Amanda Day of Remote On How To Create More Inclusive Workplaces
An Interview With Finn Bartram, Editor Of People Managing People
It’s all about effective communication and creating safe channels for everyone to share their feedback and experiences so we can track our progress against the goals we set. We run regular engagement surveys and place a great deal of emphasis on the results of those surveys, so team members feel motivated and empowered to share their experiences so we can continually progress forward.
Creating inclusive workplaces is crucial for any organization that wants to get the most out of its talent. This means creating an environment where everyone feels like they belong, has equal opportunities, is empowered to do their best work, and feels comfortable making requests and contributing ideas. In this series, we asked prominent HR and business leaders about the steps they take to create more inclusive workplaces. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Amanda Day.
Amanda is Remote’s Director of People Enablement and a critical driver of Remote’s advocacy for diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is passionate about people-first and remote-first approaches that achieve business goals while still empowering employees to be their best selves in and outside of work.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting?
I was so proud and excited to start my first office job during university. It felt like I was taking the next big step! I woke up the morning of my first day and realized I should have been at the office 30 minutes ago. I panicked! This was not the first impression I wanted to make. I sent a quick email to the only person I knew there and rushed to get ready and to the office as quickly as possible. Fortunately, the office was close to where I lived and the team was very understanding. The rest of the day carried on without a hitch!
Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Two lessons: always double check my alarm is set the night before, and life happens. It meant so much to me as a nervous new hire that leadership didn’t make it a big deal. I keep this in mind any time a team member I am working with makes a mistake, having an empathetic and practical approach is going to achieve better results.”
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
I’ve been really fortunate to be surrounded by incredible people who have supported me throughout my career. Early in my career, I was reporting to a female leader who invested in my development through career conversations, stretch assignments, and mentorship. She didn’t limit my development to our company but ensured that I was prepared for situations and experiences after my time there. The support and mentorship from this leader enabled the confidence in my abilities to grow, motivated me to perform my best, and to expand my learning opportunities.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
It’s not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters’. It took me time to learn this, but there is so much that happens out of my control. What is in my control is how I respond to events or situations and how I want to represent myself in that moment. This has made all the difference in my personal and professional life.
Thinking back on your own career, what would you tell your younger self?
It may sound cliche, but I would tell my younger self to not be afraid of making mistakes. The moments where mistakes are made are some of the best opportunities to learn, grow, and show how you can persevere.
Let’s now move to the central part of our interview. What systems do you have to ensure your workplace is as inclusive as possible?
● Remote & async work
● Inclusive recruiting
● DEIB training
● Transparency in our performance management and total rewards systems
● Inclusive policies such as parental leave
● ERGs
● Anonymous survey and feedback opportunities
We obviously do remote work at Remote, but we recognize the need to do it intentionally to ensure everyone feels included, heard, and supported. That means doing a lot of async work, which is just work that doesn’t require people to be online at the same time. We try to use the time when we are all online together for bonding and other things that can’t really be done async.
Inclusivity at Remote really starts in the recruiting phase and continues from there. You have to take an inclusive approach to hiring if you want to have an inclusive company, so we are deliberate in the way we source diverse groups of candidates for open roles and the way we create our job descriptions.
Remote is unusual in how much transparency we provide. Our entire company handbook is available publicly online at remote.com/handbook, so anyone can see how we operate. That even includes how we calculate compensation and total rewards, as well as how performance ties into that.
Finally, I would also say that benefits are at the heart of inclusivity at Remote. Making a benefits plan that is inclusive of people in more than 70 countries on six continents is a massive challenge, but because we have so much expertise on global benefits within our organization, we are well suited to the task. For example, we have a generous and robust parental leave policy that covers parents of all genders, as well as adoptive parents, to ensure everyone is covered for that special life event.
Based on your experience and success, what are your top five tips for creating more inclusive workplaces? Please share a story or an example for each.
1. Diverse workforce
2. Foster psychological safety
3. DEIB training
4. Flexible policies (ex: remote and flexible schedule work)
5. Listen to your employees
Inclusivity and diversity are not the same thing, but you can’t truly be inclusive if you are not diverse. Psychological safety is also key — it’s not just enough to have a diverse workplace. People within that workplace need to feel comfortable raising concerns and speaking honestly with leadership. Otherwise, their problems go unheard and the people and company suffer for it.
DEIB training is a necessity as well. When you have people from cultures all over the world, it’s important for people to know how to listen to and respect one another. One of our core values is kindness, and by hiring with kindness in mind, we get a great head start on finding people who are predisposed to be respectful to one another.
Flexibility is essential too. Flexible hours, flexible locations, and just flexibility in general are very helpful to stay inclusive of people with different demands outside of work. Some people are parents, some people take care of older relatives, and some people have to travel a lot. Flexibility ensures everyone can meet their obligations outside of work while maintaining their ability to perform in their roles.
Finally, just listen! We run regular engagement surveys and place a great deal of emphasis on the results of those surveys. Managers and senior leaders are responsible for ensuring their teams respond to feedback, and opportunities for feedback are plentiful.
Can you share 3 or 4 of the most common mistakes you have seen businesses make while trying to become more inclusive? What should one keep in mind to avoid that?
- Looking at diversity on a superficial level, inclusivity and belonging are so incredibly important and require intentional work. Only focusing on the diversity of your employees and expecting inclusion to automatically happen could be a mistake.
- Not listening to employees: inclusion is driven at all levels and your employees’ feedback is so important. Consider different avenues you can give your employees to provide feedback in a safe environment and encourage transparent communications.
- Relying on DEIB training as your only DEIB initiative or resource. Inclusion should be an ongoing priority that is given attention.
How do you measure the effectiveness of your DEI efforts?
● Define clear objectives
● Employee surveys like engagement surveys and pulse surveys
● Diversity metrics
● Consider the correlation between DEI metrics and the business performance
It’s all about effective communication and creating safe channels for everyone to share their feedback and experiences so we can track our progress against the goals we set. We run regular engagement surveys and place a great deal of emphasis on the results of those surveys, so team members feel motivated and empowered to share their experiences so we can continually progress forward.
What do you do to address Proximity Bias? How do you ensure remote workers are treated the same as onsite workers and have equal access to opportunities?
Remote is fully remote, so we don’t have any offices. For companies with hybrid models of office and remote workers, it is vital that everyone take a remote-first approach to ensure everyone has an equitable experience. That means keeping conversations about work in public channels where remote workers can participate, as well as having recorded meetings on Zoom instead of in closed-off conference rooms where remote workers can’t go.
How can our readers further follow your work?
Check out our Remote blog and follow me on LinkedIn! We have some great content to help global team leaders improve their remote work leadership and some really practical resources for implementing DEIB, and I have written several of these pieces myself. It’s a real passion point as you can tell.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
About The Interviewer: Finn is the editor of People Managing People, an indie media publication on a mission to help build a better world of work. He’s passionate about growing organizations where people are empowered to continuously improve and feel fulfilled in their role. If not at his desk, you can find him playing sports or enjoying the great outdoors. To learn more about Finn’s work please go to https://peoplemanagingpeople.com/
