Belonging Starts Here: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at The Org | The Org

Other announcement

We at The Org are on a mission to make the workforce more inclusive, transparent, diverse and equitable, and that mission can only be achieved if it is reflected in our own organization. We want to share our commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) at The Org which includes: how we define DEI, the progress that we’ve made thus far and our upcoming initiatives. By being transparent with our journey we hope to not only inspire our own team to take the actionable steps needed to make the tech industry more inclusive and accessible but also encourage other organizations to make that same pledge.

How we think about DEI at The Org

One of our company values is ‘hygge’, a Danish word meaning “cozy,” “belonging” or “togetherness,” and it represents the way we treat our office community and our long-standing devotion to creating an inclusive organization. We kicked off our diversity committee in June 2021, and shortly after we announced a formal commitment from our leadership team to make DEI a dedicated pillar of our business strategy and culture. As our founder and CEO Christian Wylonis stated,

“We want to attract and retain the best talent. Period. The best talent can come from any background and we want to create a community where everybody belongs. We want to build a community where people can bring their true selves to work. This is a prerequisite for creating an innovative culture that creates world class products.”

Our DEI history and progress

Our diversity team, internally called “Belonging Starts Here,” launched when The Org had just 30 employees. We now have 15+ members on the committee, including our COO and CTO and Co-Founder. Our mission is to foster and embrace diversity, equity and inclusion and ensure that The Org is an environment where nobody has to change who they are to belong.

Currently, we come together at least once a month to brainstorm and prioritize initiatives that attract diverse candidates to The Org, educate allies and create a safe space to conduct difficult conversations. We operate with rotating co-chairs who champion the strategy and implementation of these objectives and guide our meetings. Here are some of the things we’ve accomplished thus far:

As of February 2022 we have added a “Community & Inclusion” dimension to the career ladder at The Org that is focused on level-specific expectations around building community and demonstrating inclusive leadership. Everyone at The Org is expected to embody inclusive behaviors and company values, team leaders are evaluated on their ability to foster and build inclusive teams, and senior leaders are expected to champion our DEI mission inside and outside The Org.

We implemented this dimension into our growth framework in order to better hold our leaders and hiring managers accountable. In addition, this ladder allows us to reward and promote those that continuously show inclusive behaviors and actively work to attract and retain diverse talent to our organization.

In January 2022, we went public with our salary ranges at The Org. While there are many ways for organizations to foster transparency, we knew that being transparent with our salaries would allow us to operate openly and create a more even-handed professional community. When ranges of compensation are a collective knowledge, it leads to more equitable decision-making in the hiring and promotion process which helps to eliminate the issue of unequal pay that many minorities face. Additionally, we will do ongoing salary audits to ensure that everyone is compensated fairly.

In order to de-bias our hiring process, we created scorecards which every hiring manager and interviewer fills out after interviewing a candidate. These scorecards allow our employees to measure a candidate’s suitability based on how closely they align with the role-specific attributes and company values. This creates a universal set of criteria and decreases the likelihood that decision-making will be impacted by outside forces and unconscious bias.

In December 2021 we had our first all-staff diversity workshop where we brought in a trained professional to educate us on bias and behaviors of inclusion. While this workshop is just a starting point, it helped give our team a shared understanding of our blind spots, so we can hold each other accountable and begin developing a common language around all things DEI. This helped us come away with actionable inclusive behaviors — such as the importance of monitoring turn-taking in meetings, asking de-blurring questions to create clarity and specificity, and how to conduct public and private micro-interventions.

It is important for us not to tiptoe around conversations about diversity, so we make sure that it is something we bring attention to often. One way that we have done this is with company-wide town halls surrounding the topic of diversity and employee-led conversations that allow our team members to shine a light on their unique backgrounds and experiences, which we call “Org Chats.” These topics can cover anything that makes our employees special; whether that be their experience as a person of color or as a U.S. Military veteran.

Additionally, we frequently honor each other’s diverse cultures and backgrounds by sharing educational announcements via Slack and celebrating holidays such as Lunar New Year and Black History Month with food, external speakers and culture-specific traditions.

What’s next for us

Cultivating diversity and inclusion at an organization is not something that can be done overnight — it is a continuous process that we are determined to improve upon everyday at The Org. Although we have made some strides thus far, there is much more that we have to do. Here are the action items next on our agenda:

• Review job postings for inclusive language
• Incorporate DEI training into our onboarding processes
• Implement interview training for all hiring managers
• Market our open positions on DEI-focused job boards and channels
• Continue celebrating diversity with social events and company wide meetings
• Conduct DEI surveys to better understand how employees feel and what they need from us

Originally published at https://theorg.com on March 18, 2022.