How about them values?
At Aula Education, we’ve been pushing for delivering on a something called D&I. Diversity & Inclusion. Daring & Interesting stuff.
As your friendly white guy, in charge of hiring, it’s quite something to try and do D&I. D&I is everywhere, you can’t escape it. D&I is also not defined, some companies create a rainbow logo, and call it D&I. Some companies hire lots of junior women developers, and call it D&I. Living in Amsterdam, I saw a lot of company boats on the canal during pride, and they call that D&I.
Instead of doing all those things, I thought to write up some of the values we stand for, and call it D&I.
Let’s get ready for some values!
We actively practice inclusion
Boom, I said it: Like many other companies, we think having a diverse and inclusive culture is essential to our success. We don’t do canal boats just yet, but hear me out:
We’re building a social learning platform to improve education at universities and colleges. In order to build the best product for students who are in different fields of study, have different learning styles, and require different tools to facilitate their education, we need a diverse and inclusive team. Aula’s engineers represent 10 different countries. We believe it’s our duty to make everyone — regardless of their background, sexual orientation, faith or gender identity — feel welcome. Not only is this a key part of our ethos, but we also know that having a diverse and inclusive culture makes business sense, too.
The first step to achieving this is to clearly define measurable objectives and key results (OKRs), which we share publicly and continuously evaluate. Everyone on our team has access to all information, and we believe this transparency is another important step to creating an inclusive culture. We also open source our employee handbook and our diversity and inclusion policy so that everyone, internal and external, can benefit. We recognize that this is a learning process, and we are all committed to unlearning inequality and invite team members to give us feedback on how we can improve.
One of the many ways we prioritize inclusion is through our asynchronous interviews. All of our interviews are conducted over Slack and mirror how we really work on a day-to-day basis (we are, after all, a remote-first team!). More importantly, asynchronous interviews remove a lot of the unnecessary stress that make some people underperform. As a result, we are better able to screen for underlying skills rather than the most visible proxies, like brand names on a CV, and we get to show candidates what it’s really like to work at Aula so that they can evaluate us, too.
Our hiring goals are intertwined with our inclusion and diversity goals. While we allow everyone to apply, we have strict OKRs around our outbound recruitment strategy: which is only sent to underrepresented groups within Aula. We advertise our jobs broadly from remote channels like remoteok.io, to Ada’s list, Elpha, and Power to Fly, People of Color in Tech, Techqueria, and many other niche job boards/communities to foster a diverse talent inflow.
And this paid off, with having hired our VP of Engineering Laura Tacho on August 1st the strict hiring OKR is working.
We Foster Psychological Safety
We take self-care seriously.
We reimburse 30 GBP / month for self-care activities like yoga or a headspace/calm account, and also have an internal space within Aula to promote self-care. While it’s important that each person have the tools and resources they need to practice self-care, it’s not something you’ll be doing on your own.
We use Peakon to send our bi-weekly surveys and make sure that everyone is aware of how the rest of the team is feeling and doing. In fact, Rune wrote a blog post about this, airing out our dirty laundry. We continually score high (9/10) in trust, feedback, and belonging, and even display our engagement dashboard publicly. We know how important psychological wellness is in the classroom, and it’s no different on our team. Everyone at Aula has a voice, feels heard, and trusts their team members.
Our Self-Care Space below:
We’re Ideal For Parents
All new parents are entitled to up to 52 weeks of leave.
All employees are treated in the same way, regardless of their role in the birth of the child, or the matching process if adopting a child. All new parents are entitled to 14 weeks with 100% of usual pay, and longer if desired with scaled pay. You can read our parental leave policy in full here.
There are many parents are Aula, and we’ve recently welcomed another #aulababy into our family! We are an incredibly parent-friendly team and support both employees and their families. For example, when I became a father in December I got paid for childcare when my wife had a breast infection and we needed to be in and out of the hospital for three weeks. Not even mentioning I was 2 weeks into my role at Aula. Life throws curve balls and I always felt I had the team behind me to help get through things.
In the past, we’ve hired two women on our teams while they were pregnant, and on our builder team, we have four proud fathers: Frederik (2), Guro (1), Farhan (1), Kyle (1). Below, our VP of Product and recent father, Kyle, on why he joined Aula. Excerpt below:
Other Values
Obviously, we stand for way more than these 3 beliefs. But I thought to share the most important ones to me and why I think we’re doing well on the Daring & Interesting front.
Luckily, I worked with Key Values last month to put those other values we stand for in wording. Read all about them here:
NEXT UP:
Bringing a D&I mentality to hiring. I will talk about how we’ve been trying to hire more women into our engineering team. And I will share with you how incredibly hard it is, and rewarding when you pull it o
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About me
I am Willem, Firm believer in remote, inclusive & distributed teams 🏝️
I work at Aula Education — join us while we build worlds first social learning platform for education! 👨🚀👩🚀
Give me a follow on Twitter or LinkedIn, you won’t regret it.
