Every year, employees at a major company gather for an annual workplace diversity and inclusion workshop. After the hour-long session, many leave feeling more discouraged than empowered. As one of the workshop participants explains, "I have unconscious biases, but now what do I do with them?" This feeling of incomplete or inadequate DEI training is unfortunately too common across workplaces.
Enter Amanda Felkey, PhD, a behavioral economist and microeconomist with a passion for building cultures of inclusivity and belonging. Dr. Felkey understands the limitations of the one-off training approach to changing behavior. Her work focuses on creating lasting changes through individual actions, helping people move beyond awareness toward creating a habit of inclusive behavior.
Dr. Felkey’s work draws from economics and psychology to investigate how individuals make decisions and how behavior change is accomplished. “I’m in a field where there are not many women. I stand in front of classes that have as few women today as when I was in those classes. So, I’ve always had an interest in inclusion and belonging,” she says.
This interest in enhancing inclusion and belonging combined with her foundational expertise in economics led her to develop a new method for creating more inclusive environments in the workplace, known as the Inclusion Habit program.
Addressing the limitations of current approaches to diversity training
According to Dr. Felkey, DEI trainings such as speakers and workshops are cost effective and can reach many people, but they are not successful in creating meaningful change. Although a lecture or workshop may help us become aware of our biases, awareness alone does not change behavior. Moreover, this programming approach fails to account for how we learn and retain information. Information is quickly forgotten unless it is applied and practiced.
It is also problematic if those in power are not representative of the diversity of the population. They are prone to their own biases as they design and implement policies and programs.
Instead, Dr. Felkey proposes ongoing interventions that focus on change at an individual level. “It really boils down to individual decision-making, and that’s my wheelhouse,” she explains. She believes the key to enhancing the inclusivity of an organization is to help individuals practice small changes in behavior so that over time, inclusion becomes a habit. As Felkey notes, “Behavior change is like a diet—people must be able to justify doing the work today when you aren’t going to see the benefit for a while.”
What is the Inclusion Habit Program?
Felkey’s research in behavioral economics is the foundation for the Inclusion Habit program, which is designed to enhance workplace inclusion and belonging. She explains that the program uses “commitment devices and social accountability [approaches] that we know facilitate individual behavior change.”
It consists of six phases that incorporate exercises for individuals to reflect and perform daily actions. These six habit-building phases provide daily activities that help individuals create habits of greater understanding, empathy, and inclusion:
Embracing that inclusion matters
This phase helps individuals understand the benefits of inclusion to cultivate positive perceptions of diversity and inclusion. Individuals must believe a new habit will be beneficial before they can engage in the process.
Understanding biases
This phase helps individuals identify the biases they hold and recognize when their intuition is inaccurate. Participants learn to label and understand their biases. They also reflect on the origins of biases to enhance their self-awareness.
Dispersing the negativity associated with unconscious biases
This phase helps individuals mitigate the negativity, defensiveness, and denial that often occurs when confronting our biases. By understanding that biases are the result of the architecture of our brains combined with the social systems into which we are born, biases are normalized so that they can be examined and challenged rather than denied.
Practicing thinking more deliberately
Situations requiring quick, efficient action rely on our “fast thinking” or intuitive reactions. In these situations, it is more likely that we make choices based on our biases. These decisions do not always align with our values and intentions. Deliberate, careful “slow thinking” can filter and modify our reasoning to better align with our best intentions. This phase helps individuals recognize situations where biased decisions are more likely and allows them to practice thinking more deliberately in those settings.
Reprogramming incorrect intuitions about others
This phase helps replace old biases inherent in fast thinking with new instincts. Here, participants challenge their perceptions of someone different from themselves and create an assessment based on that individual’s qualities rather than group stereotypes. With updated awareness and insights, people will be better equipped to act more inclusively, even when thinking fast.
Becoming more empathetic
This phase encourages participants to practice empathy by communicating from a place of curiosity with a goal of understanding. Understanding others helps us build correct intuitions and avoid creating biases. It also attunes us to diversity in others that is not immediately obvious or stated.
In each phase, participants are sent a daily task via text or email that takes two to five minutes to perform. Examples of these tasks include changing the picture on your screensaver to an image that demonstrates diversity, practicing listening without interrupting, or reflecting on a formative moment from your past.
The platform includes a social media feed where participants are recognized for their completed commitments. It is also a place to comment and share stories. This customizable platform enhances the community effort of the program and showcases participants’ successes. The community aspect helps participants to believe that change is possible by seeing the accomplishments and encouragement of others. Weekly or biweekly emails about the stories that have been shared and how many people have made commitments help to maintain momentum and encourage new participants to take part. The program embeds the aspects that make social media exciting and attractive to us, thereby creating an engaging experience.
Arizona State University case study
The Inclusion Habit program has been implemented across 10 organizations so far with positive outcomes. Arizona State University is one such organization that embraced the program after learning about it through the Association for Women in Science (AWIS).
The program is being marketed by AWIS to help organizations create safe, inclusive environments where women in science can achieve their full potential. Shelley O’Brien, chief marketing officer at AWIS, emphasizes that, ”Building a culture of inclusion and equity will also drive a better bottom line. When employees feel they are valued and being heard, they more readily share their ideas, collaborate, and drive productivity.”
The program at ASU ran for a semester. Sixty-six participants completed the program, performing more than 2,400 micro-commitments and sharing over 500 stories. Felkey felt the ASU cohort took full advantage of leveraging social accountability features to build a sense of community. “It becomes a really powerful experience and people really enjoyed it,” she said, adding that participants feel the daily reminders keep inclusion “top of mind ... even if you don’t have time to perform the micro-commitment that day, you are still reminded that you are interested in being more inclusive and it primes your actions for the day.”
Measuring success is an important part of implementing any program and Felkey adapts measurement indicators to the interests of the organization. She can administer a subset of academically verified measures about perceptions like belonging, racism, engagement, and trust, in addition to gathering informal feedback.
At ASU, program participants’ sense of belonging increased by 13 percent. After the program, participants reported they felt they had improved their listening skills, thought more clearly, and lowered their stress. As well, they felt more included, valued, engaged, and connected to colleagues after the program. Forty-five percent reported feeling they were more likely to stay at ASU for the next year. Improving retention rate by nurturing inclusivity and belonging is something that O’Brien feels is one of the most important potential outcomes of the program. “Recruiting and training new staff is expensive...[companies] are more likely to retain employees who feel like their employer cares about them,” she says.
Workplaces are important areas to promote inclusive behavior because it is where we are most likely to encounter a lot of diversity. It is necessary for employers to provide resources to meet this diversity and embrace it. However, Felkey cautions that “it all depends on the individual. You can’t policy that into place.” For workplaces to become truly inclusive, individuals need to be given the tools to change behavior. “What I believe about inclusion work is that individual behavior change is the only way to change the equilibrium,” says Felkey.