1. General

Category

Category

Other

Please describe Other

All Industries – the tool can support decent work, gender and racial equality at Government, Non-profit and any for profit company globally

2. Project Details

Company or Institution

Diversio

Project

Equalby30 – Gender Equity in the Energy Sector

General description of the AI solution

Diversio is a consulting and technology company that leverages data analytics, artificial intelligence and extensive consulting expertise to help organizations achieve diversity & inclusion in the workplace. We are the provider of choice for international bodies, development banks/financial institutions, enterprise, and government.

Some of our international corporate clients include OLX Group, Honda, Accenture, ViacomCBS and Danone. Some of our government clients include Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Sweden. Some of our NGO clients include the Investor Leadership Network, the International Energy Agency, and Diversity VC. Diversio is endorsed by several international organizations including the Human Resources Professional Association, the Institutional Limited Partner Association, and the U.K. Rose Review. In 2020, Diversio was one of just five companies to win a World Summit Award in the category of Inclusion and Empowerment.

We work with clients to analyze, improve and track diversity & inclusion. Our competitive advantage includes:

Experience working with 500+ organizations globally ranging in size from 50 to 80,000 employees.
Proprietary benchmarking data from 21,000 companies around the world
A Recommendation Engine that leverages technology and expert knowledge to match organizations with customized solutions tailored to their unique D&I challenges and organizational environments
Unparalleled analytic capabilities developed in partnership with academic institutions like the Turing Institute (London, U.K.) and the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Canada)

Diversio has a proven track record of driving significant advancement in diversity & inclusion using a powerful combination of technology and human expertise.

Diversio brings the full power of insight and analytics through our proprietary dashboard solution, which consists of a diagnostic and a Recommendation Engine. Our award-winning dashboard is powered by a unique global database and machine learning algorithms. Our tech-driven approach also gives the flexibility to adapt to regional requirements and languages.

Website

https://diversio.com/

Organisation

Diversio

3. Aspects

Excellence and Scientific Quality: Please detail the improvements made by the nominee or the nominees’ team or yourself if your applying for the award, and why they have been a success.

Diversio assesses 5 Inclusion Key Performance Likert scale. Employee responses are aggregated and weighted to produce 5 KPI scores which, combined, constitute the overall Inclusion Score™. To generate the KPI scores, Diversio's algorithm categorizes respondents into the dominant or non-dominant group according to their self identified demographic profile.

To identify main pain points, Diversio leverages propietary Machine Learning (ML) algorithism. The ML capabilities were developed first by assessing thousands of free text responses collected from employees when I asked the question "in your opinion, what could your organization do better to advance diversity and inclusion?" Diversity as team carefully analyzed the responses to the above question to identify the most common pain points cited by individuals.

Once the pain points were establish diversity of analyst and researchers underwent a systemic data labeling exercise to manually label over 10,000 rows of employee free text according to corresponding pain points. After this process was complete diversity Jose I specialist and data scientist partnered with a I academics from Dalhousie University and the University of Waterloo to train an ML algorithm on this data.

Diversio uses the most recent ML advances to create a framework such as neural language models the resulting algorithm can accurately assess and quantify all the free text collected from organizations enabling to Diversio to understand patterns of behavior and systemic biases with high granularity while adding significant context and color to KPI scores.

After Diversio's algorithms identify relevant pain points using employee feedback they are quantified and integrated into a reporting scorecard. Diversio regularly renews the scores to determine progress and inform adjustments or iterations of a companies DNA strategy and action plan. The approach ensures that the metrics used to track progress across each organization are highly customized while remaining standardized across industry that's enabling robust benchmarking and reporting.

Scaling of impact to SDGs: Please detail how many citizens/communities and/or researchers/businesses this has had or can have a positive impact on, including particular groups where applicable and to what extent.

Our framework has been validated and impacted over 500 organizations and over 100,000 employees across the globe.

Scaling of AI solution: Please detail what proof of concept or implementations can you show now in terms of its efficacy and how the solution can be scaled to provide a global impact ad how realistic that scaling is.

At the organizational level, policies promoting diversity and inclusive practices produce a higher competitive advantage, increased productivity, attraction & retention of the best talent, employee satisfaction & loyalty, and better business performance & practices. Based on the need for a validated assessment tool that identifies workplace factors and their impact on D&I, the Diversio Diversity and Inclusion Survey (DDIS) was developed.

