Welcome to Haus: Diversity & Inclusion Required
Part II: Haus Diversity & Inclusion Series
Last year, I posted an article “Now Hiring: Homogeneity Not Required,” outlining Haus’s decision to be a diverse and inclusive company and a few steps we use to recruit a diverse workforce. When publishing the first article we didn’t have enough hiring data to measure how well our efforts were performing. Now we have our team reviews in-hand, and though we’re still very early (five full-time), we have our first tally of Haus’s diversity by the numbers. Before diving into the numbers I want to share the on-boarding document we use to bring new members of the team up to speed on our approach to diversity.
Welcome to Haus!
We’re thrilled you’re here. As you figure out our HR system, office layout, lunchtime protocol, track down product documentation and dig through GitHub, we also want to tell you about diversity and inclusion at Haus — which is central to the company we are building.
We keep hiring requirements to a minimum and believe you don’t have to have a specific personality type or share the hobbies of the other folks on the team. However, the one non-skillset based requirement is that everyone joining Haus believes in fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce.
Every two months since Haus started we have held a Diversity & Inclusion meeting with participation from members from every functional team in the company. In practice that’s meant the whole company as we’ve gone from two to five people. The agenda of the meetings has evolved as we’ve refined the purpose and in response to major societal events. For instance, one of our meetings fell two days after the U.S. Presidential election and we devoted the meeting to discussing diversity and inclusion in light of the results.
Early on at Haus we called the meeting “Diversity in Hiring.” The name evolved to “Diversity & Inclusion,” as we realized that building a diverse workforce cannot stop at hiring. An inclusive culture is critical for hiring and maintaining a diverse workforce. Over time, figuring out the appropriate scope for actions coming out of the meeting has gained importance. We found we were too eager with our goals during the meeting and often exceeded our ability to execute given the rest of the work we have as an early-stage startup. Now we are more mindful and try to define and assign exactly what we’ll do before the next meeting. What diversity and inclusion means varies across the team. While we’ve had broad conversations about the meaning, we’ve never created a fixed Haus definition and we may never because each addition to the team has brought a new perspective to the definition. We’re excited to add yours!
While we’ve had broad conversations about the meaning, we’ve never created a fixed Haus definition and we may never because each addition to the team has brought a new perspective to the definition.
Haus Diversity Results
Qualitative:
Now that we’re 21 months into Haus, how are we doing?
- In our end-of-year cross-functional reviews, our efforts to make Haus a diverse and inclusive place were called out positively by the whole team
Quantitative:
In terms of full-time team composition, we are currently (May 2017):
- Gender: Four women, one man
- Race & Ethnicity: Three white, One black or African-American, One Asian
- National Origin: Two U.S., Three non-U.S.
- Educational Background: Three from schools heavily recruited by tech, Two from schools not heavily recruited by tech
- In-Network/Out-of-Network: Four in-network hires, one out-of-network hire
- Parents/Non-Parents: One parent, Four non-parents
- Over 4o years-old / less than 40 years-old: Five less than 40,
Zero over 40 - Coastal/Non-Coastal U.S. Upbringing: Four coastal, One non-coastal, One International
What we don’t have is a metric for what the diversity of perspectives has done to our strategy, product, engineering, sales, marketing and customer support. But, we’re going to keep betting and investing that it will be positive. So, welcome to Haus, we hope you’ll bring your ideas, thoughts, opinions and experience to bear in this and all of our discussions.
