How Workhuman’s Inclusion Advisor Can Empower Your Team
Imagine that you wrote a message to thank a coworker for a job well done, but instead chose wording that was perceived as insensitive or even offensive. As the value of expressing gratitude in the workplace becomes increasingly clear, having a formalized recognition program in place can feel like an exciting step toward a better employee experience.
Fostering a more inclusive recognition program can actually bolster a company’s holistic DEIB efforts, creating deeper feelings of psychological safety all around. However, writing effective messages to empower your diverse team members can pose its own set of challenges.
At Workhuman®, we’re continuously committed to innovating our products and offering to provide our partners and their teams with the most useful tools possible. We aim to elevate Workhuman’s Social Recognition into a suite of empowering, culture-building tools.
One of these proprietary tools is called Inclusion Advisor®, which was designed to help make your team’s recognition messages as inclusive as possible, helping you avoid these unforeseen blunders.
What is Inclusion Advisor?
Inclusion Advisor is a special feature of Workhuman’s Social Recognition platform. It was designed to ensure that your recognition messages are free of language that can be perceived as prejudiced or offensive.
It flags potentially problematic language, as well as provides suggestions for alternative phrasing. This helps make your messages of gratitude more polished and impactful.
By helping you craft the most inclusive messages possible, you can strengthen your recognition program while simultaneously supporting your company’s DEIB efforts.
Who created this technology, and why?
Inclusion Advisor was the brainchild of our Natural Language Processing Team.
This team includes experts with backgrounds in computer science, psychology, linguistics, sociolinguistics, film study, literature, and data science, and is constantly dreaming up new ways to make Workhuman’s offerings as seamless and useful as possible. From this rich wealth of varied knowledge, many innovative ideas, such as Inclusion Advisor, are born.
Inclusion Advisor was designed as a simple, user-friendly checkpoint to ensure that all recognition messages use language that is as inclusive as possible.
The idea for this technology came from observing how many examples of biased language are present in our common lexicon. Seemingly innocuous phrases can be triggering for various groups of people and may be insensitive in ways that are unclear at face value.
Because we all come from such wildly different backgrounds, we may be unaware of how words or phrases that seem commonplace to us can affect other people. Language is extremely important, especially when it comes to digital communication, which makes this tool invaluable for online messaging.
How exactly does Inclusion Advisor work?
Inclusion Advisor works a lot like a spell check function or a grammar check plug-in. After writing your recognition message, you simply click a button and IA will scan your verbiage for any potential issues.
If any issues are flagged, IA will highlight them and provide an explanation as to why they could be perceived as problematic. Because of this function, IA operates as an in-the-moment language education tool as well.
By taking the time to explain to users why a word or phrase can come across differently to their reader than how they originally intended, this tool helps users think more critically about how they use language.
It empowers them to become more aware of their word choices both in the present and in the future. This can become a powerful supplement to a team’s DEIB efforts.
Also, the fact that IA provides this information privately to each user makes it an even more powerful micro-coaching tool, because there’s less room for feelings of shame or judgment that may accompany similar experiences in group settings.
This can help individuals become even more open to learning and development in the future, as it is framed to be an empowering experience, rather than a punitive one.
This video will help you get an even more in-depth look into how Inclusion Advisor works:
What issues does Inclusion Advisor flag?
Designed by a team of experts who are extremely passionate about creating diverse, equitable workplaces, Inclusion Advisor was designed to catch issues in a variety of areas that may not seem as glaring at first glance.
While there are some more obvious flags, like obscene language or overt stereotyping toward marginalized groups, IA also flags much more nuanced issues, such as microaggressions and encouraging overworking. Many of our users are initially surprised by some of the flags, which helps them think more critically about their word choice.
While our team is constantly working to expand the problematic language that Inclusion Advisor will highlight, here are the main buckets for the issues it currently catches:
Culturally insensitive phrases or word choice
While many of these phrases may seem innocuous at face value, they can feel deeply devaluing for members of various cultural groups.
“Let’s have a pow-wow.”
“You opened the kimono for a demanding prospect and closed the deal.”
Racial, ethnic, ageist, or sexist stereotypes
This so-called “praise” draws on unhealthy assumptions about individuals based on their age, sex, gender, race, ethnic background, or other sociological factors. In fact, 64% of women and 24% of people of color report experiencing these types of microaggressionsOpens in a new tab in the workplace.
