NEW YORK, Sept. 26, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TrustSphere, a recognized market leader in Relationship Analytics and passive Organizational Network Analytics (ONA), today announced the launch of the company’s new Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) MRI offering. Designed to deliver actionable diagnostic insights, the TrustSphere D&I MRI is a market first, providing meaningful inclusiveness measures using passive ONA signals.
According to McKinsey’s “Women in the Workplace” report, women account for only 20 percent of C-Suite roles, despite making up 48 percent of the U.S. workforce. Unconscious bias is a significant driver of this gender gap. The initial release of TrustSphere D&I MRI focuses on gender differences in networks and relationships across an organization, with additional features in development. Unlike other offerings, it has been developed to detect and address unconscious bias at the organizational and team level rather than at an individual level. Understanding network behavior in an organization is critical to understanding how systemic relationships drive the likelihood of outcomes such as promotion and retention – key factors for closing the gender gap at all levels.
Using TrustSphere’s core Relationship Analytics technology, the solutions leverages communication metadata to uncover network homophily, a well-established ONA construct, whereby individuals and groups exhibit a preference to be connected with others that share common attributes, e.g., the tendency for men to build networks with other men and vice versa for women. Detecting and understanding the operation of homophily at a network level allows an organization to move beyond merely increasing diverse representation to driving sustainable behavioral change that results in inclusive networks, teams and leadership.
Dr. Karen Stephenson, Social Network Analysis pioneer and head of TrustSphere’s Science Advisory Board, commented, “We are introducing a new scientific tool for CHROs and managers to assess the overall health of diversity and inclusion (D&I) in their corporate cultures. Much like an MRI, this "D&I MRI" captures the nuance and complexity of inclusiveness using evidence-based data and rapidly makes it available for diagnosing organizational health.”
Analyzing both intra-team and inter-team networks, the D&I MRI statistically assesses the overall level of homophily of a group or team, the inverse being the networks’ diversity. The D&I MRI provides a leading indicator to evaluate levels of organizational inclusiveness. Adjusting for the underlying population distribution, statistically significant deviations and changes over time, the D&I MRI produces a quarterly report which stands as an empirical measurement of an organization’s existing networks. Identifying teams that are less inclusive allows organizations to prioritize initiatives to improve overall performance. The technology only analyzes groups of 20 or more individuals to ensure data privacy is always respected.
Industry analyst Josh Bersin shared, “TrustSphere’s solution sheds light on D&I using network analytics to provide visibility into inclusiveness, a characteristic difficult to empirically measure. This is an impressive move and one that promises to evolve as we approach the future of work.”
Empirical data from TrustSphere’s work indicates that teams with greater levels of network diversity and inclusiveness produce more high performers than those teams with lower levels.
TrustSphere CEO Manish Goel said, “Ensuring network inclusiveness is not just an essential goal of D&I initiatives, but also correlates with business growth, innovation and social impact. Using the D&I MRI, organizations can, for the first time, identify levels of network diversity and inclusiveness – at scale – allowing them to connect systemic D&I initiatives to outcomes in terms of sustainable behavioral change.”
About TrustSphere
TrustSphere is the widely recognized market leader in Relationship Analytics. It helps organizations leverage a most valuable asset – their collective relationship network. By analyzing log data from enterprise communication and collaboration systems such as email, and using advanced data science and machine learning, TrustSphere builds and maintains an enterprise’s own relationship graph. Leveraging the science of Organizational Network Analysis, TrustSphere measures the social capital of individual employees, of teams and of organizations as a whole. This rich set of analytics surface insights which help our clients across the globe address key business challenges including workforce productivity, sales force effectiveness and enterprise-wide collaboration and D&I.
Current uses of our workforce analytics solutions include measuring the impact of leadership development, identifying high potentials, understanding finding hidden influencers, accelerating new staff onboarding and measuring the effectiveness of inclusion and diversity programs. Our ground-breaking solutions, processed using its proprietary technology platform, are deployed through an increasing number of technology and business partners including Visier, Salesforce.com and leading management consulting partners.