Venturing Beyond our Biases Towards a Culture of Inclusive Diversity | Best Practice by Bühler Group
Bühler’s history as an industrial technologies and solutions provider for the global food and mobility sectors spans 160 years thanks to a strong family culture and a focus on sustainability. Our employees, now nearly 13,000 strong, are key to our ability to innovate and we want to empower them with a culture of inclusivity. Our Beyond Bias program helps move us toward this goal.
This best practice was first published in the Gender Intelligence Report 2020.
In a perfect world, human beings would base all of their decisions on rational facts and pure logic. In reality, various forms of unconscious biases constantly tamper with our decision making. This can be especially detrimental to a company’s diversity strategy, as we are more likely to hire and advance people who are similar to us and/or who fit the mental image we have of what an ideal candidate for a role should be or look like. At Bühler Group, we have come to realize this as well and decided to act.
One thing was clear to us from the start of our Diversity & Inclusion program: Each and every one of us needs to take a good look in the mirror to evaluate our own behaviors and communication. A first step toward this is to explore individual unconscious biases, and we are supporting our employees in this endeavor. In 2018, Bühler introduced the Beyond Bias program. It consists of a series of half-day workshops, in which participants learn about diversity and inclusion, explore their own biases, and receive tools to make less biased decisions and thus be more inclusive in their actions. While it is important to us to reach middle and senior managers with this program, our ultimate goal is that every Bühler employee has the chance to experience a Beyond Bias workshop, as we are all responsible for an inclusive work environment, no matter the seniority.
Global Diversity & Inclusion Lead at Bühler Group
At the start, the majority of the workshops took place in our headquarters in Uzwil, Switzerland. As Bühler is an international organization active in 140 countries, we want to ensure that employees from all over the globe are able to participate. Therefore, in October 2019, we conducted our first Beyond Bias Train-the-Facilitator workshop, empowering six employees from various Bühler regions to become internal Beyond Bias trainers. This year, we are stepping up our game by offering two Train-the Facilitator sessions, which will empower 12 additional internal Beyond Bias trainers and help us really get started on a global scale.
Beyond Bias Train-the-Facilitator Workshop 2019 at Bühler Uzwil
So far, 400 employees – many of them in leadership positions – have participated in a Beyond Bias workshop. We believe this is a good starting point that enables us to further develop the concept and reach everyone at Bühler. The feedback from the participants has been overwhelmingly positive, with many of them stating that their understanding of inclusive diversity and their awareness of unconscious biases has increased significantly. We believe that the implementation and promotion of the Beyond Bias workshop program has also contributed to our improved gender diversity metrics, as we have seen a global increase of women generally and especially in leadership positions over the last two years.
The Bühler leadership team truly believes that an inclusive culture is essential for achieving our long-term strategic goals. I commit to stepping up our efforts to improve the way we recruit, retain and advance diverse talent and to creating an environment in which our increasing diverse global workforce can thrive.
– Stefan Scheiber, CEO Bühler Group
At Bühler, we are aware that while a half-day workshop is a great start, more needs to be done to ensure inclusive diversity is lived by all of us. The Beyond Bias program is a vital part of the Diversity & Inclusion strategy at Bühler, but we are also implementing various other measures to achieve our goal, be it the partnerships with various organizations to foster gender equality in business, the development of a global flexible working policy, or the planning of inspirational events for International Women’s – and Men’s – Day.
For more information on Diversity & Inclusion at Bühler, have a look at our very first Bühler D&I Annual Report, in which we outline our measures and goals for a more inclusive, diverse and unbiased culture.
If you are interested to learn more about what we do at Bühler for a diverse and inclusive culture, please don’t hesitate to contact Corinne Schneider under corinne.schneider@buhlergroup.com.
This best practice was first published in the Gender Intelligence Report 2020.
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