Photo credit: John Disney/ ALM

Last week, Starbucks Corp. closed more than 8,000 stores in North America for an afternoon to train about 175,00 employees on combating racial bias.

The training was prompted by an incident in April at a Philadelphia Starbucks in which the manager reported to police two black men who were sitting in the store but had not yet bought anything. It turned out that the men were waiting for a friend and did not want to place an order until he arrived.

And last month, the police were called on three black teens shopping for prom at a suburban St. Louis Nordstrom Rack because an employee wrongly suspected they had stolen merchandise. The president of Nordstrom Rack flew to St. Louis to apologize personally to the three friends, and the company said it is considering changes to employee training.

Educating employees to prevent these incidents is a popular option—but what should racial bias training at companies look like? According to experts, two of the biggest hallmarks of effective racial sensitivity training are an emphasis on behavior and long-term consistency.

“This whole field of human interaction and how you treat others continues to be a great challenge for employers,” said Bill Martucci, a partner at Shook, Hardy & Bacon with a national business and employment litigation practice. “The good news is that in many actions where we see behavior that is not consistent with a company's culture, more and more companies are responding quickly, acknowledging a mistake and taking action to remedy the situation that's come up and to do their best to prevent those things from happening in the future.”

Simply instructing employees to “be empathic” or to “not discriminate” will not cut it, experts said.

Standards for employee and customer treatment must be specific, consistent and defined by clear behaviors, said Stephen Paskoff, president and CEO of Employment Learning Innovations, an Atlanta-based training company that helps organizations address bad behavior in the workplace.

These behaviors may include specific instructions to “make eye contact with every customer” or to “not ignore one customer and initiate a conversation with another you feel more connected to,” Paskoff noted, adding that these standards should be as understood and closely followed as the processes the company uses for making its products.

“You give people clear standards about how to brew the coffees,” he said. “You can give clear basic standards about how to treat people.”

Paskoff continued: “You could do all sorts of training that could be legally sufficient to build an affirmative defense, but the issue is not just giving the basic minimum. It's, how do you influence someone's behavior? It's not the same at all.”

According to the employment law experts, a company's standards, including a strong emphasis on racial diversity and inclusion, must be a matter of ongoing communications, not the focus of just an annual training session. In fact, it should be discussed as much as, say, the company's sales goals or operations, they explained.

“The commitment has to be continuous,” Martucci said. “You have to explain that we want these topics, this commitment, to be an inherent part of our core values, of who we are.”

Martucci said the issue must be made prominent in the day-to day workings of companies. This  could mean integrating the matter into every-other managerial meeting, regularly recognizing a company champion of diversity or inclusion or evaluating an employee's respectful and inclusive behavior—or lack thereof—in his or her annual performance review.

The racial sensitivity training, Paskoff added, should also be used to build an environment where those who experience racial bias, both employees and customers, feel comfortable coming forward so that the initiator can better understand his or her behavior in the situation. Having such a culture of openness, he said, can allow the topic to become as commonplace as other daily, business-related discussions.

But the experts agreed getting to that point still requires a lot of work.

“The importance of consistency and core values is going to be a topic that requires a lot of discussion, a lot of follow-through,” Martucci said.