Aleria was founded out of a deep-rooted desire to bridge the gap between diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and organizational success.
In an interview with
Website Planet, Paolo Gaudiano, after years of consulting and academic work, recognized the need for a more data-driven approach to DEI, one that could directly link employee experiences to company performance. Inspired by the disconnect he observed in discussions about diversity in marketing, Paolo set out to create a solution that could quantify and optimize inclusion within workplaces.
This mission culminated in Aleria, a company dedicated to helping organizations become more profitable while fostering a happier and more diverse workforce.
What inspired the founding of Aleria and what is its core mission?
Aleria’s core mission is to help organizations understand how to become more profitable while creating a happier, more diverse workforce—without costly guesswork and with no backlash.
I began working on these ideas in 2015. I had spent the prior 20+ years doing a combination of academic work, consulting, and entrepreneurship. Between 2001 and 2015 I worked in a consulting firm where we used a unique analytical approach to help leading corporations, government agencies, and foundations solve challenging business problems.
For example, we helped health insurance company Humana design better products and better marketing strategies for seniors using Medicare plans. We helped the U.S. Navy understand how to figure out how to plan and manage its sailors to ensure their long-term ability to have the right people in the right place at the right time. We worked with the Kellogg Foundation with an initiative to help young adults from socioeconomically disadvantaged groups get the training and experience they needed to get into meaningful careers.
In most of our projects, our strength was being able to link the behaviors and attitudes of individuals to the overall performance of their organization.
On the personal side, I had been interested in issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion for many years, but I always felt that as a white man, I would not be able to contribute meaningfully.
One day during a large marketing conference, I was attending a session on diversity in marketing. I was struck by the huge gap between, on one hand, the detailed experiences shared by the panelists, and on the other, the vague ideas people had about how to solve these problems, such as “we have to dismantle structural biases” or “we have to change the hearts and minds of corporate leaders.” That’s when the lightbulb went off: maybe my years of research and consulting could be applied to quantify the link between how companies treat their employees, and how the resulting employee behaviors impact the success of the company. I literally dropped everything I was doing, spent about a year doing research, and convinced myself that I was onto something amazing. Two years later, I founded Aleria.
How does Aleria use technology to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations?
As I developed the science and technology to quantify the link between individual experiences and behaviors, I realized that what impacts people and organizations is not simply the identity traits of individuals, but rather how their day-to-day workplace experiences are influenced by those identity traits. So it wasn’t enough to know the percentages of representation of different groups: we had to know what was happening to people and use that information to understand how that impacted both their satisfaction and the success of the company.
Along the way, we have developed three different technology components. The first is our Inclusion Impact Calculator, which can estimate the opportunity loss for any company that results from different levels of inclusion or satisfaction for different groups of workers. We use this platform as part of our Discover Inclusion, the first stage of an organization’s journey toward inclusion, to help leadership understand the importance of inclusion and the potential ROI of becoming more inclusive.
The next platform is our Measuring Inclusion platform, which we use in the second stage of work to Assess Inclusion. This platform is how we collected inclusion data anonymously from employees, which we then analyzed to identify specific opportunities for organizations to raise their level of inclusion.
The third platform is our Inclusion Navigator, an interactive dashboard where we can really drill down into the data to provide detailed insights and recommendations for specific initiatives that address the problem areas we identified in the State of Inclusion. This platform supports organizations that want to move to the next stage of the journey and implement Inclusion.
These platforms achieve the three key ingredients that every organization needs to make DEI work for them: gain buy-in and enthusiastic support from the leadership, measure what matters, and create an implementation roadmap.
What key features set Aleria apart from other DEI measurement tools?
Probably the most important difference comes from our early realization that diversity, by itself, is not a good metric. I have suggested in my writing that company leaders should think of diversity as the equivalent of the balance sheet: it is a snapshot in time that shows your mixture of assets, which are the result of everything that has happened up to that moment.
Inclusion, in contrast, is like cash flow: it is the daily experiences that cause the satisfaction of employees to fluctuate up and down. And just as the flow of cash ultimately impacts the balance sheet, inclusion impacts diversity. Put more simply, I like to say that “inclusion is what you do, diversity is what you get.”
From a purely practical perspective, then, the biggest difference is that we measure inclusion instead of measuring diversity. But we also differ dramatically from most other organizations that measure inclusion, because they almost always focus on measuring the feeling of inclusion as self-reported by employees. However, the feeling of inclusion of an individual is the result of everything that happens to them, and simply knowing the feeling is not very useful: imagine going to a doctor who only asks you “On a scale of one to ten, how healthy do you feel?” Clearly that would be largely useless.
Instead, doctors ask you to describe specific symptoms and the possible causes of your symptoms. We essentially do the same thing, in a way that generates a combination of quantitative and qualitative data: the quantitative data tells us where the biggest opportunities lie, while the qualitative data tells exactly what is happening—which makes it much easier to figure out what needs to be done.
