Thirteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This project constructs a framework by which organizations can measure the diversity level of each individual employee through the experience they have gained working on organizational tasks with colleagues from diverse backgrounds. Prior simplistic workforce diversity measures, such as “% female”, have been limited to values calculated against the entire workforce. Our interdisciplinary project proposes constructing Information Systems using mathematical Graph Theory concepts with data supplied from organizational Human Resources systems. Our method calculates for every employee in the organization the number of hours they have worked on organizational tasks with every other co-worker. From those calculations we can determine which employees have the highest “Diversity Experience Index” (DEI), a value that indicates the diversity level of that individual employee. \For example, an employee who has worked many hours with female colleagues will have a higher “female” DEI value than does an employee who has not. The implication of our work is that organizations that know their employees’ DEI values will function better because psychology research has shown that humans are more open and accepting to others who are different than themselves as they increase the number or time of interactions with those different others.