E34: Cultivating Diversity: Actionable Insights for Inclusive Organizational Culture

In this episode of the United in Accessibility podcast, we talk with expert Paolo Galliano about actionable strategies for promoting equity in workplaces. He emphasizes the importance of measuring inclusion as a key step toward fostering diversity.

Transcript

00:04 Speaker  

Welcome to the United in Accessibility podcast, the podcast where we dive deep into the latest in accessibility and inclusion. Today, we are honored to introduce Paolo Gaudiano. Paolo is Co-founder of Aleria, a diversity, equity and inclusion tech company that helps organizations become more successful by measuring inclusion and ARC, a nonprofit focused on DEI research. He is also an Adjunct at NYU Stern School of Business and chair of the annual D&I Research Conference. With advanced degrees in aerospace engineering and neuroscience. Paolo likes to joke that he had already done rocket science and brain surgery before turning to a really complex problem: How to convince business leaders that they can make more money by creating more inclusive organizations with happier and more diverse employees. A sought- after public speaker with two TEDx Talks, Paolo is the author of the 2024 book: Measuring inclusion, and a regular Forbes contributor. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Moonshot House Fellowship from the Kravis Center for Social Impact in 2019, a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 1996, and a Neuroscience fellowship from the Sloan Foundation in 1992. Join us as we delve into Paolo's mission to get people to start measuring inclusion and equity on the United in Accessibility podcast.

01:32 Christopher Michael Lee  

Paolo is great to have you here. My name is Christopher Lee, I'm with IAAP and this is a podcast focused on United in Accessibility. And it is great to have you here today, your bio looks just crazy. I can't tell you how crazy it looks. You have been all over the place. You've done some work as a rocket scientist, brain surgery, you name it, you pretty much have done it. And now you're in accessibility, or inclusive environments in a sense. Tell us a little bit about your journey. I mean, how'd you get here? Where have you been? Really interesting.

02:12 Paolo Gaudiano  

Thank you, Christopher. It's a real pleasure to be here and an honor to be on this podcast. Yes, I have a bit of an unusual background. And in fact, when I do public speaking, I always like to start with what I jokingly call the white elephant in the room, which is me now this is a podcast, so you can't see me, but I'm white identify as white male, just gender, heterosexual I have no disabilities. And as such, you know, people wonder sometimes what I am doing working in diversity, equity and inclusion and you know, which is really my main field. And the story of that is that I began as an academic, as you read from my background, I was very polite word is interdisciplinary. And I think the true word is a bit scattered, like to dabble in a lot of different areas. I started out studying mathematics, but it was applied mathematics with a lot of engineering, then I fell in love with a brain, and I had an opportunity to do a master's degree in aerospace engineering. And I was actually involved with some experiments, we were supposed to fly some experiments on the space shuttle, I've actually been to some of the NASA Space Centers, unfortunately, then the Space Shuttle Program was, well unfortunately terminated because of the events in 1984, when the space shuttle Challenger blew up, but then I also, as I said, I was studying the brain and I and it wasn't the department because it was a professor that was studying neural networks. This was in the 1980s. And I thought, my God, the brain is just such a fascinating thing. And then I ended up doing a PhD in computational neuroscience and included a lot of actually working with, I was very interested in understanding how the retina works, I did some experiments, I did a lot of studies. And then eventually I ended up becoming a professor and I was studying things about cognitive science, I was trying to understand both how the brain works, but also was really fascinated by this idea of individuals within the collective. And I had started by looking at neurons in the brain, you know how you take a lot of neurons, and combine them so that we can do amazing things like learn to move and learn to see and speak with one another. And then eventually, I decided to leave academia, I was invited to become an entrepreneur to be chief scientist of a startup. And I became fascinated with the idea of a different kind of interaction between individual and collective, which was the interaction between people within organizations, people within society. And at that time, I got involved with a couple of projects that had to do with diversity equity and inclusion, even though at the time I was not thinking of it that way. And in parallel, I had been personally interested in those issues. I had seen how society treats people that are different, whether it's different because of racial aspects, whether it's different because of their disabilities, as the case might be. And I always thought, well, I'm either going to be an activist, or what can I possibly do as a white privilege, man? And then what happened is that in 2015, I was attending a conference and he would always go to these sessions on how to get more Black people into leadership roles, how to get more women into technology, and I was always struck by that stark contrast between are the individual experiences that people shared that happened to them because of their gender, their race, their disabilities, etc. and on the other hand, when it came to solutions were very vague, you know, we need to change the hearts and minds of corporate America, we need to change our educational system, we change our government. And as I sat there, thinking, you know, how do you link those two? How do you close that gap? The light bulb went off and I thought, well, wait a second, this is what I've been doing now for more than 20 years, first as a professor and then as an entrepreneur, and maybe I can apply my work to this particular space. So, I got all excited about it, I literally quit everything else that I was doing, I started to build these computer simulations, which have always been kind of the heart of my analytical work. And I can talk about those more later if you'd like, but basically, I proved to myself that it was on to something really exciting, where I had an opportunity to bring together the decades of experience that I had through academic work, business, corporate work, entrepreneurial work, and really bring them together in a space where I'm actually making a difference in society. So, the rest is history, I've actually maintained ties with academia, I still have some academic activities in this space. As an entrepreneur, I have a startup, but I also have a small, nonprofit research organization where we do some more core research. So, I really bring together all of the pieces of my background. And it feels great, because it feels like every day, I'm doing something meaningful, and I'm able to draw on what's now been more than 30 years of experience across all these domains.

