‘Diversity and the challenges it brings’
By John Kundert
Sometimes the little bit of world we occupy evolves in an extraordinary way. As a young gay kid growing up in middle England quite a long time ago the world was against me. It excluded me. In fact it stigmatised me. Alienated me. To be honest I had to hide. Over and above this, through events of life, and perhaps laziness, I failed academically. This only further reduced opportunity. I remember having a sense that people and organisations could only see me through a lens of what I was not. I was not like them. Now today, I find myself surrounded by diversity and inclusion, and in a position to exercise inclusions that makes a difference to people I may not ordinarily connect with. For me this is quite extraordinary. So, with this in mind and as CTO of FT, I’ve tried to define six areas to help execute this difference inside FT.
- Purpose
We all need purpose. You can’t say “let’s go east” without explaining why. You can’t say “let’s be more diverse” without explaining why. We must provide clear answers. For me, this bit is actually quite easy because it aligns to the values of the FT, demonstrated by high performing teams. Research shows companies in the top tiers for racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have higher revenues and profits than the national industry average. Similarly, companies in the top tiers for gender diversity are 15% more likely to outperform their competitors financially. However for me diversity with inclusion is more fundamental — it reflects my own personal values and life.
2. Natural bias
The need to invest in understanding natural bias across the FT is important. We are all subject to our own individual subconscious biases, and we are all responsible for identifying and consciously ‘uncoupling’ from these biases. Changing your subconscious beliefs is undoubtedly complex but being aware of your own biases allows you to put in check points, for example, examining your decisions, listening to your own language and the words you choose to use, scrutinising hiring and promotion processes, asking for others to hold you, as a leader, to account.
3. Culture
To be a workplace that values and treats all talent equally irrespective of our identities does not come without obstacles and lessons along the way. It requires a continuous conversation and a readiness to be challenged. Furthermore, we need to be ready for potential conflict as teams navigate change. This is a natural reaction to unsolicited change for most of us. We must work hard to ensure implicit ‘privilege’ dissipates as fairness becomes an established value. For me, authenticity is the master key. You cannot really promote equality (gender or otherwise) if you don’t believe in it and are ready to be held to account for it. You need to create an environment where everyone can respectfully and intelligently challenge, vent, grow and learn together. It is about creating a safe space for change.
4. Hiring with Quality Reach
It should be a priority to develop diversity within your hiring and talent management processes. Over the last twelve months we have started to change by tackling gender diversity. In 2016 FT Technology had natural reach into a majority male London based technology community. This was not by design and it was more a reflection of the historical makeup of our teams and technology. One of the avenues we have successfully explored to counter this is an investment in developing a talent pipeline with Makers. Makers enables people to become professional software engineers through a model of self-led learning. Ruben Kostucki, COO, talks with passion about their mission to reach every community. They naturally connect with communities FT Technology would not naturally connect with. We hired our first Maker in 2015 as a Junior Developer. Between 2015 and today we have hired a total of 22 Makers. A total of 18 of these remain with FT with many moving through our careers to mid and senior levels. Overall that is an 80% retention rate. Fifteen of these are female (70%). We are now looking at other dimensions — sexuality, race and socio-economic background. We have also hired through https://codeyourfuture.io and in Autumn 2018 we will welcome two apprentices from Ada’s College. Whilst we still have a long way to go we are seeing some real success in reaching communities we would not ordinarily reach. And I have to say thank you to Ruben for helping the FT evolve our thinking on diversity.
5. Diversity everywhere
It is enormously important to have diversity represented at all levels and across all disciplines. By way of an example, you can’t claim to have cracked diversity if all your engineers are male and all your QAs are female. At FT we have worked hard on this. Through a mix of external hiring reaching a more diverse set of candidates and promotion processes with greater awareness of diversity and natural biases. We now have 34% of our product & technology teams are women. 30% of our Tech Directors and 8 of 14 our Principal Engineers are women. We all report into Cait O’Riordan, our CPIO (Chief Product and Information Officer) and board member .
6. Looking ahead to the future
We have better representation although we still have a long way to go. To go back to the beginning, the precondition is the culture (see above) remaining open enough to be held to account and evolve — that means everyone (in my case 250 people) holding me and each other to account. It is perhaps this, more than anything else, that entices talent from all backgrounds irrespective of their identity, to join FT Product & Technology.
This is not a hiring post but… for current openings please see here and please do visit our FT Product & Technology blog on Medium for postings.
