How To Create a Meaningful Support Structure for Women at Your Startup

In the past two years, Springboard has grown from a small family of ~20 people to a fast-scaling company with 150+ employees across two offices. While we’ve worked hard to maintain aspects of our culture, many of the new employees likely don’t feel the same sense of closeness that we did when we were all cramped in a WeWork space. And we definitely aren’t as open with each other about our aspirations and struggles as we were when we regularly engaged in each other’s weekend plans, family events, and dating adventures.

But more troubling: being a tech startup in the financial district of San Francisco provides the risk of easily slipping into a “bro culture.” When we were about ~60 people, we saw some early signs that concerned us and we decided to invest more in empowering women at the company. We wanted to help amplify less-vocal voices to ensure the culture provided the balance and equality that makes a great company.

While big companies already have well-structured empowerment networks, as a startup, we both had the opportunity and task to figure out what would fit us. Having gone through this, I’m sharing our experience to hopefully advise early employees seeking to build Women@ groups at their own startups.

Step 1: Build a Core Women@ Taskforce

Two colleagues and I got together to think about what we wanted Women@Springboard to look like. We pulled ideas from resources including Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You. In the book, Julie wrote about the nature of Facebook’s support groups:

A few years ago, I formed a Lean In Circle with a dozen other women at the company. Two hours every month, we’d go around the room and share what we were each grappling with — difficult relationships, uncertainty about our careers, struggles to balance parenthood with work. Tears were not uncommon because some of the challenges were truly hard. But I will never forget the warmth and camaraderie and how much that support meant to us. Where we could, we gave each other help and advice, and where we couldn’t, we’d still offer our hugs and sympathetic ears.

After brainstorming, we decided we wanted Women@Springboard to capture warmth and camaraderie — with a strong dose of empowerment & badassery.

Step 2: Set up a Women@ Private Slack Channel

To get the conversation started, we set up a #women-springboard private Slack channel to share interesting articles, events, and questions. We wanted the channel to be private so members could share their questions and struggles in a safe environment. In the beginning, the taskforce primarily drove conversations but the frequency picked up, and the channel became an accumulation of advice & life hacks for workplace and life incidents.

Examples of early posts:

Step 3: Host a Quarterly Women@ Event

To turn our online conversations into deeper relationships IRL, we hosted a Women@ event. We wanted the conversations to be authentic and capture what was really on the minds of members — but we also knew that would be challenging.

“You can’t just tell people to be vulnerable and expect them to open up,” my colleague said in a brainstorming session.

Here’s how we planned & executed the first event:

Find a space that’s not your office. Find time in the workday.

Getting away from the office creates the distance necessary to think in a more meta way about aspirations and challenges. To host the event, I looked at parks, bars, and restaurants but none of them had the right vibe. We ended up securing a conference room at Salesforce Tower (thanks to our friends at CBRE). At the venue, we arranged the tables to form a large square to ensure everyone would face the group. Our office manager brought coffee and bubble tea.

The event was from 3pm — 5pm on a Friday to ensure that everyone could be present without having to worry about external commitments or childcare.

Involve the senior women leaders at your company.

Like many startups, Springboard has many early-career employees. To provide a diversity of perspective, we requested Springboard’s three senior women leaders help facilitate the discussion, answer questions, and share their advice. This was awesome because many attendees didn’t regularly engage with leadership and this gave them the opportunity to hear personal stories from women with remarkable professional and personal lives.

When introducing the session, I asked the three of them to share their life stories — highlighting different milestones (marriages, children, moves, pauses, divorces, and decision points).

Ask the community to submit questions (anonymously or not).

Prior to the event, I sent out a survey asking attendees to anonymously submit questions they’d like to discuss with their peers. We got 14 submissions spanning personal & professional life. Here are some of them:

• How do you not let a significant personal setback (e.g. a breakup, or a family emergency) impact your work?
• What are helpful ways to think about weighing wanting a family vs. investing 100% in one’s career?
• When I’m serious, people don’t think I’m fun. When I’m not serious, people don’t think I can get the job done. How should I navigate this?
• I struggle with speaking about compensation and the conversations that surround that. What is some advice on showing your worth and wanting to ask for a deserved increase while also being thoughtful of the company and understanding their positioning?

As the moderator, be honest and open in the opening to set the tone.

As I stood in front of the room at the event, my colleague’s words echoed in my mind: “You can’t just tell people to be vulnerable and expect them to open up.” So I decided I’d start with my own story — and why I thought the Women@ community is important.

I spoke about working really hard to apply to business school — spending hundreds of hours preparing, and getting significant help from my manager, close friends, and family. However, despite all our best efforts, I didn’t get in. I talked about how it felt to lose clarity of my goals and be filled with so much self-doubt so early in my career.

However, when I started talking to my friends, I realized I wasn’t the only one experiencing such insecurities. My friends — despite their stacked LinkedIn profiles and beautiful Instagram pictures — were all experiencing different forms of insecurity too. They were asking questions like — Is this career really right for me? What if I can’t have children? How do I find a long-term relationship in the crazy mess that’s millennial dating?

That’s when I started realizing the power of community.

Almost everything that’s happening to us has happened to someone else. Learning from experiences of our mentors and friends makes it easier to deal with our problems, and the intent for today’s session is to enable a community of really talented women to get together to exchange stories, provide advice, and share their uncertainties of life.

During this session, I’ll share the questions that you all asked — and facilitate a discussion where anyone can step in to share their thoughts and advice.

Given the nature of the content, it’s important that we open our hearts, leave judgment, and also maintain privacy; not sharing anyone else’s personal stories outside this group.

Closing

The conversation was incredible. My colleagues teased me about aspiring to go to the dark side with an MBA degree, and we gave each other practical advice on how to grow — focusing on things such as speaking up more or strategizing on how to overcome tricky work-life situations. I left the 2-hour session feeling months closer to the group, and I heard a similar sentiment from many other attendees. This event became a foundation of a much-closer relationship that women at Springboard share.

Since the event, we have continued conversations about workplace issues and opportunities on Slack and in smaller groups. In the coming months, we intend to deep-dive into other specific topics:

• Negotiating Compensation (Asking for What You’re Worth)
• Maternity Leave
• Managerial Coaching for Women

Why this Matters

I’m personally grateful for the community that is forming with Women@Springboard. On a daily basis, I spend more time with my colleagues than anyone else, and it feels so good to be able to bring my whole self to work — questionable grad school doubts and the like — knowing that there are so many people rooting for me.

It’s the responsibility of early-employees to establish such empowerment groups so they grow with the company and integrate deeply into the culture, enabling every other employee to find their own sense of belonging at the office.

Credit: The Hills Time

Special thanks to my awesome colleague Catherina for providing guidance on this piece!

Have questions or suggestions on how we can create an inclusive and supportive environment for women in the workplace? Leave a comment below or reach out @siiyeah.