message is told. So there’s different ways to do it, and I would argue it really has. That message has to fit your culture. You know, what is a high performing team at your culture, in your culture? How do you traditionally define it? And there’s almost always an element of innovation, psychological, safety, long conclusion. If you really get people to brains from those words come. Up and so it’s almost like getting them to say it instead of it coming from this, you know, Wizard of Oz, type of like, I feel like sometimes we feel like it’s like this message behind the curtain that’s mysterious. It it boils up from the right people, especially the leaders of the organization they’re echoing. It’s importance it translates into results.
Speaker
MHM.
Speaker 1
Fascinating. Was there anything that surprised you, Katryn, in that analysis? Was there, like, oh, I didn’t expect that or, you know, in in aha that you’d like to share.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think 2 are hard moments. I mean one. And I’m really struck. I I sort of struggle with communicating this sometimes because. We live in a world where. People are often able to make claims about effects and impacts that are extraordinary. Right. We do sort of we’re. Going to transform this and we’re going to double this and triple this and the ROI is going to be millions or billions or whatever it is. And and so I think it’s it’s hard not to overstate. That the effects in that country of headquarters in particular, I mean 32% more likely to be hired as in our world where you know the the, the standards of evidence are high, right? They’re academic standards. This was published in Science, so that that is a very real effect that we saw. That means that there are, you know, hundreds, thousands of women.
Speaker 1
Right.
Speaker 2
Walking around this organisation now that weren’t. So I think just the scale of that was really surprising for us. We’re often, you know, as as as behavioral scientists and experimentalists, we often see a 4% increase, a 6% increase, an 8% increase. And and we’re often proud of that because.
Speaker
It’s it’s, it’s.
Speaker 1
Yeah, it matters.
Speaker 2
Really. There it’s it’s really better, right? But that’s hard when we live in this world where where the hype is real, right? So that was one thing that I think really surprised us. The second thing that really surprised. Us was that? The second thing that really surprised us, I think, was sort of as you’d begun to sum that up right then just the impact of, yes, the message, yes, the messenger, you also described it brilliantly there as like getting to the right people at the right time.
Speaker 1
Like and this was like just in time DE.
Speaker 2
I exactly so so, so the right people and the right time. And it was those four things that we’ve really honed in on as the sort of the secret sauce and the magic of this. If we can get the right message, the right messenger to the right people at the right time, we can have these really outsized effects. And as they were scientists, would, you know, always have those clues. And that’s often how we guide our work. Right. Who are you trying to to change their behaviour? How are you gonna do it? How are you gonna get to them? What’s the most impactful? Time to do it for them. But but for us and our organisation, this was one of our first experiments. The experiment was run back in 2022. That really sort of has unleashed the power of that. And and that was surprising to us. We’re now using that in lots of other moments and areas. So we’ve got it. It raises more questions than. It answers for us. As researchers right, it works in hiring decisions. Does it work in all of those other moments that we that we spoke about earlier, performance, promotions, succession planning processes, reward and pay conversations right everyday?
Speaker
Experience.
Speaker 1
On the employee experience pieces, if we just put that inclusion filter on it and did. You said the right message at the right time with the right messenger. Exactly. It I missed one of the components.
Speaker 2
Message messenger. Person time.
Speaker 1
Oh, that right. There you go. But all of those that kind of not that it’s a check the box. But I think if if I were a business leader listening to this, I would think what’s a key part of my employee experience where I’m not really seeing. You know, inclusivity, you know. We could do. Better, and I think every organization, you’re being honest, there is an opportunity somewhere and that those are the good organizations that are looking for continuous improvement. So yeah, as you go through, do you have a season where you do more hiring, do you have a standard performance review cycle? We know that interventions work, we’re reminding people before performance reviews and increases in promotion decisions that we just remind people about some of these biases that can creep up or remind them about. Being inclusive and what that looks like those nudges. They do a really they can do a long way. I I wonder. Catering for you. You know if if you were just an everyday leader listening to this, what would be something actionable you could do based on this research?
Speaker 2
I mean, I would say based on this research, really figure out what’s the problem that you’re trying to solve for, right. And and to be that sounds like an obvious thing to say, but to be as behaviourally specific about that as possible, right? So to really hone in on. Whose behaviour do you need to change at what moment and and why? Like what is your data telling you? About where there are gaps about where we may not be having the most inclusive experiences or most inclusive leaders, and so really getting as as as.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 2
As sort of call it boringly specific as possible. Yeah, it helps, right. So we go from that. You know, we want to build an inclusive. Culture two, OK, we really want to improve. You know leader behavior in one to ones, right so that people can feel safe psychologically safe speaking up, raising issues, whatever it might.
Speaker 1
Great.
Speaker 2
Be. And that’s generally where we tend to see the most impact.
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. Again, specificity like boringly specific.
Speaker
Specific.
Speaker 1
These little nudges, though, add up. People notice like, oh, wow, like that promotion. Like, decision felt different. Oh, wow. Like, the hiring class is different, and you don’t take notice of these things. And then, like, a healthy dose of peer pressure of modeling this so that it takes. Golden. I think the big audience that we’ve missed in this research is middle managers like we just not in your research, but just in the industry in general. You know of course senior leaders have to be brought in, but you really need people making these critical day-to-day employee experience decisions to be to have it and from an inclusive mindset and you know they probably have a little. Education. And on what that looks like and don’t know any better. So you just kind of follow the outdated norms and these little nudges can help you just tweak and get a little bit more inclusive, so you get a little bit better outcomes.
Speaker
It’s.
Speaker 1
Awesome. Thank you for the research. You do. Thank you for, you know, this amazing work. I I think having the discipline and data right now is our best defense against this persistent backlash. Catch and tell our listeners how they can go your work. Get in touch perhaps.
Speaker 2
Yeah, but, I mean, Linkedin’s always the best place to find to find people. So we’re more than now on LinkedIn, I’m capturing writing LinkedIn. That’s generally where you’ll find does. And, you know, for us first, Julie Wright, a huge thanks to you for sharing the research that you share in your in your writing and in your in your voice. So thank. You for that.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for keeping the discipline there for us and I’m really thankful for your work and thankful for this message. This I’m kind of thinking of it as just in time in my own logistics days, like just in time deployment of some of these interventions or inclusion acts or inclusive lessons, whatever you want to call them.
Speaker 2
Boring specificity, specificity, behaviors. Something like that.
Speaker 1
I love it. I love it. Well, thank you, Katryn. I really appreciate you.
Speaker 2
Thanks, Judy too.