Hackathons for Good: Innovation to Make a Difference

Deep Banerji, SVP Technology at Deputy

I love taking things from 0 to 1. There is nothing better than creative problem solving, working with a passionate team, getting out of your comfort zone, and learning something new. Whether it’s at a startup, in a scaleup growth stage, or at a large organization.

That’s why I am passionate about hackathons.

Hackathon-style, time-boxed sprints have been intrinsic to our company’s makeup. They’ve led to the development of our values, impactful features, and team building. After all, people can swiftly accomplish ambitious things together.

Traditionally, hackathons focus on introducing a novel technology or solving a meaty customer problem — both being imperative matters to solve. But how do you ensure that you’re creating a meaningful impact in the lives of people that interact with your product every day?

It’s a question I think about a lot. Especially as global communities continue to face difficulties caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, racial injustices, and heightened discrimination.

At Deputy, we sit at the heart of 200,000+ shift workplaces worldwide. We recognize and welcome our unique part to play in generating impact for communities and making a difference in how people are treated.

That’s why we decided to launch “Hackathons for Good” — internally dubbed “DE&I Week” — “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Week”. Deputy invests a full week to design and implement initiatives in our product and our company that further DE&I for our customers and how we work.

We even created a brand and logo with swag (t-shirts) for all staff!

Hackathons For Good 101: How to Get One Going with Your Team

Building your own “Hackathon for Good” can be a daunting task. Especially for larger organizations working across a multitude of timezones. Here are my top five tips for mastering your own “Hackathon for Good”, after 2 years of running “DE&I Week” at Deputy —

1. Call for leaders. Leadership comes in all forms. What better opportunity to embrace and elevate leaders in your company than to give them ownership over a company-wide hackathon. I suggest leaders brainstorm ideas 2 – 3 months prior to your event and connect in the weeks leading up to start mapping out a plan.
2. Rally the team. Involve the whole company, and create ambassadors out of your hackathon leadership team. Ideas come from everywhere, so you’ll want everyone included.
3. Ensure success. Form a DE&I Week Committee of a few senior leads to ensure initiatives are staffed for success. It’s important that each initiative has full-stack teams to effectively execute the idea, end-to-end!
4. Invest your time. Meaningful change comes from meaningful investment. In this case, that investment is time. Communicate with your team to see what items can be pushed or stalled until after your hackathon so that it’s truly all hands on deck.
5. Finish the jobs. Be flexible with your timeline, your team may not be able to accomplish everything in one week. I recommend allocating a few days post-DE&I-week to rollout initiatives, get feedback, and nail the polish.

To date, I believe we’re the only tech company that steps up with this level of commitment company wide (would love to hear from you if you are running something similar!). It’s one of the key drivers of why I’m proud to work at Deputy!

And what a difference we’ve made.

Last year, the 2020 inaugural edition, we…

• Updated our site illustrations of people to be diverse and representative
• Uplifted our recruiting process to be more inclusive to diverse candidate groups
• Displayed timesheet edit history in mobile, to build transparency between managers and their team
• Added preferred names to allow staff to be represented by the name they feel most comfortable with
• Removed the gender field to better support non-binary and trans team members
• Renamed “archive employees” from the previous term “discard” because people aren’t objects, we know words matter
• Promoted charities supporting racial justice and equality on our login page
• Setup the framework to offer discounts to charities who use our product
• Audited our help docs to be more inclusive

And just last week we supercharged our efforts in the 2021 edition. This time we drove 3x the number of initiatives, as the entire company got behind it. We are launching…

• Employee engagement health check to create an avenue to collect sentiment and feedback on how teams at hourly workplaces are feeling, so managers can take action
• Shift equality report to determine if shifts are being allocated to staff fairly
• New Apple Watch app to allow shift workers, who often aren’t allowed to use their phone while on shift, to glance at their wrist to determine when to take a break, clock on/off, and see upcoming shifts
• Renamed our git branches from master to main, removing a reference to slavery
• Renamed the default term “employee” to “team member”, a more inclusive and equal term
• Pronouns can now be entered by team members so they have a choice in how they are referred to
• A localisation platform to enable our web application to support any language, and a new version of our iOS and Android apps with full coverage for Spanish
• 30 improvements to accessibility, supporting inclusion for people with vision impairments and other disabilities
• Voice-activated shift clock-in experience proof-of-concept, for those with disabilities that rely on voice
• Charity onboarding so that charities can easily qualify for discounts and seamlessly onboard onto Deputy
• First draft of a more approachable and understandable Terms and Conditions that customers, small to large, can easily digest
• “Sparking Conversations”, an internal self-help club to learn and have challenging, respectful discussions
• “Machine Learning Customer Feedback” dashboard that takes bias out of reviewing customer feedback
• Diversity dashboard to show our progress on building a diverse team and company
• Careers site to reflect the diversity of our team and company
• Employment opportunities for people with disabilities
• Confluence page on resources to create a stronger remote and distributed inclusive work environment for Deputies

Epic!! We’ll be shipping these product improvements over this week and am thrilled to play our part in furthering diversity, equity, and inclusivity in the 200k+ workplaces we serve.

DE&I week initiative teams having a ball and making a difference

DE&I week is now an official program at Deputy. The yearly week-long “hackathon” is much-anticipated by our team around the world and continues to be a powerful vehicle for making a meaningful difference.

Consider it for your product, service, or company — it can truly be the gift that perpetually keeps giving. If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know in the comments!