CrowdSmart Conversations: Take Pride in Reducing Company Bias

It’s June, the month of celebrating all types of diversity, whether for the color of one’s skin, origin of birth, or LGBTQ status. Yet bias based on these classifications, which have nothing to do with a person’s intelligence, professional abilities, and integrity, still factor into and influence business and organization decision makers.

Bias is not only bad for workforce morale, it’s also bad for harvesting the best ideas and innovations from the very people who need to be heard. Study after study has demonstrated that insights gleaned from a diverse rather than a like-minded group improves the quality of intelligence for product planning, hiring, growth, and innovation.

Someone who knows how to reduce bias in business and organizations is Dana LeVan, VP of Growth at CrowdSmart.ai, delivering technology that reduces bias while engaging your workforce to align and move forward together on making decisions. Lisa Sheeran, public relations consultant, interviews him below.

Lisa:

Tell us more about yourself and why you joined CrowdSmart.

Dana:

I come from a deep background in social media marketing. Based on my experience with startups and large companies, I believe social media is an effective way to reach out to help communities as well as businesses.

When I was approached to join CrowdSmart by CEO Amanda Reed earlier this year, what drew me to the company were three things:

1.   Its mission to focus on helping customers achieve their best outcomes.
2.   Its emphasis on treating everyone – including its employees – with integrity, respect, and equity.
3.   And for me, most importantly, leveraging its software system to eliminate bias in decision making, whether that bias was based on gender, race, income, education, place of birth, or age.

Lisa:

Can you explain how the software reduces the kind of bias you mention?

Dana:

Most surveys or face-to-face decisions reveal the identity of the participant. That means that often the most senior, the wealthiest, the most articulate, or merely the loudest voice gets heard.

With CrowdSmart, the decision-making process engages our client’s selected ecosystem  – whether that’s employees, investors, customers, and consultants – on an anonymous basis. That means every voice has a chance to be heard… not only by people at the top making the final decision but also by other participants, who can respond to each other’s input. This not only reduces if not eliminates bias but it also identifies, harvests, and then aligns fresh insights and innovative ideas that might have been buried.

Lisa:

So a CrowdSmart session identifies ideas rather than the individual who contributed those ideas?

Dana:

Yes and no. To the rest of the participants, the individual with the great ideas is anonymous. But to the person administering the session – whether an HR director, a CEO, CIO, or other C-suite executive – that individual’s identity is transparent.

Lisa:

Which means that person can be rewarded for their input?

Dana:

Exactly. That person can be ranked as an influencer because their influence on others leads to alignment, followed by results allowing the team to move forward together. It’s almost like the jury process, which can often take days if not weeks to reach a verdict, but with CrowdSmart, it can take only hours to provide leaders with a basis for making a far more accurate decision that aligns with everyone’s input. And the technology can scale from 10 to 10,000 participants.

Lisa:

Anything that reduces bias in decision making while making the process more accurate sounds like a win to me. I think our team might all be proud of CrowdSmart this month and beyond.

Check out CrowdSmart.ai for a free demo.