06:19 Christopher Michael Lee  

You know, it's nice Paolo when you reach a certain age, and you're like, okay, it's coming together, right? I mean, the academia, the technology, the business aspect of it, and you're looking through different lenses. And, and not only are you looking at one lens, like you said that you've kept involved in multiple areas. So, talk to us a little bit about the startup, and then maybe feed into the nonprofit, and how your work is impacting others?

06:50 Paolo Gaudiano  

That's a really good question. And I will say when I started my startup called Aleria, and then I also started a small Academic Research Center, which doesn't exist anymore, but I'm still doing some of the work. We call that the Quantitative Studies of Diversity and Inclusion Center. And it was at the City College of New York, with my former colleague and dear friend Gilda Barabino, who's now president of Olin College of Engineering. And then I also started this 501 C3 called Aleria Research Corp, which was an unfortunate idea to use a very similar name, but we now just call it Arc. And the idea there was to do the core background research, when I started that people were like, oh, you're crazy, you know that if you're an entrepreneur, you always have to focus on just one thing. And here was doing three things at the same time, but the reason why I did that is because I saw an opportunity not just to solve a problem for a particular company, but to change fairly dramatically the way that people think about diversity, equity and inclusion. And based on my background, I knew that first I knew that trying to run a startup and do core research is very difficult. And I've had experience before where I was involved with the company where we tried to do both consulting and kind of product development and R&D. And it was almost impossible. You need different mindsets, different business models. So I knew that having a separate 501 C3 would offer certain benefits, for example, we were able to get a substantial grant effect a couple of grants from some foundations that we would not have been able to receive as a for profit startup, as to the academic, there were a couple of reasons why I wanted to keep that thread alive. One of them is because I love teaching, and I love doing research. And I always feel that academia in a way gives you a kind of credibility. You know, if I reach out to somebody, and say, I'm an Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern as I am, right now, it carries a very different significance than if I say, I have this little startup, and I'm trying to sell you something. And more than that, it also is important to me to get the kind of scientific validation to the work that I'm doing that is typically associated with academia. And I've been able to collaborate with some people in academia, I run an annual conference that even though it's not an academic conference, is grounded in an academic environment. And it's open to a variety of these things. So, I always thought of it as a three legged stool, where essentially, the nonprofit, the for profit, and the academic legs all sustain what I'm hoping is ultimately a much more impactful set of activities than any one of those by itself would be able to achieve. 

09:07 Christopher Michael Lee  

Thank you, Paolo, for that. So, let me ask you to solve a problem for an organization? Can you walk us through how you do that? In regard to diversity and inclusion?

