A recent study by Staffing Industry Analysts shows that 63% of business leaders expect diversity, equity, and inclusion to become a higher priority. Research has already proven that gender and ethnic diversity improve organizational performance. More and more businesses are attempting to improve upon workforce diversity for social good.

The Challenge Behind Increasing Workforce Diversity

Perhaps the greatest challenge behind increasing workforce diversity lies in the fact that providers and practitioners often try to take this on without accurate and necessary information to successfully combat this challenge. If they have inaccurate information to begin the process around their workforce’s current diversity, they have little chance of truly addressing it in a way to improve that diversity.

In addition, they often don’t get the needed resources to put toward this challenge, further complicating an organization’s efforts to improve their workforce diversity. This is likely a key reason why a CEIPAL market research report states that only 11% of staffing firms are currently tracking and/or reporting their contingent workforce diversity metrics.

As a result, workforce diversity is not improved as much as is expected or hoped for because decision makers within these organizations are not truly aware of how diverse their current workforces are, so they are unaware of how much progress they must make to reach their goals.

What Indotronix is Doing to Combat This Challenge

Indotronix International Corporation, a minority-owned company and part of the Indotronix Avani Group, uses CEIPAL’s AI driven DEI assessment tool to provide corporations with a better understanding of workforce diversity. The tool uses a simple and non-intrusive way to quickly and accurately assess diversity in any workforce. The only piece of data essential to the analysis is the list of the worker’s first name and last name. Also, if you add location, job titles and wages the tool can provide equity and inclusion metrics.

The tool can break down an organization’s workforce by gender, race, and ethnicity. This tool has been shown to have an 80-90% accuracy level in its gender identification reports and a 70 - 75% accuracy level in its ethnicity identification reports.

What the DEI Assessment Tool Provides to Organizations

Indotronix and CEIPAL’s CEO Sameer Penakalapati points out that self-reporting by an organization’s workforce often leads to a very low response rate at best. As a result, this form of response doesn’t give actionable insight into the diversity makeup of the workforce, and it gives no real understanding into the diversity of the organization’s contingent workforce. Today’s contingent worker could go on to become an organization’s full-time employee hence it is essential to understand that that as well.

CEIPAL’s AI based DEI Assessment tool is based on publicly available data; the analysis is based off those numbers the employees supply, so it is based upon the entire workforce. Additionally, the tool is able to evaluate an organization’s workforce based on its gender, race and ethnicity, veterans, and disabled. It can also determine if there is wage equity. Sameer points out that the tool can help organizations realize if they really have wage equity; some organizations may appear to have this, but when they analyze it with this tool, they may find that there are many women at the associate entry-level (lowest-paid) position, while there are fewer men who are paid a higher wage as managers, directors, and other high-level positions. Thus, the organization actually has wage disparity or inequity because of the disproportionate number of women at lower-level, lower-income paying positions versus men at higher-level, higher-income paying positions.

Indotronix President Venkat Mantha points out that when it comes to a corporation’s suppliers, the DEI assessment tool can analyze their suppliers DEI goals, and who their best supplier is in terms of bringing diverse workers into the organization, in addition to who is falling short of the organization’s diversity goals. This type of analysis has been absent from most organizations reporting, having no real way to measure this important statistic among an organization’s suppliers and its entire workforce.

Director of Marketing at Indotronix Anu Rao asserts that the diversity assessment tool can also provide a diverse view into the applicant pool for a particular position. The AI tool can quickly analyze the profiles of the applicants in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity.

Sameer indicates that the AI based DEI assessment tool was built to analyze the processes within an organization to see if a company is really building a diverse supplier base and workforce the way it was intended. It can do it in a more time-efficient and cost-efficient way than any human-based system could.

What Organizations Must Do With the DEI AI Tool Data to Improve Diversity

  Venkat adds that the appropriate decision-makers still have to take the decisive action necessary to build diversity within their organization based on the insights they have gained from the trend analyses this tool can provide to them. We gain deeper insights into our organizations to know whether they are as truly diverse as we’d like to think and hope they are; with this tool and the data that is input into it, we can now have a better idea of knowing whether that is truly the case or not and how to go about closing the gaps that do exist if they do.