Organisational culture is one of the most important topics in the post-covid world. The world of employment, especially in technology, is faced with many pressures, from new modes of working all the way to economic shifts. This means that keeping employees happy is key in attracting and retaining the best people, but also building impactful teams.
The world of data science in HR and organisational culture is growing as well. Data science can provide unique insights which otherwise be hidden. In this report we will examine how the Tesseract Academy data science team helped an organisation extract useful insights from HR data on sensitive topics such as gender and racial bias.
The problem: Data science, HR and bias
The Tesseract Team was commissioned to use data science in order to better understand how different demographics affect behaviours within an organisation. The client is a startup that is working with corporates who want to better understand the inner workings of their organisational culture.
The client provides questionnaires to the employees of corporates in order to examine questions such as:
- Is there gender bias?
- Is there racial bias?
- Are there managerial issues?
- Is there anything blocking progress?
- Are there any departments that seem to operate better than others, and why?
The result of this process is a massive amount of data, with multiple answers from employees within many different functions. The client also has access to sensitive demographic data such as gender, age, and race.
The client is primarily interested in identifying biases, so the management team can them mitigate them or deal with them. This requires going through a large volume of complex data to find the right answer.
From a data point of view, the major challenge here is that there are multiple interactions and confounders, which might not always be visible at first sight. Therefore, before going to the management, the company needs to be 100% sure that a variable like gender or age really does affect behaviours (within the organisation) in a certain way.
The solution: Interpretable AI and machine learning
The Tesseract Academy data science team worked on a proprietary AI algorithm to achieve the desired outcome.
The algorithm performs the following:
- It goes through all the questions, and fits a statistical model to measure the interaction between demographic variables, and the responses.
- It then applies a machine learning model, to summarise all the statistical models applied in step 1.
- Finally, it applies an interpretable AI methodology, in order to distill the effect of each demographic feature, such as age or gender.
The end result allows us to analyse any dataset within less than 30 minutes (even bigger ones), and distill all important factors.
The impact: Data science in HR and organisational culture
The impact of this exercise is clear. The client company can go back to its clients with a distilled summary of results and more confidence, than ever, that they are delivering the right results.
Since the client started working with the Tesseract Academy, they’ve experienced excellent growth, and is currently in the process of raising a big investment round, and closing some new big clients.
The Tesseract Academy is proud to support organisations of all sizes in their journey through AI, data science and blockchain. If you want to work with us and learn how we can help you, please get in touch. We will be very happy to speak with you!
