Lorne Epstein
Reducing bias and improving DE&I in the workplace using a science based tranings
Arlington, Virginia, United States
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Lorne Epstein, SHRM-SCP, MSOD, social scientist, keynote, and Vistage speaker who consults with leaders on methods to improve the ROI of decision-making by reducing biases. Over 15,000 professionals have taken his workshops. He has been quoted in Forbes, Cosmopolitan, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. Lorne is obtaining his master’s degree in cognitive neuroscience at George Mason University. His Bias Impact report has been downloaded over 1000 times. Lorne has been leading experiential workshops since 1993 and has been an HR professional since 1996. As a leader in Talent Acquisition, he built recruiting teams in the U.S., India, and Brazil. His research focuses on improving decision-making and reducing the impacts of unconscious bias in the workplace. His book, You're Hired! Interview Skills to Get the Job has been downloaded over a half-million times worldwide. He is a Lifetime Charter Member of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Uncovering and Reducing Unconscious Bias
This workshop offers an introduction to how human beings operate with unconscious bias.
Description
Research on decision-making reveals that when individuals are highly aware of their decision-making process, they can see how non-determinant data influences their thinking. This awareness improves decision-making by giving people access to a more extensive set of choices to reach their intended outcomes.
Experiential learning is an integral component of the workshop and the participants learning experience. This session includes simulated experiences that transform participant behaviors through awareness. The experiential learning model builds insights by having participants do the actions in a training space that will reduce biases in decision-making. Participants have many opportunities to directly experience their unconscious bias and priming bias. They will have an opportunity to take a firmly held assumption and deconstruct it using deductive reasoning.
Learning Objectives
In this initial workshop, participants will learn about unconscious bias and how it affects their workplace relationships and decision-making.
Through this workshop, participants will:
• Learn how priming bias works.
• See how bias can affect their choices at work.
• Conduct a personal social network analysis.
• Develop new practices and skills to minimize bias in business decisions.
• Learn how unconscious bias affects diversity and business strategy.
• Develop a business case to integrate diversity strategy throughout the organization.
Participants will explore the following questions:
• What is unconscious bias?
• How does unconscious bias affect our lives and the workplace?
• What biases do I have?
• What tools are available to me to reduce the effects of bias in my workplace?
Creating Psychological Safety
In this experiential workshop, Lorne guides participants to a new awareness of psychological safety to support a culture where they feel safe sharing their ideas with freedom. We will discuss the literature explaining what psychological safety means, how it improves DE&I, and practices to show managers and employees how to create it.
Google’s research on their highest performing teams uncovered it wasn’t team members’ education, experience, or place of origin that drove their success. Critical success factors were the team members’ levels of communication, empathy, and sense of psychological safety with each other. In today’s fast-paced, high-stress environments, the need to build context so teams can work effectively together has never been more critical.
Clear guidelines for engagement create the foundation for highly effective teams. Boost team efficiency, trust, and alignment with strategies for collectively identifying what is vital to your teammates and building team commitment to using the co-created guidelines for success.
Using stories, dialogue, and appreciative inquiry techniques, you will learn what’s important to other participants and how you could work together in mutually supportive ways if you were part of the same team. You will take away tools that you can use to bring your team to its next level of performance.
Learning Objectives
• Explore what psychological safety means and looks like in the workplace;
• Develop new language and awareness about psychological safety;
• Create a plan to develop psychosocial safety in the workplace; and
• Gain skills to work effectively with coworkers to establish psychological safety in the workplace.
Participants will:
• Create a team charter drawing from the needs of the people in the room;
• Prepare by reading academic and business literature before the workshop;
• Answer several written questions before the workshop to prepare;
Participants learn and experience the meaning of psychological safety and how this concept is a tool to engage employees and drive productivity, innovation, and collaboration.
Collaborative Communications Workshop
This 90 to 120-minute is a highly experiential, hands-on workshop based on Marshall Rosenberg's work on communicating and listening more effectively using Nonviolent Communication (NVC). We will cover the four fundamental steps of nonviolent communication: observing without judging, expressing feelings when observing, expressing and clarifying one's needs to the feelings they observe, and expressing specific requests.
