Big Four accountancy firm KPMG will make unconscious bias training mandatory and linked to bonuses from next month, just over a year after its now ex-Chairman called the idea “complete crap”. The Telegraph has more.
The accounting giant’s 15,300 U.K. staff could have their bonuses slashed if they refuse to attend future lessons on bias, which will highlight how discussing skiing holidays, gap years and private schooling can isolate others.
The move, which marks the first time KPMG has made this training compulsory, comes just over a year after its former U.K. chief Bill Michael stepped aside following an outburst in which he told workers to stop “playing the victim card”.
His remarks also saw him call unconscious bias “complete crap”, triggering a backlash from staff who argued that dismissing the concept was “reckless” and reflective of his own privilege. Mr. Michael later apologised for his comments.
Companies are increasingly keen to show they are tackling unconscious bias – making assumptions about people based on characteristics such as gender, race or background – by trying to alert staff to hidden prejudices that might influence their behaviour.
However the results of training programmes have been mixed. Whitehall scrapped its unconscious bias training in late 2020 after finding little conclusive proof that it works.
Mr. Michael’s comments last year came just days after KPMG revealed that staff from ethnic minority backgrounds were paid an average of 38.2% less than white colleagues due to their underrepresentation in senior roles. Its partners pocketed an average of £572,000 each for the year to September 2020.
The Big Four accountant also vowed to ensure that a third of its senior employees come from working class backgrounds late last year, making it the first large British business to set a target for socio-economic diversity in the workplace.
KPMG’s compulsory training, which will start in June, will raise awareness of the workplace biases facing those from certain backgrounds as well as race, gender identity, disability and sexual orientation.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: If you’ve been ordered to undergo unconscious bias training at your workplace and want to opt out, the Free Speech Union has published some FAQs setting out what your legal rights are and how to push back while minimising the risk of being disciplined or fired. However, before refusing I recommend you join the FSU so we can defend your rights if you do get into trouble. For those wishing to furnish themselves with the evidence that unconscious bias training is a waste of time and money, the FSU published a briefing paper on its shortcomings here.
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Stupid, pointless and counterproductive. Forced training on this kind of things tends to make things worse, rather than better, in my opinion. But big firms are full of this kind of nonsense.
Small businesses have neither the money or the time to squander on this kind of thing, along with little inclination, thankfully.
“Forced training on this kind of things tends to make things worse, rather than better, in my opinion.”
Quite possibly. But I am not at all sure I want to be made “better”. Any government, firm or other body taking an unnatural interest in my “unconscious bias” can jog on. I’m quite happy with my biases, conscious and unconscious. They are between me and my Creator and my wife. Nobody else’s bloody business. There’s no good outcome possible from anything like this, however well meaning. It will always end in tears.
When you call it counterproductive, you may be assuming that its real aim is what is presented as its aim.
‘Making things worse’ is what this Government is all about!
Is this accountancy firm introducing this because they were told by some professors in California that maths is racist because it requires a “right answer”
And accountancy needs correct figures so ipso facto they’re racists.
Attend.
Switch off.
Collect bonus as you pass Go.
If you’re weak and pathetic. The correct response is to stand up to this crap and refuse to attend, or better still get a job elsewhere
Attend, create chaos and derision about this farcical “training” and tell the organisers to stick it.
Sounds a bit like a speed awareness course…
In which they make you participate otherwise they fail you…
Next time I’m taking the points.
I’m sure I would develop a terrible stutter.
That’s what I did.
When I looked at taking the course, I added in the cost of my time, parking and fuel costs to get there and back and decided it was better to take the points.
Good for you. That’s my approach too.
If everyone took the points (in which case the fine goes to the treasury, not the “speed camera partnership”) their business model would soon fail.
Stopping distances for cars were established in a Ford Anglia, with drum brakes and crossply tyres, in the 1950’s I believe.
From memory, the two second rule conforms to the stopping distances at one speed only.
Steering a car without crossing your arms was developed to manoeuvre heavy cars with no power steering again, from the dim and distant past.
