The Tough Questions We Should Be Asking Ourselves…
2020 has brought on a myriad of changes. From a pandemic forcing us to create makeshift offices in our homes and re-evaluate our work-life relationship to the BLM movement re-surfacing ongoing and systematic racial inequality and injustices, this year has already stamped itself in our memories and it’s only halfway over.
While a lot of what is going on has undoubtedly impacted our personal lives in one way or another, it is important to remember that these uncomfortable moments are also the catalysts and opportunities for real change to take place and for new habits to form.
At Uni we take a particular interest in how this change, and this year, will impact our work-lives and just what the future of work will entail. While we don’t have any clear-cut answers or step-by-step instructions as to what every executive or team lead must do to adapt and survive in these times, we believe a focus on the answers is premature, and instead we should begin by understanding just what are the right questions to ask.
We took the last few weeks to reach out to leaders and workers across industries to get a glimpse as to what are the questions they are asking themselves and their teams during these times. As you read these questions, our hope is that they can help inspire or frame some of the difficult situations you may be finding yourself in.
“If a photo of our leadership team (or our investors and their firms) was published would we be proud of the diversity represented? If not, how can we actively work to expand our networks and invite more diversity to our hiring pool?” — Emily McAllister, CMO @ Turtle.dev
“If you are one of the “diverse” team members, how do you feel about us putting your photo up on our website?” — Biz Stone, Co-Founder @ Twitter
“What diversity and inclusion metrics are we reporting at a company and board level? Are we expanding the diversity of our board to include more representation from African Americans, women, people of color, and others?” — Aniq Rahman, President @ MOAT
“Given our stated commitments to anti-racism, are there aspects of our business model and how we make money that unwittingly support systemic racism? What are we doing to identify those issues and correct them?“ — Chad Dickerson, Executive Coach
“Are our current hiring practices perpetuating systematic racism?” — Adrian Soghoian, Engineer @ The Commons Project
“How will we be acknowledging Juneteenth as a company ‘holiday’?” — Madelin Woods, Founder @ Walden
“How do you authentically communicate support and concern for critical issues such as BLM, and diversity and inclusion more generally — without seeming promotional nor simply following the crowd?” — David Aronoff, General Partner @ Flybridge
“Which of our assumptions about workplace safety are grounded in solid evidence, and which are we making based on news reports or anecdotes from peers?” — Benjamin Jackson, Founder @ FTW
“How might we check in on with each other, create spaces to engage with psychological safety and support each other?” — Jai Chaudhary, Engineer @ Google
“What has COVID permanently changed about our company? What is something brand new that has emerged? Not discussing accelerated behavior, but brand new things that are not here to stay.” — David Tisch, General Partner @ BoxGroup
“Can a company develop a meaningful and human company culture by being completely remote?” — Rei Inamoto, Co-Founder @ I&CO
“How do we properly onboard remote employees into a culture that was built on in-person interaction? “— Philip Lang, Co-Founder @ Triplemint
“What’s our marketing/messaging during this time?” — Yvonne Leow, Founder @ Bewilder
“How do we empower employees to speak up when they see problems within the company so that companies don’t take a stand only when things become a world issue?” — Sandy Wang, People Operations Lead @ I&CO
We hope this inspired you on how to start some of these conversations with your teams so that you can ultimately reach a decision that’s right for you and your team.
In future articles we will talk more about what goes in to effective questions and how to make sure our decisions translate to actions.
If you would like to learn more about Uni and our mission to transform decision making you can find out more here. If you want to see all the question ideas and conversations we gathered for this article you can find them on this Uni question.