09:19 Paolo Gaudiano  

Yeah, so what happened was actually kind of interesting. When I started doing the work. I mentioned in passing the idea that it builds these computer simulations. And these computer simulations are like a Sims game, you literally simulate the behaviors of individuals, how they interact with each other. And the key is that by doing that, you can capture the macroscopic outcomes that result when you have let's say, a lot of people in our organization. So, I built a simulation that captures a typical organization with multiple levels, let's say entry level, management, VPS, and executives. And these people in a simulation can have different personal characteristics. And then I tried to play around with what would happen if certain things were manifesting themselves. For example, I didn't want simulation in which we assumed for simplicity that they were just men and women, not suggesting that gender is binary, but we were just trying to make a point. And it showed something very interesting that under normal circumstances, a company that starts with, let's say, 50%, men and women will remain balanced at every level all the way through. But what it showed is that if you assume that there was even a slight bias that favored men in the promotion, and you ran the same simulation, and you found that after a relatively short amount of time, let's say five or six years, you would get a company that looks suspiciously like real companies where you had the vast majority of the leadership was male, and then you had, you know, decreasing numbers of men, and then eventually at the entry level, you would have roughly 50/50. So, it was all excited about that, because I felt that I was able to prove how the behaviors of people in organizations would actually affect the company. And I was showing that to the chief diversity officer of a large company. And she said, well, I want you to take this, and I want, I'm going to give you the diversity data for my company, I want you to build a simulator for my company. And that was initially my goal, I wanted to use this as a kind of a strategic platform. But then what I realized is that just knowing that there are men and women or people of color, people with disabilities was not sufficient, I had to understand what the experiences were that people had, as a result of their having a disability or the result of their being a woman or being gay, or whatever the case might be. And so, I went back to the woman who said, I can't do it, I need to figure out first how I can collect data not about the diversity, but about the experiences. And what I realized is that we essentially developed a way of measuring inclusion. And by actually measuring exclusion. In other words, inclusion is a little bit like privilege, right? Inclusion itself is invisible, we tend not to notice it, when we have it, we do notice it when we're being excluded. And so, what we did is that we developed a platform in which we are with where people that come to one of our workshops, then go to the platform, and they can completely anonymously provide some basic demographic data and job-related data. And then they can share experiences of things that happen to them in the workplace, that interfere with their ability to succeed. And it doesn't necessarily have to be excluded in a way that simply will mean that it could be I gave my laptop to the IT department three months ago, and they still haven't given it back to me. Well, when we tally the data, if we find that that happens a lot more to women, say than two men, or if happens a lot more with people who are neurodivergent than people that are not, then you know that there's a problem with inclusion where different groups have been included more than others. So that's what we do right now. Well, we offer companies a way of measuring inclusion that gives incredible clarity, first and foremost in where they have the biggest issues. Secondly, what are the sources of these problems? Is it something that's due to your leadership? Or is it due to the behavior of managers? Is it due to what your peers are doing? Is it due to something that has to do with maybe the physical plant or the policies in the organization. And then thirdly, we find out exactly who is being impacted. And when you couple the data with the descriptions that people share, anonymously, we preserve their anonymity. But we see stories about things that happen to people that range from mild annoyances to major things that probably like that would be illegal if they were found out, that gives the companies and incredible insight into what is happening, how it's impacted their organization, and what they need to do to fix it. And that's essentially how we are, you know, the main approach that we use to solving problems for organizations. 

13:13 Christopher Michael Lee  

You know, I'm interested in drilling down on this just a little bit. You know, IAAP, is in the process of piloting and launching a tool. So, a criteria tool that looks at how organizations were the gaps on organizations, and regarding supporting people with disabilities, in 13, actually different areas, one of them being governance and leadership. Another one being HR and training, so on and so on. You know, I'm curious about the work that you're doing with the simulations, and how something like this could actually benefit this criterion. And give you a little more background, just briefly, the criteria are vetted through disability advocacy groups, so we can't change the criteria beyond the IP being IAAP, G3ict, but the criteria are vetted, looked at, by advocacy groups with people with disabilities. So, I'm thinking more about the governance and leadership area where we go in and we can see that accessibility isn't top down, supporting people with disabilities isn't top down, whether they are employees or customers, right? Do you see your simulation of the work that you're doing, something that could benefit organization, regards to do how the employees are addressing policies and procedures are addressing people with disabilities eternally? 