Stopping distances assume the following driver is wholly fixated on the car in front, yet drivers are encouraged to look beyond it and ‘read the road’.
There is no requirement to know what 23 metres or 75 feet (typical stopping distance at 30mph) looks like.
The Higway Code attempts to make the visualisation of this more illustrative by telling us it represents six car lengths, but doesn’t tell us if it’s a Fiat 500 or a Rolls Royce.
There is no driver education on swerving to avoid an incident in the driving test curriculum.
Driving instructors can pass a driving test, as part of their qualification, at a lower standard than new drivers can achieve.
There is/was no requirement for a driving instructor to have taken any further driving instruction e.g. RoSPA/IAM.
Don’t give me your trashy common sense talk and science. What are you so sort of speed maniac?
Being able to estimate distances would be a society-wide skill in a society that truly valued education. So would being able to work out which way is north during daylight. Etc.
The amount of idiocy regarding driving that exists in some parts of the male population can be staggering. I’ve heard men mock the “P” plates when they are a sensible thing because you do learn a lot during the period when you’ve just become a solo driver. Others boast about not looking in their rear-view mirror much. Some men I met from the Republic of Ireland were complaining about how in that country there’s a three-year period before a newly-qualified driver can count as a supervisor – i.e. learner drivers need someone in the car with them who has had a full licence for at least three years – when again that is a perfectly sensible rule. A car is a f***ing dangerous weapon. It’s not like teaching English as a foreign language.
Mine wasn’t speed it was for people who knew they were doing wrong but did it anyways apparently. The standard of driver at this thing was astonishingly bad! One little old lady had “no idea why she was there” as she “barely touched that cyclist before driving off”. Honestly…. so I push on, big deal, the room was full of awful drivers.
The best driving instruction I had, back in in the mid 60s, came from sessions with my Godfather who was an instructor oat the Met Police driving school in Hendon. He had the scary habit of suddenly covering the rear view mirror with this great big mit and asking me for the “make and index mark of the car behind you as it’s been there for 10 seconds”!! And I still check that mirror every 7 seconds to this day!!
I had to attend one of those for the terrible sin of overtaking a split arse who then complained that I had done so. It was the most pointless, wasted afternoon of my life.
Perhaps the most degrading part was having to drive a Nissan Micra having turned up to the event in my Aston.
All this kind of crap is just about making jobs for people who otherwise would have nothing to do.
Screwing up other people’s lives is what gets them all off!
I think you have nailed it!
I took a speed awareness course. My take home memory from it was,” its the street lamps stupid”
If there are street lamps it is a 30 limit unless there are supplementary signs on them!
Which was very sensible in the 1930s when there were very few street lights. Outside those “built up areas” there was no speed limit at all. Drivers were trusted to choose a safe and sensible speed for themselves. Most did. Most still do today.
It’s a pretty poor driver that needs someone in a council office to tell them what speed is appropriate.
Stop the world, I want to get off!
Oh sorry, it stopped 2 years ago last March.
Yep: it is not what I was promised when I agreed to be reincarnated. Hey ho, can’t trust politicians even up in the astral planes!
Elon Musk needs to buy a country and everyone who is anti-woke needs to move there!!
Falklands, St Helena,Pitcairn Island?
Yes,yes, I know they are overseas territories as opposed to countries but you know what I mean.
Can we drive jeeps, dirtbikes up mountains and shoot guns?
I’m in!
Would that be the same Elon Musk who said he wanted his son to choose his own gender?
South Africa maybe? It’s a beautiful country.
Oh wait – the Chinese already own it
It was a beautiful country before the blacks flocked in and ruined it. Now it’s dangerous, full of corruption and all hope is lost. They ruin everything, the UK next.
Nah we just stepped into the multiverse.
KPMG the company with a history of serious failings. More concerned about wokery
They’re trying to get back on the list of approved suppliers to HMG. Things must be bad if they can’t make a living out in the real world
I have many conscious biases, I guess that’s level 2?
