Your Team Could Be Just Like Uber, Especially If You’re Certain It’s Not.
Like a lot of folks in tech, I’m spending today reading and re-reading Susan Fowler Rigetti’s horrifying account of her time working at Uber:
If you haven’t read it, go ahead and do so right now. It’s at least 100 times more important than this post. If you can muster the strength, come back here when you’re done.
So. I trust that you, as a decent human, are as disgusted by Susan’s story as I am, but if you’re a manager or executive at a tech company, I hope you have an extra layer of discomfort while reading it. Because any good engineering manager’s reaction to Susan’s post should be: “How sure am I that this isn’t going on in my organization, too?”.
My answer: it depends a lot on how much harassment and inappropriate behavior you are currently aware of as a manager. And somewhat counterintuitively, the worst possible answer to the question “how much harrassment have you had in your team?” is “zero”.
The Problem With Zero
A lot of our time as software engineers is spent as detectives, using our tools to deduce what’s happening with our code and how it’s behaving in the real world. And at some point in my career as an engineer, I learned that it’s always a good idea to distrust zero.
You see, zero isn’t like the other numbers. Getting zero for an answer casts a cloud over the whole endeavor.
For example, let’s say I’m looking to find out how many errors are being thrown on my website. I run a query on my web logs and spit out an answer. If the answer comes back with a very low number (say, one error per day), my site is doing well, and I feel pretty good. But when the answer comes back “zero”, I get nervous. Because what is the chance that I truly have a completely, 100% error-free website versus the chance that I’ve just written my query incorrectly? My money’s on the latter, every day of the week.
As an engineer and as a manager, zero should throw up red flags. Alarm bells should ring. It should make you seriously doubt your method of measurement. Zero should make you more than suspicious; it should make you uncomfortable.
See No Evil
If you’ve been paying attention to conversations about inclusion in tech, you know by now that Susan’s story is far from unique. But don’t take my word for it:
Now, ask yourself: if harassment and inappropriate behavior are consistently reported as widespread in my industry, what are the chances that the incidence of this behavior on my team is zero? (Hint: the answer is “very, very low”.)
In fact, if you run an engineering organization of a moderate size (say, 20+ employees) and you don’t know about any form of inappropriate behavior, comments, or harassment that has happened in the last 6 months, I think you need to be worried. Like, really, really worried. Because no matter how inclusive your hiring practices and culture are, things are happening beyond what you see. Your employees are interacting with each other every day, and chances are at least a few of them are screwing up.
And if you’re seeing none of that, you could be Uber and not even know it.
Zero To One
So, what should you do if you are currently seeing literally zero incidents of inappropriate behavior in your org? Fortunately, the answer is pretty basic: you need to beef up your systems for finding and dealing with harassment. This could include things like:
- Evaluating your incident reporting system. Is it clear how and to whom people should report incidents? Are there clear, documented processes for how that information is dealt with and aggregated? If not, fix it.
- Increasing employee trust. Repeat over and over again, in public and in private and until you are blue in the face, that employees should expect a supportive workplace, and tell them how to report when things go wrong. When they do report an incident, follow through.
- Hiring an inclusion expert. There are a lot of great folks doing consulting work in the inclusion space. Hire one or more of them to help you figure out why you aren’t seeing any problems.
It can be really uncomfortable when you go digging for this kind of bad behavior; chances are you will in fact find it, and it’s brutally disappointing. But trust me when I tell you that you will appreciate the fuller, truer picture you have of your team as a result, and you’ll be doing your part to get the thousands of stories like Susan’s closer and closer to zero.
Update 2/20/2016: Interested in further reading? @sarahsharp on Twitter has a great thread on these topics and more, including more and better concrete suggestions for action:
Update #2 2/20/2016: My friend and former co-worker Erin Paul points out that another concrete step that I should have included is to strengthen your relationship with your HR partner, assuming, of course, that you have an HR department committed to a just and harassment-free workplace. (Disclosure: Erin was my HR partner at my last job, and her commitment to a just workplace was unwavering; her work and counsel were key to my team’s success.)