14:33 Paolo Gaudiano  

Well, I would say that sort of simulation itself. Interestingly, I still use it a lot more as a demonstration of taking something that most people intuitively understand. And then showing in bright colors, if you will, how that actually plays out in a company. We don't actually use the simulation, at least not right now in the work that we do with companies. But what it does help and I think that it might help us in your case is that it forces you to focus on the experiences of being individuals day in and day out. And one of the things that I found is that a lot of companies that measure inclusion, for example, or that measure belonging, tend to focus on either feelings or conclusions that people drive up the organization. So, do you feel that your organization is inclusive? Do you feel that there's a culture of inclusion? Do you feel there's a culture of belonging? Do you feel that your company has good governance and good policies, etc. The problem is that you're asking people to express their opinions about something that is based on an accumulation of things that happen to them day in and day out. So, one of the things that I would you know, and I don't know exactly how your specific, you know, criteria work and how they're qualified. But I would make sure that rather than just asking people and advocates for their opinions about what may or may not be a good policy, you also consider the experiences that happen to people. And one of the reasons for that is because sometimes something may happen to you that you think is because you have a disability, but perhaps it happens to other people as well. And conversely, sometimes things happen to you that you don't realize it's because you have a disability. But in fact, when you look across the whole organization, you find that people with a disability, maybe with a particular kind of disability, are more dramatically impacted than others. And so ultimately, I think it's a fairly known fact, in social sciences that asking people their opinions about something is always a slippery slope, because what we report and what we say, and what actually drives our behaviors, and drives our opinions are two very different things. I don't know to what extent we could sort, you know, understand, I don't know to what extent seeing the way that we collect data might be helpful to you, but we're certainly happy to explore that. As far as the simulation and something else that we're doing right now, there is one potential benefit. We realized very quickly that when we ran the simulation, that if you start to track things like satisfaction, you can do things like for example, say, okay, in my simulation, there is there is a simulated person, and if something happens, that upsets them, then their satisfaction will dip temporarily, then we'll come back up. For example, if you get passed over for a promotion, somebody junior to you gets promoted before you do, your satisfaction will dip down and then come back up again. Over time. Well, when you run this simulation that I mentioned before, in which there is a bias in promotions, if you look at the cumulative satisfaction level of the men and the women, you find that the men satisfaction stays very high, but the women satisfaction cumulatively just drops fairly dramatically. And that that's natural, it makes sense, right? Because the women are getting passed over more than men. But what that means is that you now have a group of people that because of experiences that have nothing to do with your skills, it just has to do with the fact that in this particular part of the simulation, they happen to be women, but it could have been people with disabilities, these people are less satisfied, which means that A, they're going to be producing less, and B, they're going to be more likely to leave. If they produce less, you're impacting the top line of your organization, if they're leaving more frequently, you're impacting the cost of your organization, because you have to replace these people. And both of those are very tangible costs. So we've used a simulation, and we recently launched a very simplified version of that, that's just the calculator that will take an organization and tell you, if you have these demographic groups, whatever demographic data you use, if you have any data about either the satisfaction, their belonging, or if you use inclusion data, if you work with us, we can give you a fairly accurate estimate of how much money you're losing every year, just by virtue of the fact that some of these groups are treated differently than other groups. And so, our argument becomes not Oh, make it more diverse, because it's the right thing to do or make you more diverse, because diversity somehow magically increases the performance of your organization, which is kind of a hotly debated topic. It's more look, by treating people differently, you're losing money every single year, and that money is not insignificant, it can be a significant portion of your net profits. There was an article in 2022, late 22, somebody leaked a memo from Amazon. And by their own calculations, they were losing $8 billion a year with a B, because of unwanted employee churn that was about a quarter of their net profit. And that's just from unwanted churn by their own calculation. So, we've estimated a typical 2000-person company is likely to lose $10 million a year at least, because of the fact that they're not treating everybody the same. So, when you take that approach, I think you can really help to make the CEO and the CFO of the company understand that this is not just about making people feel good. It's not just about being fair and equitable. It's not just about oh, you know, this month is you know, AAPI month and next month is going to be I forget who it is. And last month it was you know, Black History Month, etc. Oh, let's do let's do a pride parade. Let's do whatever the case might be. This is about how it's impacting your business negatively. It's impacting your finances negatively. And all you have to do is figure out what is happening in your organization and fix it just get rid of the obstacles that are creating those problems. So, I do think it's a very powerful approach. I think it could be potentially tied to what you're doing by maybe taking the data that you have and plugging it to the calculator that we have. And actually, going beyond just saying, hey, you have this problem and saying, here's how much money it's costing you.

20:12 Christopher Michael Lee  

I totally agree with you. I mean, if it impacts the wallet, you're going to have the CEOs listen more, and you're going to see change from top down, instead of bottom up, which is a lot of what we deal with the accessibility, you know, arena is that sometimes it's middle management that's pushing up and sometimes it's coming from grassroots pushing up. So, I like the approach. And I think you're talking to a language, right? I mean, you're talking that language much more. So just on that, could you share with us just some examples of successful strategies, or interventions that organizations have implemented to foster greater inclusion?