Through a meta analysis conducted by Diversio, a systemic literature review of relevant D&I academic research to date allowed us to isolate the key drivers of D&I internally in organizations. Additionally, our internal dataset and public data from more than 20,000 companies worldwide, analyzing feedback from over 50,000 employees and 30 countries, Diversio has identified and validated the six defining characteristics of a highly inclusive workplace.

Between January and December 2019, a total of 11,027 respondents across 18 organizations took part in the survey as a part of a validation test conducted by Dr. Bigelow and Dr. Igboanugo at the University of Waterloo. For the internal consistency of the DDIS, the Cronbach’s alpha for the survey was 0.840, with all item-total correlation greater than 0.5, indicating a high chance of questions reflecting the concept being measured.

Ethical aspect: Please detail the way the solution addresses any of the main ethical aspects, including trustworthiness, bias, gender issues, etc.

Product Methodology
The Framework and Psychometric properties behind Diversio’s Diversity and Inclusion Survey (DDIS) was validated over an 8-month research effort conducted by scholars at the University of Waterloo School of Public Health. In their validation of the DDIS, Dr. Phil Bigelow and Somkene Igboanugo, conducted a meta-analysis of published literature on diversity & inclusion as well as provided a psychometric evaluation of the DDIS by investigating its internal consistency. Based on the findings, the DDIS was shown to be extremely robust, with a reliable Cronbach’s alpha of 0.84. The high internal consistency observed with the DDIS speaks to its use as a reliable measure of D&I as perceived by employees in the workplace.
Recommendation Engine
The Recommendation Engine represents a one-of-a-kind piece of intellectual property that was created over an 18-month period. During this time, Diversio’s analysts worked alongside University of Toronto researchers to systematically collect every D&I solution used by organizations globally and available on the market today.
Diversio’s database contains every tool, policy, program and solution used by organizations worldwide to drive diversity & inclusion. This information was scraped from data repositories, company websites, reports, public records, etc.
The Engine ranks every solution based on a set of criteria (e.g. size, sector, region of organization where the solution is most effective; specific problem addressed by solution; target group; validation through academic studies; etc.)
Through this tool and in-house expertise, companies are matched with customized recommendations that take into account a company’s unique circumstances and specific problem areas identified in the diagnostics section.
The database is continuously updated by the product team, with one or two researchers dedicated to building out solutions at all times.

Addressing Unconscious Bias
To address unconscious bias in the Recommendation Engine we brought together a diverse set of minds to develop the product. This included racial, ethnic, gender, sexual identity, age, nationality, cognitive styles and other forms of diversity. Once the framework was developed, we validated it with academic partners and experts in the space. We continue to stress-test the tool several times annually to ensure its robustness. Of course, all technology is still susceptible to implicit bias, and thus, we have always retained a highly qualified consultant to review and vet all recommendations to ensure that only proven, best-in-class solutions are suggested to our clients.
Benchmarking
In addition to organizational scoring, Diversio provides our clients with rigorous benchmarking against relevant peer groups. Powered by our dataset of over 21,000 global organizations, Diversio is able to create customized benchmarks for each client, tailored to each organization’s comparison goals and overall best fit.
Diversio’s benchmarking data is drawn from direct client engagements and partnerships, as well as publicly available data captured and collated by our proprietary AI systems.
Inclusion Scorecard
Based on experience data and research across more than 500 companies in 30 countries, Diversio has identified six Inclusion Metrics that may be tracked to ensure diverse employees are being valued and treated equitably.

Adding diverse perspectives to your team only works if employees are able to share them without judgement. Inclusion means that everyone in an organization can advance meritocratically without having to face barriers or discrimination. When employees do not feel included, they are unable to do their best work.

Diversio’s 6 Point inclusion framework:
Inclusive Culture- Does your team value your opinion?
Fair Management- Are your managers fair towards you compared to your colleagues?
Career Development- Is someone invested in your growth and development such as a mentor or sponsor?
Workplace Flexibility- Do you have enough flexibility to manage personal and professional obligations?
Workplace Safety- Is your workplace free from harassment of any kind?
Recruiting & Hiring- This is an objective measure of incoming class diversity

Diversio’s inclusion framework is at the core of its Inclusion Scorecard. Green and red arrows on the dashboard indicate strengths and weaknesses on inclusion. They are generated through an algorithm which identifies areas within an organization that are:
o strongest/weakest overall and
o strongest/weakest relative to industry peers.

Supporting Gender, Racial, LGBTQ, and those with a Disability through the opportunity for equality at work is at the very core of what we do.