How to transform workforce diversity with AI and analytics
4 mins read

How to transform workforce diversity with AI and analytics

Four key areas of your data worth looking into for workplace diversity transformation

For decades, organizations around the world have suffered from a lack of workforce diversity in race, gender, age, and more. In America alone, men named John outnumber all women in leadership roles.

As our current generation seeks to embrace diversity around the world (and we have come a long way in doing so), organizations should strive to meet the same goals—not to satisfy the general public—but to improve the efficiency and happiness of your employees. Just by increasing racial diversity, your organization can improve team performance by 35%. Another study has found that gender-diverse organizations earn 41% more revenue than non-diverse organizations.

Whether you are looking to improve existing workplace diversity or transform your organization’s diversity from the ground up, the first thing you should be looking at is your data—HR, communications, and even accounting—and leveraging the latest available analytics and AI tools to provide insight into the areas your organization can improve. Here a few key areas worth looking into:

Payroll for gender disparity

Are the men within your organization getting paid more than women? This is an easy one to look into, to address existing diversity. Start by comparing the salaries between genders in similar/same-level positions for any notable pay gaps.

Want to look even further? Take a top-down approach, and analyze your company’s hierarchy—do you find that men fill more leadership roles or women? Or, how about promotions—is there a pattern in promotions by gender? Payroll can tell you a lot more than just numbers, and chances are you already have this data digitized and ready for analysis.

Interviews first entry-point for workforce diversity

The interview process can hold tons of useful insight into how your organization currently approaches workforce diversity since this is the step in which certain demographics may be favored by or filtered out of your company entirely.

Do you find a pattern in your applicants being rejected or selected, by race, gender, or age? This is the type of data that will help set the culture and diversity for your entire company.

Internal communications to address and predict discrimination (and lawsuits)

Real-time monitoring and analysis of your company’s internal communications data—such as shared emails between employees—can stop potential harassment or discrimination issues in their tracks. Additionally, AI has the capability to learn and predict common behaviors between your employees with machine learning.

For existing cases of misconduct, AI can assess the correspondence of an employee against whom a complaint has been made—say, a driver for a ridesharing service—AI could automatically compare keywords from that employee’s texts, emails, and internal correspondences to those of past cases of harassment, and flag words and phrases that could be good predictors of inappropriate behavior.

Improve workforce diversity with an information architecture

In order to make analytics-influenced workforce diversity changes, it is important to have proper information architecture in place to collect and manage your employee data under a single platform. This will make it much easier to perform analysis of your data, as well as integrate the predictive AI and machine learning tools as previously described. Solutions like the Solix CDP (Common Data Platform) can manage all of your employee data—from ingestion to analysis—securely and efficiently, by leveraging enterprise archiving and data lake technologies. Hosted on the cloud, on-premises, or both, the Solix CDP gives you full control of your data.

Don’t be afraid to look into your data to improve diversity within your organization—by doing so, you are helping to create and influence workplaces that are more comfortable, productive, and compassionate—driven by data.