We’ve all had that “ouch” moment… Maybe you witness favoritism in the office, or you get passed over for a well-overdue promotion. It stings. Fairness in the workplace should be non-negotiable, but, unfortunately, many businesses fail to prioritize it.
When organizations do keep fairness at the forefront, they see gains way beyond compliance. We’re talking happier teams and even healthier profits. Let’s jump straight into what fairness in the workplace is, what it isn’t, and how you can ensure workplace fairness in your organizational culture.
What Is Fairness in the Workplace?
A fair workplace is one that promotes justice, treating everyone with impartiality regardless of seniority or background. To be truly fair, you must demonstrate this in action, not just on paper.
To make it easier to remember, we’ve summed it up here as four Es:
- Equal opportunity: Everyone has a fair chance to succeed and be recognized, with equal access to professional development opportunities like mentoring and performance coaching.
- Equitable treatment: Equity means that people are treated appropriately and consistently, taking into consideration individual needs, personal circumstances, and varying starting points.
- Everyday respect: People feel heard, valued, and safe in their day-to-day interactions, and their contributions and perspectives are genuinely acknowledged.
- Enforced accountability: Policies are applied properly, concerns are taken seriously, unfair behavior is addressed, and those responsible are held to account.
Of course, understanding what fairness is only tells half the story. Let’s move on to what fairness in the workplace is not.
What Is NOT Fairness in the Workplace
Not everything that feels unfair is unfair. And not everything that seems fair actually is. Let’s clear up some of these common misconceptions.
Fairness is NOT based on work performance.
Here’s the baseline: people deserve to be treated with fairness regardless of their position in a company. Unfortunately, only a measly 37% of US employees feel that they are treated with respect in the workplace. In practice, this might look like a group mentor who offers more time and support to team members who are already well-developed in their career, rather than the interns who might benefit from it most.
Fairness is NOT treating everyone exactly the same.
Treating employees fairly doesn’t mean that you stop recognizing them as individuals with unique traits, strengths, and support needs. For example, an autistic employee might prefer clear, structured communication or quieter working conditions. Supporting this isn’t “special treatment”; it’s a fair adjustment that enables them to do their best work, just as others might benefit from different forms of support.
Fairness is NOT getting everything you want.
Sometimes things in the workplace can feel unfair, but in reality, they are not. For example, not getting the promotion you wanted is disappointing, but it’s not unfair if the role was awarded to someone else through a consistent and unbiased process using the same criteria for every candidate. Research on procedural justice makes this distinction clear: It turns out that most employees judge fairness by how decisions are made, not only by whether they got the outcome they wanted.
Why Workplace Fairness Matters
Let’s look at a scenario. When Melanie presents the wrong figures in a client meeting, her manager gives her coaching and a second chance. For Sammy, it’s a formal warning. What gives?
We know deep down that fairness matters, but it’s difficult to formally incorporate it into team culture until we quantify it. So, without further ado, here are some ways that both employees and organizations benefit from prioritizing fairness.
Boost employee engagement
Happy employees = happy businesses. Fair processes (particularly around pay, as research shows) reduce frustration and help people stay focused on meaningful contributions. For example, organizations with transparent promotion criteria often report higher participation in development programs and stronger internal mobility rates. Take the example of drink company Bacardi, who used MentorcliQ software to organize their Women in Leadership program. Thanks to this equitable treatment, Bacardi’s female employee engagement increased by 12%.
Improve employee retention
When your employees are engaged, there is, most of the time, no reason for them to go looking for greener grass elsewhere. From impartial everyday inclusion to indiscriminate development programs, fairness strengthens loyalty across the board, in the process reducing turnover risk. In fact, we at MentorcliQ found that employees who participate in fully accessible mentoring programs have an average 9% turnover rate, compared with 19% for employees not involved in mentoring. That translates to about a 50% reduction in turnover.
Ensure labor laws compliance
Your employees have legal rights, so if they’re treated unfairly, you could actually be risking a lawsuit (gulp!). In 2021, a jury found that Walmart had discriminated against longtime employee Marlo Spaeth, a worker with Down syndrome, after failing to accommodate her disability and then firing her. This went against the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), leading to the jury ruling in Spaeth’s favor. Walmart was obliged to award her $125 million in compensation.
