You’d be hard-pressed to find a tech company that said it wished it had waited longer to implement on diversity and inclusion efforts. The examples of tech companies “doing it right” in this industry are few and far between, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. And for those that want to try, there’s a clear playbook to follow.
Where tech companies seem to go wrong is around implementing one-off initiatives such as unconscious bias training, employee resource groups or hiring a head of diversity and inclusion. Alone, these initiatives are not effective. But implementing those together, along with other initiatives, can create lasting change inside tech companies.
More than 10 years ago, Freada Kapor Klein, co-founder of Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact, published her groundbreaking book, “Giving Notice,” about the hidden biases people face in the workplace. In it, Kapor Klein laid out five key strategies as part of a comprehensive approach to addressing inclusion within tech companies. In order for it to be effective, companies must implement every single initiative.
This approach, which is applicable to this day, entails instituting policies practices and principles; implementing formal and informal problem-solving procedures; devising customized training based on organizational needs; ask more specific questions on employee surveys and break down data demographically; and ensure accountability from the top.
Policies, practices and principles
“It does matter what your policies, practices and principles say and don’t say,” Kapor Klein tells TechCrunch. “What is the floor that they guarantee to everyone about fairness? What do they say about what’s appropriate and inappropriate behavior in the workplace, in work sponsored events, in work-related activities, like conferences, and meetups and even parties.”
Code2040, a nonprofit organization that prepares underrepresented folks of color for engineering careers, requires its tech partners to have specific policies in place. That includes agreeing not to screen potential candidates by university pedigree or GPA.
“That is not a marker of their ability,” Code2040 CEO Karla Monterroso tells TechCrunch. “We had a couple of really ridiculous moments in previous fellows’ cycles where a student had technically proven themselves and then the company had asked for the GPA and if they didn’t fulfill that requirement, the student would lose out on the job.”
Formal and informal problem-solving
“This is the one that just about everybody flunks and many people flunk it because they go to their corporate law firms and that’s who writes their policies,” she says.
That’s because the job of a management-side employment lawyer is to remove as much risk as possible, regardless of the consequences, Kapor Klein says.
“But if you present the data about how few complaints of racial bias — any kind of harassment, racial, sexual, homophobic, religious — if you look at how often those things happen, and how underreported they all are, and how they lead to high rates of turnover, and they lead to reputational harm of the firm, it makes zero business sense to not be able to capture, to create an anonymous or confidential channel where those issues can be captured early and acted on before they escalate and blow up.”
She points to how Erica Baker, formerly of Google and Slack, wrote about her experience at Google and wage gaps among employees, and how Leslie Miley wrote a Medium post about his bad experience at Twitter. There was also Fowler, who shared her hell of a year at Uber.
“If Susan Fowler, Leslie Miley or Erica Joy Baker had a safe problem-solving mechanism — safe and effective — don’t you think they would’ve used it much earlier than they wrote their blog posts?” Kapor Klein says. “What I remain completely dumbstruck about is all of these supposed geniuses who are running these companies miss the obvious. If you don’t have a safe place for people to speak up and get their issues resolved fairly, you’re going to find out about it in a Medium post or a lawsuit or both. So don’t talk to me about how diversity matters. They all have the same platitude on their websites and none of them take the most obvious step in creating fair, welcoming workplaces.”
Customized training
We’ve seen unconscious bias training, ally training and even training for underrepresented groups where folks are taught how to own their differences and handle microaggressions in the workplace.
“I do think training has a role, but I don’t think off-the-shelf training works for anybody,” Kapor Klein says.
Within an organization, there are several different roles at play. There’s the executive, the manager, the ally, the bystander, a complaint handler and, of course, the marginalized person.
“Each of these roles is very different,” Kapor Klein says. “And they need different kinds of help preparing how to handle issues when they arise.”
At the management level, these people need training around making more effective decisions, writing better and more inclusive job descriptions.
Sensing, monitoring and surveys
In order to foster true inclusion, heads of diversity need to be empowered to do the work they set out to accomplish, and employee surveys need to get more granular, Kapor Klein says. Many companies these days use surveys to try to understand how their employees feel about the workplace, whether or not they’re set up for success and how they generally feel about the company.
“Many surveys ask whether you think people of color are treated fairly here,” Kapor Klein says. “And the underrepresented people of color tend to disagree and the white people tend to agree. That’s a predictable answer that doesn’t help you.”
Instead, Kapor Klein says companies need to ask more specific questions and then break down those responses by demographics.
“What you want to be looking for is whether or not people got their last performance review on time and whether they felt like it was fair, whether or not they feel that they understand what it takes to be promoted, whether they’re on track for promotion and whether or not their professional colleagues solicit their opinion on a regular basis,” she says. “Then you cut those things by demographic data. You want to know how many underrepresented engineers of color versus white engineers versus Asian engineers feel that their review was fair. That’s when you get to the real data.”
Unequivocal, consistent commitment from the top
As mentioned above, in order for diversity and inclusion initiatives to work, there needs to be a commitment from the top. This is not optional.
“What’s happening right now, in a certain set of companies, you’ve got an exec who is relatively passionate about it but is not holding anyone in middle or senior management accountable,” Monterroso says. “Sending out the email when bad things happen is not enough. And the CEOs who don’t care aren’t even sending out the email. There’s a set of senior leaders who talk about it, say it needs to happen, but aren’t managing it.”
It’s that lack of commitment from the top that led Code2040 to proactively divorce 40 companies.
“The reason that we did that is because we were watching as certain companies would get the sticker but they were not demonstrating that they were down with black and Latinx people,” she says. “They wouldn’t take the feedback.”
The companies Code2040 divorced fell into three pockets, Monterroso says. There were those who admitted Code2040 made an accurate assessment, those who said they understood why diversity was important but simply could not get the rest of the company on board and then a third group of people who were “offended and pissed,” she says.
Within that third group, Monterroso says, there were people who threatened the organization “because they felt really entitled to the talent that we had. So that let me know absolutely that we had made the right choices there.”
To recap, all five of those initiatives must be in place for your company to have a chance at fostering true diversity and inclusion. There are numerous other resources out there on the topic. A good next step for your company is to look at Project Include, co-founded by Kapor Klein, Ellen Pao and others, and get in touch with the folks over there.
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