Collaborative communication skills are examined and practiced to have strategies to meet the fundamental needs of all of the people in a conversation. This style of dialog requires building a safe space and trust. When you and your teams feel heard by others, trust will rise.
Learning Objectives:
• Develop the courage to listen without fear.
• Develop a framework to ask for what you want.
• Create a deeper understanding of self.
• Discover unknowns & form new understandings.
• Creating a culture of innovation & psychological safety.
• Improving productivity and revenue by sharing mistakes and finding solutions.
Participants will:
• Learn the four easy steps of collaborative communication;
• Practice communicating in small groups;
• Participants will learn how to use language and dialog to improve performance, reinforce positive behaviors and improve negative ones; and
• Become eligible to participate in small learning labs to continue their practice.
Removing Bias from Job Descriptions
Unconscious bias shows up in job descriptions, which has informed our hiring decisions and diversity makeup. Lorne facilitates a workshop where participants learn how to analyze and write job descriptions to mitigate as much bias as possible. You will learn to highlight invisible diversity dimensions crucial to job success. They include learning & conflict styles, life experiences, attention to detail, ability to grow into the position, and professional skills. Data shows that the greater the diversity dimensions represented, the more productive and robust an organization is. You will practice a critical job description review to develop questions for the hiring manager and coworkers to help you bring salient clarity to the job description to hire the most diverse people available now.
Organizations seek to become more diverse to expand their hiring pools and gain diversity advantages. Job descriptions are the leading edge of the hiring process, facilitating people to join your organization. They demonstrate the organization’s values, the tasks that need to be accomplished, and what they are looking for in the person who will best fit the role. We break through the old job descriptions model to create a diverse workforce.
• Participants will learn to create job descriptions that reflect the position's needs and mitigate dimensions of diversity.
• Review and highlight bias in job descriptions.
• Create critical questions to uncover the goals the position seeks to attain.
• Learn what words, phrases, and themes contain biases to embrace and avoid.
• Develop a palate of questions to take back to your office and discuss them with your hiring managers.
• Compile uncovering questions to elicit critical stakeholder data into the job description.
• Focus company job descriptions to be seen and read by more people.
• Make distinctions between company values and culture to mitigate bias.
• Bring the hiring manager and coworkers into the job description writing process.
Global Bias Impact Report - Keynote
Lorne shares the results from his Global Bias Impact Survey. In 2022 and 2023, we asked hundreds of professionals from around the globe to share their insights on the impact of Unconscious Bias in the workplace and what they are doing to mitigate it. This talk presents a summary of what the data revealed. Lorne is committed to improving our ability to relate to one another, learn how to learn, and slow down our thinking to uncover and mitigate our unconscious biases.
Description
For centuries marginalized people have been crying out for justice, freedom, and an opportunity to be heard. Those who do not feel heard have turned up the volume most recently experienced after the murder of George Floyd.
My report honors the marginalized people on our planet, including people of color, the LGBTQ community, non-native-born Americans, women, the elderly, and everyone who wants to be seen and accepted for who they are.
Discrimination and dysfunction in the workplace stem from a lack of diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI). Unconscious Bias is one of the biggest influences on this set of problems. Improving the choices we make will improve DEI and business outcomes.
I want to share with the public what people see as the impact of unconscious bias in their workplace and what they are doing to mitigate it to make our work world a better place.
Developing Your Ethical Mindset
This is an experiential, hands-on workshop based on applied and normative ethics. Participants learn the fundamentals of ethics and how to create a framework communicating their organization’s ethical standards. We cover the history of ethics in business and use experiential exercises to uncover and illuminate the participant’s ethical mindset.
Ethics is a branch of philosophy that involves recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior.
Ethics has taken center stage as a component of an organization. Ethics has become an essential pillar of an organization’s holistic operations, from its brand to how they treat employees and stakeholders. Ethical behavior aligns the values of an organization with its outward expression in the form of products and services. The closer the alignment of an organization’s ethics is to its business model, the more ethical an organization can be. Ethical statements can reassure stakeholders about their fears. For example, “We are reassuring people, It is OKAY to be here.” And “We will protect you from that which you fear.”
Lorne Epstein
Reducing bias and improving DE&I in the workplace using a science based tranings
Arlington, Virginia, United States
Actions
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