I enjoyed my time at KPMG but God I’m glad I’m out of there now.
I think it makes sense for KPMG, the essential skills for perpetuating corporate global fraud include glibness, psychopathy, manipulation of numbers and people, being able to lie about your feelings, artificial charm, putting up with corruption and taking it up the arse whenever ordered by your superior – all of which can be uncovered in this sort of training. They are just selecting the best staff for their intended job role.
(Also, the goal is to convert unconscious bias into conscious bias.)
KPMG are our current auditors. They are obsessed with diversity, such that every junior auditor seems to be from Ghana or Nigeria, and every email has their preferred pronouns included in their signature. They also seem to be particularly useless, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
I have developed a conscious bias in regard to people with personal pronouns in their signatures.
Are you nw getting lots of emails from an African prince offering you a magnificent opporttunity?
They are thick. For some reason the world feels it needs to hide from this fact, but nevertheless it holds. They are just dense.
I found them very keen on ‘social justice’ issues in the Perth (Aust) office. RUOK, indigenous reconciliation, all the regular good causes.
But prior to my time at KPMG I worked for Shell, and they were obsessed with that nonsense. Going to KPMG from Shell was like turning the volume down from 10 to 5.
This is COMMUNISM. Communism as in a nation which is built on deceptions and manufactured crisis and an outright attack on the public consciousness to break people down and essentially make society ill via perversion and distortion of truth and reality – everything turned on its head and painted grey.
Note the parallels:
The Communist Takeover Explained (1966)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3LTrqv3sFE
FULL INTERVIEW with Yuri Bezmenov: The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion (1984)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw
Yes, the denial of the existence of objective reality and reason is at the core of every dictatorship. We saw this in the COVID-19 era, in the Soviet Union and Nazi-ruled Germany. There was a Star Trek TNG episode called ‘Chain of Command’ which summed up the method perfectly. Patrick Stewart’s Picard was tortured by a Cardassian for military plans: the key to trying to break him was showing him four bright lights and trying to persuade him to say there were five lights, in denial of reality.
Likewise in 1984.Winston is tortured up to a point when he genuinely sees five fingers when the torturer holds up four fingers. Winston has already realised that the inevitable goal of tyrants is to deny that two and two make four. On the way, they have to erase memory, so that their lies remain undiscovered. Loathsome Bozo and his satanic gang have done that already, to the zombies.
It’s the likes of Blackrock who are pushing this crap along with threats of bad ESG ratings. We’re suffering under an unholy union of economic neoliberalism and cultural Marxism.
I’m a freelancer, so I’ve been in and out of many major firms, avoiding the politics that comes with being one the staff. One corporation I worked at for a while had a special room devoted to all this diversity, cultural appropriation, unconscious bias training and other nonsense. The room had glass wall, so you could could see all the posters and the big screen at the front of the room, but when staff went in there for a training session, they would turn a switch and the wall would go opaque. It was deeply sinister. The place was horribly political – every March 8, every woman entering the building was given a bag containing God knows what to impose celebration of International Women’s Day, for example. The regular staff I dealt with were lovely people, so I felt sorry for them having to be told they’re ‘unconscious’ racists, homophobes, transphobes, ‘internalised mysogynists’, and so on.
I’ve been freelance for most of my career and I have no desire ever to go on the staff at any company, no matter how difficult the present Government and HMRC are making my life. I pity anyone who does, because the culture in medium-sized and big businesses resembles a school, rather than a workplace.
Totally agree, that’s why I left big corporates and do freelance HR with small firms, to get away from the madness that working for a big firm entails.
I am also freelance and have seen the same rubbish going on. One company even had the gall to ask if I wanted to enter a raffle to raise funds for their BLM society. Faces dropped to the floor when I said no thanks, I can’t stand people peddling positive discrimination and I will not clap my hands like a seal cheering on people just because they have a certain skin colour, when all their lives they complain that they don’t want to be treated differently for having a different skin colour.
