DEI isn’t a destination.
The murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others forced even the most well-meaning, open-minded people to acknowledge their role in perpetuating inequity and power imbalances, including businesses that advocated for equality.
O/M is no exception.
“We absolutely had a shift. It was a moment that needed a response and action,” says O/M COO Lisa Adang. “As an organization, it made us step up to the plate in terms of having an active relationship with the outside world, knowing our staff lives in that world and is subject to its stressors.”
Since then, the studio’s ongoing commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) has transitioned from crisis response to daily affirmation. “Folks are still sharing a lot about how difficult it is to live in a time where there are so many challenges around being a person of color and other types of identities,” she says, adding that it’s important to consider who might be adversely affected by current events.
“How can we as studio leaders relieve some of the burden that employees carry? How do we help people feel supported? I think there’s a set of core needs that cut across every single person, starting with psychological safety — knowing you’re working with a team that accepts you for you, because so often there’s a burden of conformity or dogmatic sense of what is professionalism that creates a lot of stress and unseen labor for folks at work.”
Lisa’s superpower is identifying and implementing equitable systems and structures that prioritize people as humans who are more than the sum of their jobs. She arrived at O/M five years ago after a career in museums and academic spaces where she started doing what she specializes in today — “Understanding how workflows work, helping make them better, connecting people, figuring out the problems, having conversations, getting things done, and bringing in resources where they’re needed.”
It might sound analytical, but when approached with empathy, operational planning can create an environment where everyone can thrive. Perhaps most critical to O/M’s DEI efforts is the continuous feedback loop that invites employees to speak up without fear of repercussion.
For example, when staff requested a formal and fair system for performance evaluations, Lisa and team developed biannual reviews so people know exactly what steps to take to advance their careers. They’re now gathering input on the system itself to ensure it’s actually working as advertised.
“I fully expect we’ll get all sorts of feedback and we’ll need to work with the team to understand the best way to move forward together,” she says. “That’s basically how we approach all of our practices. We have systems that we trust and believe in but we also remain open and flexible to continuously evolve them.”
There are many factors that allow O/M leaders to nurture core studio values. Being small, for example, is huge. A lot of companies have to make compromises to meet financial goals, whereas O/M is able to choose clients and make decisions that match their ethics.
“We’d rather run a company that we believe in than stretch ourselves too thin and make compromises,” Lisa says.
The team is equally intentional about how and who it hires. O/M used to rely on word of mouth but managed to avoid becoming a monolithic culture simply because the original members were a rather varied bunch, so the referral network was pointed in many directions. Today, the studio has worked hard to create an equitable hiring process, from where new job openings are posted to how the interview process is structured. Lisa also says it’s important to be very transparent so candidates don’t have to guess what O/M is all about.
“If you really lay out who you are and what you’re doing exactly to support your team, it clears the way to help people feel confident about joining,” she says. “We also share our salary bands with our candidates in our very first conversation. We let them know what they’ll be evaluated on and what to expect in each step of the process. Restricting information in the interview process is not a good way to evaluate people for success. Giving them all the information you have and seeing what they do with it is a much more realistic way to see how they’d operate in the workplace, which runs counter to interview processes that are set up to surprise and befuddle!”
O/M isn’t perfect, of course. With the recent uptick in violence against Asian-American communities, the studio didn’t know how to respond and was slow to address the issue. They looked for guidance from staff because they wanted to listen and understand but also knew that in doing so they were putting the weight of responsibility on individual employees. They’re getting better about recognizing how to respond and being more proactive about identifying challenges facing the team.
“Getting comfortable with messing up is very important to make any progress in this space. It’s really humbling, constantly, but that shouldn’t absolve our responsibility and my responsibility as a member of leadership for taking that on,” she says, adding that, ultimately, DEI isn’t a project to finish. “Diversity is not a goal post that you meet as an organization — it’s something we’re always building on and can be represented through so many different aspects of identity and experience. Equity and inclusion is something we’re working to define. It manifests in the way that we show up for each other every day.”
“Getting over fear and discomfort as a white person navigating these questions [of diversity, equity, and inclusion] is imperative. It’s constantly challenging and humbling and I'm not an expert and I don’t know the answers but I care and I want to try and I want to accept responsibility when I misstep. Getting comfortable with messing up is very important to make any progress in this space.”
“It’s really humbling, constantly, but that shouldn’t absolve our responsibility and my responsibility as a member of leadership for taking that on.”