20:48 Paolo Gaudiano  

One of the things that is surprising about what you know, when we started to do this work, was the fact that a lot of the problems that we found were very simple problems, there were things that don't require, oh, let's spend a million dollars to get an external consultant to change everybody's mind about, you know, when they see if somebody's in a wheelchair, you know, things of that sort. I mean, some of those activities are good, but we found that the majority of problems are silly little things that add up. So, for example, a lot of people, a lot of people complain that they didn't get invited to meetings in which they should have been. And it could be because hey, the guys were out at lunch, and they all started talking about something and made a decision, while the people that were not part of the in that crowd did not get invited to lunch, and they missed out on it. Or it could simply be that the person was like, oh, we got to have a meeting and let's invite this person and that person the lo and behold, you tend to forget people that are different from you, whether they're different because they have a disability or because they're, it's a woman, or because it's a Black person, or whatever the case might be. So in a case like that, when you see that, and you see that it's recurring, and you see that it tends to disproportionately impact the most excluded populations, then you can come up with a very simple policy, you tell all the managers, anybody that organized, the meeting says you have a spreadsheet, and every time you organize a meeting, you have to check out the spreadsheet, and we're going to track you on it. And if you don't do it, you're going to get penalized for it. And it's not that people are doing it because they're evil. And you can tell them all the unconscious bias, you can do all the accosted by train that you want, they're still going to forget, because they're instinctively just doing things that are rushed. So, you can fix that very easily. And we have found that a lot of the kinds of experiences that impact people negatively, first of all, they tend to impact most people across different what I call hugs, historically underappreciated groups, and that includes women, people with disabilities, etc. Now, granted, some of the things like especially when it comes to disabilities, there are certain experiences that are unique, whether it's a mobility problem, and you know, therefore accessibility of a physical nature, whether it's about neuro diversity, there are some situations that are very unique to specific kinds of diversity, quote, unquote. But what we find is that a lot of times, it's just about sensible behaviors. You know, another example that is very, very prevalent in companies is the tendency for processes that impact people such as who assigns and projects and how are they signed? Who chooses which salespeople go to which clients? Who does the performance reviews? How are the performance reviews done? The more all of those processes are done in a casual way and not measured, the more likely it is that biases will inadvertently creep into the process, and then compound over the entire organization so that all of a sudden, your promotion rates for people with disabilities and for Black people, and for Hispanics, etc., is significantly lower than it is for white men. And that's why you find that the representation of white men, for example, a recent study by McKinsey, this has been this has been found in virtually every industry, where if you look at the representation of white men at the entry level, it's reasonably small. And by the time you get to the C suite, it's dominant, right? So, the problem is not that we're not hiring enough people, the problem is that we're not promoting people, we're not advancing people. So that's what it would really, you know, that's how it would really suggest it's like, really focus. And again, we've done that with companies where we literally found exactly those kinds of problems. And where we've told them, you know, we had one organization we're working with, where we found that there were a lot of complaints about some policies that have been changed recently that had a profound impact on flexibility. And what they didn't realize was the damage that were causing, and they actually went and changed something about it. So, in general, as I said, the cause of the work that we do is a combination of finding specific tactical things that you can do, but most importantly, it's making the leaders aware of exactly what is happening in the organization. And these are you know, you talked about the fact that sometimes you have top down sometimes bottom up, a lot of times there is a gap there because you know, I mentioned the idea that inclusion is invisible, the promise that inclusion is most invisible to those who enjoy it the most. And in any organization. That means the white male cisgender heterosexual leaders with no disabilities, which means that those people are the ones that are least aware of the problems. It's just like being sick, right? If you're going to be healthy, you don't know what diseases are, you don't know what the symptoms are, and you sure as heck don't know how to cure it. And with exclusion, if you think of exclusion as being a disease within an organization, the leaders least qualified to understand that which is why you get sometimes this huge gap. When we work with companies, one of the first things that we always do is we say, start with a leadership workshop introduces an entirely new way to think about diversity, equity inclusion, show them how it impacts their bottom line, show them how they can quantitatively link the behaviors in your organization to their wallet, and then dive in collected data, find the tactical problems that you can fix linked them to the potential ROI and now you got a combination of top down and bottom up data driven, very human centric approach, that really, really makes a change, not just in, hey, let's implement some specific activity, but in changing the mindset of the entire organization.

20:55 Speaker  

The IAAP Accessible Document Specialist (ADS) credential is intended for accessibility professionals who create and remediate accessible electronic documents and their related policies. The ADS credential represents an ability to express an intermediate level of experience designing, evaluating and remediating accessible documents. The ADS credential is beneficial for people in or aspiring to be a user experience designer or tester, Web Content Manager and administrators, Project program and ICT managers and more, check out the IAAP ADS certification webpage to learn more.

26:30 Christopher Michael Lee  

So, you mentioned ROI. So, I want to get to the measurement piece of this the outcome piece, the impact piece. But before I do, I'm curious as you're talking, what sectors or industry are you seeing receptive to this type of work that you're doing, coming into these organizations impacting? Is it finances? Is it other areas that are craving this type of information and solution-based tools? 