Much like the BBC/other woke media, the cult is that if you don’t join in and agree then you are a terrible person. We are in danger of losing free thinking people, which of course is what they need to usher in communism. The whole pandemic was an experiment to test our obedience, and we showed ourselves to be weak and vulnerable to whatever they choose to do next.
Another corporate loony to go with all the others who insisted on mandatory double vaxxing and mask wearing, even when the evidence of uselessness was staring them in the face
Many large corporates have been doing this sort of stuff for a while now. I once sat through 4 hours of diversity training which could be replaced by a single statement; “Respect each other”.
Yes, I’ve been though it, when we were put in teams; and each team had to “direct” an actor in an anti- racist play.
The upshot was that we shouldn’t be rude to people.
The End.
A work colleague had to endure Cultural Awareness Training because he was getting an Aboriginal as a team member. He said the wrong thing at one point – he told me after, ‘I felt the temperature in the room drop twenty degrees.’
Firms hire KPMG to audit their financial statements. Not to count black and white faces.
As for discussing skiing holidays, private schools, etc., that doesn’t make them biased. It just makes them bores.
‘The accounting giant’s 15,300 U.K. staff could have their bonuses slashed if they refuse to attend future lessons on bias, which will highlight how discussing skiing holidays, gap years and private schooling can isolate others.’
Instead they will have to discuss being stabbed, selling crack and doing a spot of jihad.
What is the point of bias if you can’t have some?
I’m biased against all sorts of groups and biased in favour of others.
My bias is born of experience, the whole point ofbias is to help you navigate the future based on passed experience.
‘Bias’ in the real world is simply that you’ve made an observation and come to a conclusion that one thing is better than another. ‘Unconscious bias’ training is intended to tell you that you have to believe what someone else tells you in defiance of your own senses and mind, even though what they tell you is clearly wrong and contrary to what you have observed.
Ayn Rand, whether you love her or hate her, pointed out the tendency of those in power to do this over half a century ago. The fact that many on the left and the right still rage against her shows how terrified they are of facts.
Wait until the very end and state ‘Just to clarify can I or cant I say ‘w#g’?
Hmm, is that Klingon or Vulcan?
The purpose of unconscious bias training is not to correct bias. It has no basis in reality, and psychologists have comprehensively condemned the notion. There is no evidence our thoughts work in the ways they claim.
As far back as Freud it was understood the very basis of civilization was suppression of urges and instincts; a man sees a pretty woman and doesn’t ravish her on the spot. Self control is a key feature of western countries.
It is noteworthy that those they claim need us to be trained about our unconscious bias, the ethnic minorities, are often characterized by their poor impulse control. This is especially true of subsaharan Africans. Casual rape is not uncommon in India too. Something of a scandal we rarely discuss.
I am reminded of the Afghan refugees taken to an air force base in the US following their evacuation a few months ago. While there, under armed guard, on a military base, one of the Afghan men tried to rape a 13 year old girl. When caught and challenged he was baffled as to what the problem was. Such cultural enrichment. No unconscious bias training for him.
The purpose of unconscious bias receiving the star treatment is to pave the way for reclassifying racism and homophobia as mental illnesses. That is the logical next step.
We let these things slip at our peril. Today’s minor annoyance is tomorrow’s jailable offence.
The insane Noah Yuval Harari (beloved of the WEF and a senior advisor to Klaus Schwab) talks at Davos in front of the likes of Leonardo de Caprio and Joe Biden about the mapping the human genome being a way to ‘hack’ humans and abolish free will. In the world he envisages, anyone accused of deviating from accepted principles will presumably be reprogrammed. Once upon a time this would have been called eugenics!
Excellent choice of image, which for those who don’t already know is from the film version of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange.
If unconscious bias training caused BBC officials “not to notice” that the main spokesperson for Remain on Question Time a few days before the 2016 referendum was a transvestite (Eddie Izzard), who was pitted against the normal-looking Nigel Farage for Leave, you’d have thought some at least of the “Enoch was right” types would be chanting “More, please!”
I understand that BT are doing the same thing.