“It’s very impressive that as a Boomer you grasped our new digital filing system so quickly!”
“You’ve stepped up and shown your technical skills as a woman engineer."
Unhealthy workplace rhetoric
These messages glorify overworking or a lack of appropriate boundaries between employees’ personal and professional lives.
“All those late nights at the office really paid off!”
“We so appreciate you logging onto those calls while you were on holiday!”
Unnecessarily gendered language
These types of messages may feature gender-biased language or lean into sexist stereotypes.
“All you guys did such a great job last week.”
Ableist phrases
These may expose unconscious bias or insensitive word choice toward people with physical or intellectual disabilities.
“Thank you for turning a blind eye on the mistake I made last week.”
“We really appreciate your contributions to the new marketing campaign. The old ones were so lame!”
Comments on an employee’s appearance
Not only may some of these comments constitute harassment, but these comments can shift the focus from a person’s accomplishments at work to personal appearance, and trivialize a person’s contributions.
"Thanks for getting your work done on time and always with a lovely smile on your face.”
Microaggressions and condescending language
These backhanded “compliments” expose low expectations or a lack of faith in a team member’s abilities.
“For someone who’s filling a temp position, your skills in Excel are great!”
“We were nervous to hire someone with a background in retail for a sales job, but you’ve really proved us wrong.”
Who can benefit from Inclusion Advisor?
Anyone and everyone can benefit from this technology. We all have implicit biases we need to unlearn, as well as issues with our language we may not even be aware of. This shouldn’t be viewed as anything to be ashamed of but rather a valuable opportunity for learning and development.
In fact, it is the openness to learning and being corrected that shows a true commitment to inclusivity. We’ve found that out of all issues that IA flags in messages, 79% are edited by our users. We’ve also seen a measurable decrease in flagged language by users over time, which proves that the educational element of this tool is working.
Merck was the first one of our partners to pilot Inclusion Advisor, and they had a great experience rolling out this new technology. Christopher Cardarelli, their Executive Director of Global Diversity and Inclusion, had this to say about Inclusion Advisor:
“At Merck, we recognized that our systems of talent attraction, recognition, promotion, and compensation needed to have diversity, equity, and inclusion embedded in them. That was the intent when we started to work with Workhuman to leverage, within the flow of work, the opportunity to remind people to be inclusive.
I think it’s really important to understand that people receive things differently. Words matter. At the heart of this is humans. This is just another way to consciously check your thinking and mindset.”
Our team has even heard anecdotes from partners who copy and paste their emails into Inclusion Advisor because they trust this technology so much. It’s been inspiring to see their passion for this offering, and feeding off that positive energy only makes us want to expand and improve IA’s capabilities and reach.
Are there any future plans for expanding this technology?
The Workhuman team updates Inclusion Advisor often to ensure that it’s as effective and far-reaching as possible. Conversations between developers, insights from other specialists, and even feedback from end users can all prompt updates to this software.
However, a major concern with any updates to Inclusion Advisor is going overboard with the issues it will flag. Our team doesn’t want our users to be afraid to speak freely, or to feel that their language is being overly policed. We want to strike a solid balance between comprehensiveness and far-reaching capabilities without being overly stringent or limiting.
Want to see exactly how Inclusion Advisor can help you and your team?
Wrapping up
At Workhuman, we work tirelessly to ensure that our offerings support our partners and their teams in fresh, innovative ways. Inclusion Advisor is another program that deeply supports this mission by empowering users with helpful tips to ensure their language is respectful and free of bias.
As these small changes add up over time, we hope that their cumulative effect can play a larger role in changing your company’s culture for the better.
About the author
Anna Picagli
As a CYT500 yoga instructor and a certified reiki practitioner, Anna is an advocate for holistic wellness, especially within the workplace.
She’s extremely passionate about the brain-body connection and exploring how mental and physical wellness intersect.
Anna has experienced firsthand how chronic stress, overworking, poor management, and other organizational issues can lead to extreme burnout. Knowing the impact that a toxic work environment can have on a person’s body, psyche, and general sense of well-being, she now works to direct others away from facing the same fate.
As Workhuman’s Content Marketing Senior Specialist, Anna is a regular contributor to Workhuman iQ reports and aims to create resources that company leaders can reference to help improve their culture and empower their employees, creating healthier workplaces for everyone.
In her free time, she’s a voracious reader and a seasoned home chef. You can learn more about Anna’s work on LinkedIn or through the Yoga Alliance.