26:56 Paolo Gaudiano  

Well, that's a really good question. It’s because we work across a lot of different sectors. And we found that the receptivity is much more about the individual organization. And often, not surprisingly, probably, it has to do with the level of interest and engagement of the leadership. And it's not so different across industry, we do see some patterns, for example, we find that one thing that that's happened a lot that initially kind of surprised us is that, companies will come to us and say or organizations not necessarily worked with, with also with nonprofits, with government agencies, and some of them might come to us and say, we have a real problem with the attraction and retention of people of color. And sure, enough that you know, very small numbers, and we would do our data effective, maybe we don't really even have yet enough data to kind of separate out particular groups. But what we found is that the inclusion data for women was much, much, much worse than for men. And when we looked at the kinds of things that happened to them, it became pretty clear that the company was for example, maybe there was a lot of lack of respect among peers, inappropriate jokes, being told meetings, meetings that always started talking about golf, and football, or, in some cases, like even worse things were there, you know, hey, let's I'll do an offsite, let's all go to a strip club, you know, which, fortunately, they're not going to happen all that much. And so, we realized, you said, Look, you have a problem, that if you just make it better for the women, you're also going to make it better for the women here, then it's like the problems, it's going to improve the condition for women, and it will make it more welcoming to everybody else. We found that across all the industries, technology is particularly the discrepancy between the scores that we get for the men and for the women is particularly acute. We just published the report where we worked with the women in cybersecurity, which is a large nonprofit organization that supports as that may might apply, really cybersecurity, we did an industry wide benchmark, where we had about at this point, about 20 of their strategic partners participate, we're hoping this year to double that number. And we collected data from more than 1000 people. And they found some very striking results like that. And but they also found that the problems were not only for women, but in fact, we actually in this case, we had a significant number of people who identified as having a disability. And we found that disability is also a huge marker. People who identify as having a visible or invisible disability report much higher levels of exclusion than people that do not have a disability. And so yes, we do see some industry differences. But in terms of the willingness to participate, it's fairly uniform. And I can tell you that once companies and organizations will learn about the approach, which is why we always want to get the leadership involved, we always get very enthusiastic responses, especially for two reasons. One, as you've already pointed out, we go straight to the wallet. And in fact, that was my initial motivation in doing this was thinking, if I can convince leaders that there is a financial benefit that actually aligns with their responsibilities as leaders, that's going to be a win, but two and this is kind of unique in the last couple of years. We are completely backlash free, like what we do completely sidesteps a lot of the issues that have resulted in this in this horrible anti DI backlash that we're seeing today. Because we don't focus on identity groups we don't focus on or do the right thing for Black people. For people with disabilities. We're like listen, make the organization more inclusive, your goal should be to drive exclusion to zero, it should not be to increase participation, or representation. If you do this, people will feel more welcome, they will be more productive, they will be less likely to leave. And your diversity numbers will go up. And we've shown that in our simulations, and we're starting to see that actually, with some of the organizations with whom we're worked.

30:21 Christopher Michael Lee  

Yeah, I do want to get to the measurement piece of this. But I'm also curious about, you know, was there a time that you walked away from organization, something just caught your eye, you learn something that you didn't expect to learn. Something that just really popped out something that highlighted that now you utilize and build into your work that you do with other organizations? It's maybe a very broad question, but I'm just curious, because you're learning a lot. I mean, you're dissecting an organization.

30:51 Paolo Gaudiano  

I would say probably the biggest realization that we have had is that historically, we have become somewhat obsessed with diversity as the sole metric. And I think, you know, the reason why that happened probably is because, you know, back in, at least in the United States, you know, after civil rights, there was a willingness to open up more especially corporate sector, but by government, etc., open up more to groups that have been historically underrepresented. And, and these people could tell there was something wrong in the organization, they were not treated equally, they were not getting promoted. But the only thing that could really see was that, hey, look, there's so few of us here, right? So, diversity became the banner. So now we talk about DEI. But the reality is that 99% of the data is focused on the D and the D alone. And one of the things that we realize is that when we look at data about identity, we do collect identity data, because people ultimately want to know that. But we found we think of diversity in a very different way, we think of it more as if you consider a person who in this country is a white male, cisgender heterosexual person with no disabilities, and you consider that to be kind of the normative majority, then instead of thinking about, Oh, let's think about the experience of a queer Hispanic woman with a disability, if instead, we think let's think about people that are one degree away from that. So maybe you differ from that no matter the majority in terms of your gender, or your race, or your ethnicity, or whatever the case might be, and maybe people that are two degrees away. So let's say for example, that gay Black man, with no disabilities who's identified as heterosexual would be two degrees away, when we do that, we found that you can get really clean data, you can see the impact of intersectionality, because you see very clearly people that are two degrees away have a significantly higher what we call exclusion score than the ones who are one degree away, and those internal higher than zero degrees. When you do that, it kind of helps you to understand that, yes, diversity is very important. But it's not and again, I don't want to at all take away the fact that the experience of a Black person is very different from the experience of an Hispanic person. And I think it's incredibly hard to acknowledge that and to customize some of the things that we do to that. But when you show the leaders that look, some of the things they do, like forgetting to invite people to meetings, it's not necessarily because oh, I have a template in my head. And when I see a Black man actually this way, when I see a White woman, it's viewed that way. It's just that we have some bad behaviors, and they tend to come out with people that are different from us. So that was a profound realization that we had, that again, it relieves a lot of the pressure, because and by the way, I have an analogy, I may go on for one more second, you probably heard the expression that says that the rising tide lifts all boats equally, right, it's attributed to John F. Kennedy talking about investment in stimulating the economy, we found out something very interesting, if you think of the structural barriers that cause differences in wellbeing differences in outcomes between different groups. And at this picture that show people sometimes we imagine you see, like three different you see, like a little lake that's up high, and then you see like a big Canyon, and there's a lake that's much farther down, and another one that's even farther down with little boats in it, right. So, you have these disparities. When you rain down, including the whole environment, you're going to see all of the boats being lifted, but the ones that were the farthest out are going to be lifted the most. In other words, creating a more inclusive environment automatically benefits the most excluded person the most. So instead of raising our boats equally, you're doing something that benefits everyone. But it's particularly beneficial for those that have been the most excluded. And that was probably the most powerful general realization that we had, because it helped us to understand how powerful this approach is. And it takes away the pressure of saying, oh, let's focus on this group or that group. So, in terms of general, mind-blowing findings, that's, I would say, probably the biggest thing that we found.

