3 Ways One Tech Company is Moving the Needle on our Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
When I joined Unbounce four years ago, the company was being led by five white male executives. Back then, I remember Rick, our CEO, sharing that while he was grateful for each and every one of Unbounce’s founders (there were six founders when Unbounce got off the ground), he wished that back then he had been more intentional about inviting more diversity into their team of founders. A few months later, Rick signed the Minerva BC pledge and publicly committed the company to work towards achieving gender parity, while simultaneously increasing representation of women in leadership and technical roles.
Since that date in 2016, a lot has changed. Today, our team is made up of 45% men and 55% women and other marginalized genders. Our President is a woman along with 60 percent of our senior leadership team and 30 percent of our technical teams. We also analyzed our compensation and reached gender pay parity back in 2019. The efforts Unbounce has made to advance gender diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), I believe have given us a strong foundation to increase the scope of this work moving forward. In 2020 specifically, we’ve moved beyond gender and focused on improving our efforts to advance racial and ethnic DEI. We collected demographic data including things like ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability, we created a formalized DEI policy and we gave employees access to long-term learning and development opportunities on topics about how DEI impacts our day-to-day work (this included an amazing session with D&I consultant, Cicely Blain!).
In recognition of the strides we’ve made so far, BC Tech recently awarded us with the 2020 TIA Game Changer in Diversity and Inclusion award. There were many tactics, projects, inputs, and people (so many people, but a special shout out goes to our People and Culture team!) that contributed to our DEI journey so far. And while we don’t consider this work to be truly ever complete — I want to share three key ways we moved the needle on these important commitments.
1. We Formalized Diversity as a Company Value
From day one, we’ve been consciously building a people-first team with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Even back in 2011, before diversity and inclusion were top of mind for companies, Unbounce thought progressively about taking care of its people. We followed the philosophy that happy employees = happy customers = healthy business.
But while we had already made many commitments to be a more diverse team and companyI, we also knew it was important that we officially formalize diversity as a company value. This decision was a signal to the entire team, future Unbouncers, our community, and ourselves (hello, accountability!) that diversity, equity and inclusion were part of the bedrock of our business. We’re committed to thinking about D&I on a consistent basis, incorporating these best practices into our current business operations, evaluating candidates against this value, and investing in D&I (both time and resources) just as we would any other business priority.
People have always come first at Unbounce, but with diversity as a company value, we’ve invested heavily in building more diverse, equitable, and inclusive spaces. This ensures our employees can bring their authentic selves to work, and feel their voices are heard.
2. We Overhauled our Recruitment Process To Combat Unconscious Bias
Our first objective as part of the Minerva BC Pledge was to reach gender parity in terms of organization-wide representation. To begin chipping away at this goal, we started with a thorough inspection of our recruitment processes. We set out to ensure that diversity was a priority during the pipeline creation phase and that inclusive candidate interactions were created during the interview process. Over several months we trained hiring managers on a variety of topics including how best to rate candidates’ answers to interview questions consistently, how to ask probing questions appropriately, what not to ask, and how to create an environment of inclusivity during an interview. We also included a female senior leader in technical role interviews so that female candidates could “see” themselves reflected in the company and to eliminate candidates who displayed bias towards our female leaders.
The work we did to improve and revitalize how we approached diversity and inclusion during the hiring process played a huge role in our ability to hire and retain more women and ultimately our representation of women across the company. And these same tactics allow us to ensure diversity and inclusion beyond our gender-related commitments through the Minerva BC Pledge.
3. We Conducted a Compensation Analysis and Closed Our Pay Gap
Equal pay is an important part of measuring a diverse and inclusive workplace and we also know that when organizations make equal pay a priority, they’re 19 percent more likely to exceed industry-average levels of productivity and 54 percent more likely to beat industry-average turnover benchmarks. Businesses that value equality end up with less turnover and higher productivity.
Back in 2017, our People & Culture (P&C) team completed a rigorous manual evaluation of each employee’s salary level. To our surprise, we discovered we had an adjusted gender wage gap. While it was clear that the gap wasn’t there due to intentional gender bias, a lack of structure and process in how compensation was decided and adjusted at Unbounce had led to them. So our P&C team immediately worked with people managers to close these gaps and started to build out policies and procedures that would allow the company to monitor and prevent this from happening moving forward. Some major milestones included separating compensation evaluations from performance evaluations (to avoid a difference in pay due to negotiating skills versus performance), taking steps to increase pay transparency, and collecting more robust self-identified demographic data.
We conducted another gender pay parity assessment in 2019 and discovered the processes and policies are working. Today at Unbounce, no gender wage gap exists. This assessment is something we’ll continue to conduct annually, and thanks to our recent collection of more robust self-identified demographic data, we’ll also be able to evaluate for pay parity based on factors beyond gender, like ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and caregiver status.
Embracing diversity isn’t only about creating more diversity at the table–it’s also about ensuring you have equitable and inclusive practices and policies in place so that everyone at the table is being treated fairly and is meaningfully contributing. As part of this work, we also launched an initiative — Pay up for Progress — to support and inspire other companies to prioritize equal pay too.
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We’re taking small but consistent steps every day to prioritize DEI and iterating as we go. And sometimes we don’t get it right the first time. But as I reflect on the past year, one thing that I’ve certainly learned is that making progress is much more important than striving for perfection when it comes to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion.
