Make Inclusion your business strategy
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has been the ‘talk of the town’ for several years now. When I say town, I mean that globally, huge companies such as McKinsey, Bloomberg, and Amazon, as well as academic institutions, and reporters [Forbes, Harvard Business Review] have all been publishing research on the space. They’ve found inclusive teams are up to 35% more productive, and have 2.6x higher retention rates. Diverse workplaces make better investment decisions and in general, the places doing DEI properly see greater ROI. So, with a huge market for this stuff, where are the gaps? Where does this project fit in?
Well, glad you asked. We spent several months speaking to heads of inclusion, independent authors, DEI consultancy directors, and lots and lots of employees finding out what was going on behind the scenes. The problem we discovered was a data one. Despite the hype and the spending and the efforts to recruit, hire, and retain diversity and build an inclusive work culture, a lot of these programs are lacking the data they need to do this genuinely. Employees aren’t disclosing data, and a lot feel disconnected from talks, workshops, seminars, resource groups, and other initiatives at work. Leveraging the all-pervasive, LLM-powered chatbots that are so widely available these days, we propose Frankly, a conversational agent empowering employees to shape an inclusive work environment.