34:30 Christopher Michael Lee  

Yeah, I love that. I mean, we do walk into environments when you just think about the vertical this is this is what we need to focus on, instead of the horizontal, across the board. And it sounds like that just highlights some of the some of the findings that you've seen as you can't just go on into an organization just looking at one thing is there's no such thing as psychology, one on one, right? And that's what you're doing. I mean, this behavior analysis in a sense also, that you're jumping in and will add something else to you wasn't a psychology, right? So, I want to get to your book. I want to talk about that, but briefly if you could, because we're running out of time talking about, you know, the impact of measurement and getting that ROI and any different ways that you're doing that that may be unique.

35:17 Paolo Gaudiano  

Yeah, it's I think I hinted away already at the fact that most people use diversity of really representation as the sole metric. And, by solid mean, alone, the only metric that people use, and what we find is that sometimes people measure inclusion, but again, it's more about climate, it's about like, you know, on a scale of one to 10, how inclusive the organization to me, you know, going back to kind of my health analogy, know that inclusion is little bit like health where you notice when you're sick, not when you're healthy. I like to draw a similar analogy to say, Well look, when you go to the doctor, if they just test you on a scale of one to 10, how do you feel, then you just said five and said, well, then take two aspirin to come in the morning, that would be useless or even worse, you know, when companies ask things like, you know, would you say that? You know, would you say that this is an inclusive organization? It's like saying, you go to a doctor, because you're sick of the say, would you say that a hospital is a very good hospital in treating patients. So that's all they ask you, right? Makes no sense. So, in general, what people focus on almost exclusively is diversity. We focus on inclusion, we were adding, you know, in the DEI, we're adding metrics to that I, and we're giving you numbers that say, here are we have what we call these categories of work experiences. So, work life balance, compensation of benefit, recognition, respect, and so on, and so forth. And we give scores to each of those, we also give scores to what we call the sources, is it because of a policy? Is it because of your leadership? Is it because of your management, and so on, and so forth? So, you start out with some data that tells you very, very clearly, these are the places where we have the biggest issues. And then from there, you can drill down, and you can ask, well, what kind of issues are they having, and who's having these issues is impacting these people more than those people. And the real key that I think is going to be a game changer, and we literally just kind of launched this very recently is that we now have a calculator that can attach numbers to it. Because if we know that this particular problem impacts 13% of your organization's overall and in particularly impacts 42% of your Black people or people of color, etc. And we know roughly their average salaries, the cost of replacement and how they're involved with productivity, we can tell you very, very accurately how much money that's costing you. And that I think is going to be a game changer, because it's like, that's kind of like we have this the stages of our offering. And the last one is we're going to combine our inclusion data with our calculators specifically for your organization, so that you can actually do a detailed ROI calculation that can say, this is how much I'm losing. This is what I need to invest in to fix it, is it worth it for me or not? How much of a benefit will again. And frankly, some companies choose to do that, and some companies don't, but ultimately leave, you've elevated that to a strategic decision that's on par with all of the other business decisions that they make.

37:55 Christopher Michael Lee  

You know, and in some cases of it, you're seeing that it's not about implementing new stuff, it's all right there, right. It's just a matter of recognizing it and then hopefully, that will impact the wallet. Right? So I will come to the end. This has been really great. I want to talk a little bit about the book that you have coming out. And I love the title. By the way, it really speaks to everything that we talked about mostly today, measuring inclusion, higher profits, and happier people without guesswork or backlash. How'd you come up with that title?