Promote business success
Fair pay, fair treatment, fair play! These are trademarks of the most successful businesses. In fact, according to a Great Place to Work survey, 86% of employees at Fortune-recognized small to medium-sized businesses say they feel they are fairly compensated in line with company profits. And over 9 in 10 of them say their manager never has favorites. Now there’s a bar to aim for.
How to Promote Fairness in Your Work Environment
It isn’t enough to pay lip service to fairness. If you’re taking it seriously, you need to go beyond a translucent attempt at a diversity and inclusivity document. Here is the hands-on, practical guide to get integrity right into the bones of your organization.
1. Implement consistent policies
Set defined (i.e., written) guidelines for promotions, discipline, and compensation, and apply them consistently across teams to reduce bias and confusion. This goes back to the “equal opportunity” part of our four Es framework. The Magnet program for nursing is a good instance of this, as it requires hospitals to implement standardized career ladders and evaluation criteria across roles.
2. Build transparency in pay and decision-making
Pay transparency can lead to the closing of unfair pay gaps, as in the example of Siobhan, whose male colleague privately informed her of the unfair disparity between their salaries. With this information, she was able to formally challenge the unfair pay rate and negotiate to receive adequate compensation for the work that she was doing. Part of this transparency could also mean publicly advertising systems and criteria for promotions and career development.
3. Provide equal opportunity for growth
Please leave your mini-me syndrome at home. We’re talking about affinity bias, which is what happens when a senior employee invests professionally in a more junior member on account of little more than their mentee reminding them of themselves. If you want to be fair, you can’t single out one little protegee for leadership mentoring, only to leave the rest of the team in the dust. Everyone needs a chance to learn from more experienced team members in the industry.
4. Train for bias awareness and inclusive leadership
Whatever we might wish, a sense of fairness is not always innate. Some folks have always worked in an unfair workplace and may have developed bad habits to get ahead. Others are simply ignorant of the extra mile that is required to make workplaces more inclusive. You can change this by implementing diversity training or providing development for leaders to show them how to carry out a successful mentoring program.
5. Create structured recognition and feedback systems
No one wants to be taken for granted. People want their employers to recognize the good work that they do. Gallup and Workhuman found in 2024 that only 38% of those who get weekly managerial feedback without recognition are engaged, compared to 61% of employees who receive both feedback and recognition. This could look like thanking team members on a public platform, detailing precisely why the work they completed was well done, or giving them an end-of-year bonus.
6. Support employee voice through employee resource groups
Employee resource groups (ERGs) are effective for increasing representation and providing a space for different employee voices across the company to be heard. In fact, 100% of DiversityInc Top 50 companies have implemented them! These are a structured way for employees to share experiences, raise concerns, and contribute to workplace decisions. When supported with the right technology and backed by leadership, ERGs help turn employee voice into measurable progress on representation and belonging.
7. Hold leaders accountable for fair outcomes
None of these steps makes much difference if senior leadership isn’t held to account for fair processes and outcomes. One of the greatest sources of complaints of unfairness is hypocrisy, particularly when it comes from leadership. By doing away with double standards and having a system in place to ensure that more senior members stand up for justice in the workplace, your workplace will be a much fairer and psychologically safer environment for everyone.
Use MentorcliQ to Level the Playing Field
Even with the best efforts, your organization may let fairness slip through the cracks. Maybe you have it down on paper, but are struggling to put it into practice. Or you tried a mentoring program once, but the matches didn’t quite work. If this sounds familiar, don’t worry.
Sometimes what you need is a system and an action plan.
With MentorcliQ’s award-winning platform, you can match hundreds of mentor-mentee pairings in minutes—accurate matches that take experience, background, and development goals into consideration. For if you want to begin simply by listening to your employees’ views, you can organize ERGs, keep track of the data, and create a plan that actually makes a difference in your workplace.
It hits us in the gut when we witness or experience injustice anywhere in life, not just in the work environment. We go into the world hoping for the best of people, and when we don’t get it, something doesn’t feel right. Thankfully, with the right tools, you can change that.
Book a demo today and try the software that levels the playing field.