I worked for BT and they had diversity training years ago. I was talking to one of these “Diversity Officers” and she (Asian as well) told me that there was a very high percentage of absentees on the day of the training due to sickness. (I couldn’t guess why).
Also (although BT will never admit it) they wanted to get rid of all the older employees as they were on a good pension and contract. They put pressure on older employees to leave and started having assessment centres where you had to justify the portion you held. I resisted it for as long as possible but they insisted I attended and I took the redundancy package.
I also went on a course to “learn” how to mark people down on their annual appraisal and explain to them why they were bing marked down (it was of course wrapped up in polite terms). It was expected that all managers mark down their staff.
The background to this is hierarchical conditioning aimed at the unconscious.
Churning out bullsh*t documents and checking procedures isn’t the half of it.
Note that whereas in physical-conflict war it can be preferable to fight wars on someone else’s territory rather than your own (although there are exceptions to that, given the defender’s advantage), this isn’t always true in the “what’s on today’s agenda to get upset about” world of politics.
‘Mr. Michael later apologised for his comments.’
An therein lies the problem.
The most openly anti-black person I’ve ever met was a female Sikh employee of KPMG.
Her well-meaning white female departmental senior manager was so convinced that only whites are racist that she made the Sikh the mentor of the only black trainee in the building! I did try to tell her….
I always found the Sikhs to be excellent people.
They are, of course, a warrior race….
I see this kind of activity as straight political propaganda, unconnected with my job. There may be some justification for HR staff to undertake this training – but none for purely technical staff.
However, looking at the FAQ from the Free Speech Union, it appears that staff in general do not have the right to refuse to attend such ‘training’, and do not have the right to disagree openly with the ideas being expressed.
Is that really the case?
With centralised digital money there is no need for “creative” accountancy practices. Well not on the plantation workers’ side. Every transaction recorded on a blockchain. This latest wokery is part of the controlled demolition. Merchant banks will follow by apparently going woke and broke.
Keep your eye on the bond repo market after this summer’s sports bread and circuses finish.
I’ve had to endure this but the examples of “unconscious bias” they used were so outrageous I had to wonder if the people forcing it on us were justing doing it as a box-ticking exercise – “if you think all black people are lazy or all women are terrible managers you may suffer from unconscious bias”.
All he did wrong was to apologise. I never would have
I did my company’s unconscious bias training a couple of weeks ago and scored 100% in the exam and therefore I am an expert.
I’m off to the Asian corner shop to get some bubbly. Always nice and cheap in that shop, probably knock off.
Unconcious biasses live in the deepest recesses of the mind and are effectively built in. Altering unconcious bias is a long and difficult process and it seems pretty superficial to think it can be altered by a lecture or two.
Subconcious bias is a different kettle of fish, but the pschologial and medical communities apparently have different definitions of unconcious and subconcious.
Is this yet another example of the woke using pseudo-psychologial mumbo-jumbo to advance their cause and to paint those they despise as the problem, whereas in reality they are the problem?
Most people will go through the motions and ‘do’ this training.
Eventually, these companies will realise it’s a waste of time and money and they’ll quietly drop it.
Some other fad will replace it.
Rinse and repeat.
I am in agreement with Mr Michaels comments, the people who get paid for running these courses won’t be in agreement
I was once obliged to attend a course of a similar nature. It was when we were asked to do some fatuous presentation as characters from ridiculous children’s TV programme, that I finally baulked and refused to take any further part.
I don’t mind at all joining in with the high jinks of people I know, but making a fool of myself in front of strangers is anathema to me… it, quite literally, makes my skin crawl.
I was taken aside and told that it would reflect badly on my further prospects as I would be marked as not being a team player, By this stage I’d realised my days were numbered anyway, so told the ‘trainers’ that I was really, really unhappy to continue and I’d rather sit it out, thank you.
Oh, the title of the course? “Respecting other people’s boundaries”.
Designed to disrupt and divide. The road to hell.
Just when you think you’ve passed the point of peak madness another deranged leftie comes along and assures you that you haven’t.