Through our work, we realized that focusing on inclusion offers many benefits, but probably the biggest one is that it completely removes the resentment and sense of reverse discrimination that is fueling the current wave of backlash against DEI. This is because we are bucketing experiences, not people. When we find situations that create uncomfortable experiences for some employees, we almost always find that these experiences impact most types of employees. Hence creating more inclusive environments ultimately benefits everyone—but especially those who were the most excluded.
One of my greatest satisfactions is giving presentations at the start and end of projects, and seeing the enthusiasm of everyone in the audience, regardless of their role, seniority, or personal identity.
Can you share a success story where Aleria’s solutions significantly impacted an organization’s DEI efforts?
In my forthcoming book, Measuring Inclusion: Higher Profits and Happier People, without guesswork or backlash, I have a chapter that provides details on five case studies, ranging from a 50-person startup to global pharmaceutical leader AstraZeneca. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most visible result came from the startup, where the organization was able to go through three cycles of measuring inclusion, identifying the biggest opportunities, creating an initiative to address that opportunity, and then measuring again to find the next opportunity.
In addition to being able to solve specific problems and seeing the results in the data, they noticed a dramatic increase in their retention rates as employees really liked the commitment to inclusion and tangible improvements. And they also saw improvements in their recruitment, as people heard about their inclusive practices and wanted to join.
With larger companies like AstraZeneca, change is less visible, first because we were working with a single function, and also because with larger companies it takes much longer to get approvals and implement initiatives. Nonetheless, a clear indicator of the success of our work is that most of our clients (including AstraZeneca) have come back for additional engagements.
I am also particularly proud of a collaboration with the nonprofit Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS), with whom we launched the first-ever sector-wide State of Inclusion Benchmark.
This project had us collecting data from roughly 1,000 employees from a combination of individual members and employees of WiCyS partner organizations. Being able to establish a benchmark for the entire field of cybersecurity has been a phenomenal experience that we believe will lead to profound system-level changes for the entire sector.
How does Aleria ensure the accuracy and effectiveness of its assessments and recommendations?
Measuring inclusion works very differently than measuring diversity. In terms of assessment, diversity takes a very long time to change, and change can be extremely gradual, so you need lots of data and high degrees of accuracy (which sadly often still lead to disappointing results).
When we assess inclusion, the data often shows massive differences in inclusion scores across groups. For instance, when we calculate the “exclusion score” for men and women, we often see factors of 2x or more. The issue here is never about accuracy, it’s about looking for things that really stand out so that you can pinpoint the greatest opportunities for improvement.
In terms of recommendations, it’s a bit funny when people ask us because I am not aware of any diversity measurement that can actually recommend any specific action: typically all you know is that you don’t have enough of a certain kind of people, or that retention rates or satisfaction levels are different.
In fact, one of the big disappointments of DEI activities is when companies make a lot of effort to collect data, and then do absolutely nothing about it—because the data tells them that there is a problem, but not what the source is, or how to fix it.
In contrast, when you measure inclusion you identify very specific opportunities to improve. For instance, you may find that a lot of people complain that they are not being invited to meetings in which decisions are made that impact them. If that’s the case, create a policy that anyone organizing a meeting has to check a spreadsheet to make sure all the right people are invited.
Or perhaps you find that a lot of people complain that project assignments are done informally and always favor one or two individuals liked by a manager. In this case, establish a more formal process to assign projects, and be sure to track the data to spot biases.
We are so accustomed to a world dominated by statistics that we obsess about accuracy and forget that statistics is simply telling us about macro patterns, but completely hide the details of what is actually happening at the individual level that gives rise to those macro patterns.
What new features or initiatives is Aleria excited to introduce in the future?
In 2024 we launched a beta version of our Inclusion Impact Calculator. We are currently working with a select group of DEI leaders from some amazing corporations, and plan to release an official version in early 2025. We also released the first version of our Inclusion Navigator platform for interactive data analysis and visualization. In the future, one big plan is to combine these two parts of our platform, so that after measuring inclusion, a company can link inclusion data with HR data such as retention rates, engagement, compensation, etc., to create a much more granular assessment of opportunity losses and ROI of very specific initiatives.
But perhaps the most exciting thing for me is that on September 24, 2024, my book is coming out. The book brings together the work and ideas that went into developing Aleria and its offerings, it provides real-world case studies, sample data, and step-by-step instructions for organizations that want to measure inclusion on their own, and it also includes candid discussions of some of the reasons behind the current backlash, and why I am optimistic that, armed with the new data and analytics, we will be able to move beyond the backlash to create greater inclusion, sustainable diversity, and economic prosperity across many parts of our society.
Find out more at:
www.aleria.tech
