Talent trends: Incorporating talent diversity into your contingent workforce management program improves business performance

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As the global economy continues to react to recent economic- and pandemic-related shocks, organizations must shift how they define, find and retain talent. In many cases, this means incorporating more remote work and using more contingent labor, like temporary workers, contractors, gig workers and freelancers. Talent management technology also has evolved to meet market demands, offering solutions around talent diversity.

“Talent diversity is no longer a ‘nice-to-have,’ but is now a requirement to attract and retain workers in all categories. Incorporating talent diversity into your contingent workforce management program is now a strategic focus for business growth, but not many companies look at it that way when they start,” said William T. Rolack, Sr.,Workforce Logiq’s Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion.

Until now, contingent workforce diversity typically revolved around supplier diversity status with little thought given to the diversity of the actual people working within an organization. While there is still a need to focus on suppliers, the shift from diversity business strategy to diversity people strategy is even more important to driving tangible, significant change.

As a result, some forward-thinking contingent workforce management (CWM) program providers have begun to incorporate ways to improve diversity into recruiting, retention and management support. Several have pushed even further into data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) specifically geared toward creating competitive pipelines of diverse talent.

Workforce Logiq, a global workforce solutions provider, has developed这是一个人工智能驱动的解决方案，专门致力于帮助企业提高员工多样性绩效。该公司拥有一支由数据科学家、人才经济学家和商业智能专家组成的专职员工队伍，他们正在创新和增强他们的总体人才智能引擎，这是一个适当的专利模块，在其所有员工管理解决方案中嵌入了数据、分析和见解功能。

为了进一步了解Workforce Logiq如何利用大数据和人工智能来改善客户的多元化招聘实践，我们与Rolack，Sr.进行了交谈。

Q&A

Spend Matters: Workforce Logiq is enabling and empowering clients to manage their contingent labor forces in a way that more fully incorporates diversity. Where do you begin this change process?

William T. Rolack, Sr.:我们从一个扩大的对话开始，讨论他们目前是如何进入员工队伍的，这样他们就可以衡量自己的位置，并定义组织的成功。我们想确保他们看到的是总数可获得的workforce — one that reflects the demographics of communities where they live and work, and of the country as a whole. This ensures there is a diverse slate that includes LGBTQ individuals, people with disabilities, veterans and other groups that move them beyond equal employment opportunity categories. Then we talk about how to improve their overall corporate diversity strategy and their go-to-market tactics, including how to position their internal and external messaging.

When clients understand the extent of your suggested changes, are they receptive? How do you ensure the complex nature of the process doesn’t become an impediment?

Change is always difficult, but it is most successful when senior leadership makes the commitment to look at it from a much broader perspective. For most organizations, diversity has been used as content on websites, often focused on more tactical messaging, like support of cultural celebrations. Our job is to help clients understand their broader opportunities and the impacts those can have on their business performance, employee satisfaction and retention, and the communities where they live and work. We help them see beyond their current position and advise on the actions that support commitments to all stakeholders.

How do you make sure you're truly looking at diversity in an effective way?

我们的经验——部分基于客户对话——已经确定了组织在其多样性之旅中所经历的相当一致的五个层次的演变。这一过程通常从合规开始，最终目标是真正的业务整合，让我们的客户成为其行业和部门的领导者。我们的工作是找出他们在这段旅程中的位置。考虑到他们的商业模式、地理位置和其他关键因素，我们帮助他们围绕自己的目标、竞争对手的表现和实际机会建立基准。

第一级以合规性为中心，因为法规和法律要求会影响很多公司。例如，围绕《美国残疾人法案》制定了合规政策，与在职退伍军人合作，并为同性伴侣提供福利。这些基本的保护措施使人们能够在工作场所确认自己的个人身份。

When companies reach level two, there is a greater focus on activities — like multi-cultural celebrations that reflect their employees — which can foster inclusion for their diverse workforce. We have found that this is often where the journey stops.

