Data-driven fairness across the talent lifecycle

Mitigating unfair workplace biases with Worksense

I moved to the US from Nigeria in 2014 with a single mum and two brothers. I very quickly discovered the role that skin color played in the United States — which was a huge eye-opener for me as someone who had grown up in a predominantly Black society where skin color played a minimal role in social interactions if at all.

This culture shock was further exacerbated after I taught myself how to code off of YouTube and attended my first hackathon. I was the only Black person at an event with over 200 attendees, giving me my first official taste of imposter syndrome. A few months later, I matriculated to Tufts University to study computer science and economics and my imposter syndrome followed me as I was faced with the reality of being one of the very few people of color in the entire CS department.

My curiosity eventually got the best of me as I started to do some personal research on the diversity, equity, and inclusion crisis in tech and was taken aback when I realized this was a problem that had been plaguing the industry for decades with no end in sight.

Determined to do something about it, I spent the majority of my college career-building tools, platforms, products, and everything in-between. I experimented with a variety of solutions such as a coding boot camp for underrepresented high school students, a low-friction pulse survey engagement measurement tool powered by Twilio messaging, and a platform that leveraged public conversational data on slack to empower managers to understands topics driving and influencing employee behavior in the workplace among others.

Along the way, I met Kevin Destin, Worksense’s CTO, with who I bonded while working on CS projects together and sharing our experiences as one of the few Black people in the Tufts CS department as well as our other experiences of feeling out of place within white-dominated spaces. Kevin and I spent our time building and experimenting with several different solutions, pivoting multiple times.

The Worksense journey, however, took a turn in the summer of 2019 when we ran our first methodical customer discovery process. We interviewed over 100 individuals ranging from Heads of People, Chief People Officers, Chief Human Resources Officers, diversity consultants, and officers, as well as minority engineers and team leaders trying to tackle tech’s DEI problem.

This process delivered two key learnings that have served as the foundation of what we’re building today. The first key insight was that organizations were losing a lot of money as a result of unfairness-based turnover and lawsuits with unfairness estimated to cost the tech sector $16B a year in employee replacement costs. The second was the decentralization of “people data” within the workplace. We discovered that people and human resources teams were storing payroll, performance reviews, potential ratings, manager feedback, and other employee-related data across a number of different platforms, making analysis tedious as a result of the data consolidation that had to take place beforehand.

These insights are exactly why Kevin and I decided to build Worksense. Through our platform, people leaders are able to access a dashboard that automates the consolidation, analysis, and visualization of people data while providing them with insights that enable them to proactively track, mitigate, and respond to detected unfairness across their talent lifecycle. Across recruiting, compensation, promotion, and turnover decisions, through our dashboard, people leaders have greater visibility into where biases are creeping in, empowering them to employ targeted strategies for mitigating these biases instead of implementing overly generalized DEI strategies.

Kevin and I are bullish on the role that data has to play in eradicating unfair treatment within workplaces, and through Worksense, we are removing the friction involved in leveraging the tons of people data that exist in workplaces to drive fairer people decisions at scale.

Worksense was co-founded by Timi Dayo-Kayode (Chief Executive Officer) and Kevin Destin (Chief Technology Officer) who met while studying Computer Science at Tufts. Other team members include Daniel Nwaeze, a data scientist, and Daemi Dayo-Kayode, a product designer. They have received support from the Envision Accelerator, MassChallenge, The Tufts Entrepreneurship Center, the 1517 Fund, and Coding it Forward in scaling their impact with Worksense.

To learn more, please visit our website, LinkedIn, or Twitter.