38:27 Paolo Gaudiano  

You know, it's funny, I, I've been wanting to write a book for some time. And I ended up working with a couple of organizations that helped me with, you know, the business first with the business for the book proposal. And then recently, I'm working with an organization called Practical Inspiration. That's my publisher. And I have to say, coming up with a title was possibly the hardest part of the work in the sense that, you know, how do you combine in just a couple of words, the key idea what you're doing, and then in the very short, subtitle, you know, all the things that and I appreciate the fact that you liked it, because again, I really wanted to emphasize first the motivation, it's high profits and active people, but then also the benefits of the unique approach, which is that there is no guesswork. And when we say by no guesswork is the fact that we're giving you quantitative data, so you don't have to throw something against the wall and see what sticks. And of course, the No, the no backlash is something that has become very important in the last couple of years, when I started to think about writing the book, the backlash, you could kind of see it coming over the horizon, but it was not nearly where it is right now. So, when I really got serious about writing the book, I knew I, you know, I didn't want to back away from the diversity and inclusion side of things, but I wanted to make it very clear that there are ways of approaching it without the backlash. So, and the book ultimately, it was interesting the way that I ended up developing it and I wanted to be very mindful, I'm an academic at heart or I used to be an academic. And I know that sometimes I write in a style that people have said, it's a bit of an academic style. I wanted to avoid that I wanted to write a book that is aimed at business leaders, DI leaders, but really also managers, you know, anybody that really wants to understand how to be more effective and how to manage an organization and so I worked very hard at that. And what I ended up doing is that I realized that as I was doing in my projects, and with my colleagues and I was doing public speaking, I had developed a sort of sequence. And that's basically what the book is all about. It's got a sequence where first it tells you why this should be interesting, what are the basic ideas, then it tells you about how we measure things. I talked about some of the case studies that have a number of organizations to work with. And then in the end, they have a couple of sections that really focus on some of what I think have been mistakes that the field of the DI has made, that have led to the backlash. And then I have another chapter, we're talking about some of the mistakes that people who tend to be against the DI often make them make wrong assumptions about the DI. So I tried to take out a big stick and kind of beat up on both of those groups and say, Listen, let's stop the rhetoric. Let's stop this polarization. Let's realize that there was an opportunity for everyone to benefit. And I think that this book really is a roadmap to help people go in that direction.

40:48 Christopher Michael Lee  

That's great. It's interesting, I need to take a look at it. Definitely. It's a kind of a unique approach to address it. And I think your title hits that defined audience, which is so difficult to stay on, you know, when you're writing a book, right? I mean, you want so badly to break out of that audience and reach more people in different areas. But that CEO that top level, folks, I mean, the other ones making the decisions, and they need to hear this. So, I am looking forward to drilling down on it. Maybe next time, we can have you back to talk just about that book, get into the case studies, and drill down. So, I just wanted to close this out by just asking you, what future projects? I mean, you talked about cybersecurity, which is our benchmarking beyond that sounds exciting that you would like to leave with our listeners?

41:34 Paolo Gaudiano  

One of my goals in the future is to really expand the kind of analytical and forecasting capabilities of the platform that we have, you know, right now, we found that there is just a tremendous need for just measuring inclusion, because again, people are scrambling to try to figure out, how do we respond to the backlash? How do we avoid getting into legal problems, unfortunately, these are things that I wish that didn't have to deal with. But so that's the right now there is there's enough demand for that, that I think they're just growing, that is great. But to me, ultimately, I want to get to the point where I see HR talent management, DI as really kind of merging into a function that will be elevated at the same level, if not at a higher level than virtually every other function of a company and the reason why I say that is because these are things that a lot of people don't realize, if you look at the total amount of money spent on advertising, by every company, the United States in one year, across every channel of advertising, it's about, it's about 200 to three years ago, it was $250 billion a year. When you look at payroll spent by those same companies across the United States, it was $7.5 trillion a year, 30 times as much. A lot of people don't realize that talent, human capital, human resources are the biggest, biggest item, budget item of every company. So if we can quantify the way that you manage it, diversify your human assets, the way that we quantify and diversify every other assets, whether it's marketing assets, financial assets, products, etc., etc., that has the potential to have a profound, profound change on every organization, it will make the people happier, but it can be a huge, enormous competitive advantage for the leaders. So, one of my goals for the future, and we're starting to do that with a calculator is that we really want to turn it into a full-blown strategic platform for corporate leaders, they want to learn how to collect data in a meaningful way just like to collect financial data from the whole organization and roll it up to the top. That's how the DI should work. It shouldn't be, oh, let's have a DI section that's different. You should actually have the ability simplified for every manager in every sector, in every division to measure very simple things about DI that are within their sphere. And then that should roll up and the chief diversity officer, chief HR officer, chief talent officer, whatever you call them, will be able to provide the strategic information and the financial information that the CEO and the CFO need to make the right decisions. That's my future plan. It's going to take some time right now we're so busy focusing on the sort of lower-level stuff, but that's where I hope someday to be getting with Aleria.

44:05 Christopher Michael Lee  

It's a great plan. And I look forward to hearing more about that. And I'm looking forward to reading your book. I spent some time definitely the case studies. I love case studies. And I think that's where you can share with people your vision of where you want to go. So, Paolo, thank you so much today, we really enjoyed having you, We look forward to possibly having you back.

44:22 Paolo Gaudiano  

Great, Christopher. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure. And I would love to be back when my book comes out in September or at any other time. 

44:29 Christopher Michael Lee  

Well, I can't wait for September. Thank you so much.

44:32 Paolo Gaudiano  

Thank you.

44:34 Speaker  

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