在大多数情况下，第三级涉及多样性的经济价值，以及它如何影响工作场所、劳动力和社会责任。最近的研究和数据表明，多元化如何积极影响以人为中心的重点多元化项目带来的收入收益、生产力提高和成本节约。全球咨询公司麦肯锡发现万博体育下载apporganizations with gender-diverse executive teamswere 21% more likely to have above-average profitability and 27% more likely to outperform their competition with regard to long-term value creation. Recent Wall Street Journal research indicates thatstocks of companies with strong diversity metrics outperformthose from companies with low diversity scores.

Once companies understand how diversity improves performance, they are much more open to moving to level four. Now, organizations can use their diverse resources to create innovation teams, which allow them to include internal voices to define and execute business plans and solve complex business problems. Diversity councils and resource groups should include a broad range of demographics, tenures and roles within the business. Their interactions lead to more innovation across the organization, creating new best practices and identifying untapped growth opportunities — all while improving worker satisfaction and retention.

第五个层次由真正的业务集成定义，这是一个组织内部的持续过程，不应被视为短期目标。对于达到这一水平的组织来说，多样性成为内部成功的驱动因素、销售工具和竞争优势。

如果一个企业致力于发展，他们会看到什么样的即时和长期利益？

Incorporating true diversity practices improves business performance, but not many companies look at it that way when they start. Something as seemingly simple as celebrating culture can increase retention and create higher-performing teams. When people feel included and safe, they are more likely to commit to and participate in their organization’s success in deeper ways.

In the longer term, companies see productivity gains, cost savings and revenue growth. One often-overlooked benefit is new business opportunity. Increasingly, companies may be excluded from the buying process, including RFIs and RFPs, if they are not seriously addressing social responsibility, diversity and inclusion. If companies choose not to engage in diversity initiatives, they cannot even enter some bidding processes, and risk losing revenue and market share.

What prompted Workforce Logiq to broaden its offerings to include data analytics and AI specifically focused on diversity? What does your solution offer?

从我们的客户和marketpl需求增加ace around diversity led us to create an AI-powered solution — IQ Talent Diversity. It is the first solution of its kind in the CWM industry and gives our clients the edge they need to identify, attract and retain diverse talent. Not only does our technology infer gender and race, but it also provides diversity benchmarks by role, company, industry, region, country — and predicts the risk of talent leaving an organization. With our predictive workforce management solutions, our clients gain the competitive edge to retain diverse talent and develop talent pipelines to support their diversity initiatives — whether it is a direct placement or transitioning a temporary worker to permanent employment.

While Workforce Logic’s solutions are primarily geared toward a company’s contingent workforce, have you seen the information you share make its way into the permanent workforce?

绝对地我们发现，我们的客户经常看到代表性不足的员工的数据和新管道如何超越采购，进入人力资源领域。当我们的客户能够绘制他们的内部员工数据时，可以改进他们的招聘方法。当不同的临时工转变为永久员工时，临时劳动力的改善会给永久劳动力带来变化。

How does your solution help large national companies deal with diversity across multiple markets? What accommodations can be made in the data?

Companies can talk about their successes around diversity from a more informed place. Before looking at the granular data, they may have believed they were doing poorly overall when they were actually successful in certain markets. Smaller cities will provide different worker pools than large metropolitan areas, and different regions of the US are home to different available pools of workers. So, companies need to know these particulars to establish benchmarks for current performance and future goals.

当公司可以将数据解析成更小的片段时，他们可以讲述一个完全不同的故事。这些见解非常宝贵。他们可以看到他们多样性的丰富性，也可以发现他们漏掉了谁。所有类别和维度都需要包括在内。

Companies that have over-indexed in certain areas can reset their methodologies. And companies need to realize that it's not about eliminating the presence of one group, but about including a larger number of groups.

This Brand Studio article was written with Workforce Logiq.