Designing an Inclusive Workplace
We formed our design consultancy last year, and the first part of the year was rapid putting-out of fires. We were taking over clients from our NYC parent company who’d recently been acquired, figuring out payroll, forming a brand identity, and hiring a staff who could handle the workload we were facing. While we cared about creating an inclusive and diverse culture, we really weren’t intently focused on it. Turns out, if you don’t give time and attention to something, it’s pretty hard to bring it to fruition.
At this, you might be asking, “Listen, I know diversity is a buzz word and I’m ‘supposed’ to care about it, but why?” Research — and a lot of it — has shown a direct correlation between diversity initiative and ROI impact for businesses. Specifically, when a business has a more diverse workforce (meaning, a group of employees of varying races, religions, ages, genders, sexualities, classes, education, etc) their employees are more committed to the company, they create more successful products and services, and the company performs better financially. So, yeah. You should care.
Back on the farm… While we did do a decent job of hiring in terms of gender and race, we were less great about class, age, ableism, sexuality, and other areas. And more importantly, because we weren’t focused on inclusivity, we weren’t as strong as we could be when it came to retention or attraction of diverse employees. When we came up for air towards the end of the year, we recognized our lack of focus. We took a step back to analyze our culture and ensure it was that of a place we could be proud of, bringing something positive to the world. Here’s where we started.
Bring in an expert
No one knows everything. And no one is expected to know everything. I think we all forget that at times, and it can be helpful to bring in an expert to help you evaluate things with fresh eyes and a broader knowledge base, no matter the context. Our first step to improving our diversity was tackling what we considered the first step in the employment process: our recruiting and hiring approach. For this, we hosted a workshop from Colored to understand where our hiring process was failing and what we could do to make it more inclusive. Thinking we might not be the only ones with these questions, we opened it up to the Chicago community to also attend. What resulted was an open and honest conversation with other hiring managers and designers about improvements we can make as well as direct steps we could all take to make our processes more accessible to candidates of all backgrounds.
Take a long, honest look in the mirror
To look at what was working with the people we already had, we turned the design process inward and created “culture week:” a week of workshops to address things like career growth and opportunities, organizational values and how to implement those, and how our physical space design impacted our communication, among other things. Everyone weighed in, and we were able to have some tough conversations around what was working and what was not for everyone here. In turn, this also helped us narrow in on priority with recruitment and hiring process efforts which we’d learned from our hiring workshop.
Lunch & learns
Part of our commitment to our employees has always been celebrating the individual and allowing their personality to shine. During our culture week workshops, we learned we could step it up and really encourage that expression more actively.
To that end, we created a lunch & learn program that was about employees’ interests and backgrounds — not about the work. The reason for this was twofold:
- It created a low-stakes way for employees to practice their presentation skills, a set of necessary skills as consultants
- It allowed employees to get to know each other more deeply and connect with their colleagues outside of the surface-level knowledge they might have about them, which, particularly as companies grow, can often be based on demographics
The result is employees now get excited about their coworkers’ presentations. We all guess what we’re going to learn, and the anticipation is part of the fun. So far, we’ve learned about CSAs and community farming, how to write a TV pilot, and knife-throwing, among other topics.
Ask your employees
Something we often think about in design but sometimes forget to apply to ourselves is “ask the user.” In this case, our “user” were our current employees. Rather than do one-on-one interviews where people might feel put on the spot or tokenized, we implemented weekly 5-question surveys to check in on how we’re doing as an institution and where we can improve. (It’s worth noting that, as a small office, we made sure to keep the feedback anonymous in order to preserve the ability to actually be honest.)
More importantly, we do something with these surveys. Our HR manager takes each response to heart and presents the feedback weekly at our leadership meeting where we discuss ideas on how to improve areas where we’re not as strong. Lastly, we make sure to give monthly feedback to the whole company of how the feedback is getting used and new initiatives we’re working on or rolling out based on the survey responses. Because it’s not enough to ask the questions — you need to do something with the answers and communicate that you’re doing something with them.
Moving forward
All in all, we’re very much still a work-in-progress culture, but this journey of inclusivity is one we’re happy to commit to. We’re taking the feedback from our full-time and contract employees to improve things for the people in whom we’ve already invested. We’re revamping our hiring and assessment process with the help of a diversity consultant. The majority of our leadership is women. And we realized we can’t just focus internally — there’s a lot to be gained from sharing with and boosting our community.
To that end, we’re so appreciative of the womxn who participated in this month’s Chicago Womxn in Design feature with us. We are in awe of all of you and hope to earn your respect as much as you have ours.
