About two years ago, a midsize U.S. law firm reached out to the Center for WorkLife Law to learn how bias was surfacing in their performance evaluations. The firm’s D&I director had spot-checked a sample of supervisor evaluations for bias and identified several red flags. They decided they wanted to go a step further and take a data-driven approach. (Music to our ears!)
How One Company Worked to Root Out Bias from Performance Reviews
An audit of bias in performance reviews at a midsized law firm found sobering differences by both race and gender. The authors identified four patterns of bias in the evaluations and recommended two simple changes for the following year: 1) Reworking the performance evaluation form to break job categories down into competencies and require that ratings be backed by at least three pieces of evidence; and 2) Developing a simple, one-hour workshop in which participants were introduced to the patterns of bias and learned how to use the new form. One year later, people of color and women got more constructive feedback, and the playing field was leveled for everyone: Whereas white men had longer, more complex evaluations in year one, in year two, both word count and language complexity were similar across all groups. While there was still room for improvement, the intervention showed that evidence-based metrics can help companies make steady progress and improve outcomes for everyone.