Who are your diversity ambassadors?
In the tech community there has been a lot of talk about diversity, gender ratios and the trouble with homogenous perspectives. Equality is always a worthy topic and should be a constant topic until we find it.
The challenge with reading a lot about these issues is that they teach us more about what not to do than how to encourage the right things.
How do you empower all employees to be part of the solution, not just police bad behavior?
When you’re growing your company, you need to find people with the skills where you have holes. That requires you to seek out people unlike the current people on your team. Diversity makes sense.
I’ve heard more conversations about how to be mindful about diversity as an organization grows. One common question is, how do you take action and empower all of your employees to participate? The answer is different for every company but the best place to start is by taking inventory of what’s currently happening:
- Do you consider your team diverse or homogenous (diversity goes beyond the physical, it’s background, education, experience: work or worldly, viewpoints, and beyond)?
- Is there someone currently taking the lead on ensuring there is diversity on the team?
- Has this person become the default diversity ambassador? Was it given to them by default based on their ‘diverse’ qualities? Did they choose that role? Did you?
- Who speaks up when something is offensive? Who shakes their head when a rude joke is made?
- Who notices when the team is too similar?
- Who is doing outreach to diversity groups?
- Who’s asking the question: Why don’t we have more men on our team? Why don’t we have more women?
- Are there people who might feel excluded who currently work at your company? or who want to work at your company?
Take inventory.
Who do you believe is doing a good job? Is it one person? Are there multiple people? Are you one of them? These are your diversity ambassadors.
Diversity Ambassadors are great but they can’t do it alone. They can’t be in every conversation. They can’t be the only ones on this mission. It won’t work.
Everyone needs the diversity ambassador mindset.
If everyone has the conversation, it doesn’t fall on the minority group to speak up for minorities. If everyone in your company knows that people should be treated equally, everyone will participate equally in upholding the mission.
Start the conversation in your company. Use a public forum or an anonymous survey. It’s up to you but have the conversation:
- Does this feel like an inclusive workplace?
- Are there things we do that might make team members feel excluded?
- Do you think there are candidates who would feel uncomfortable working here?
- Are there missing perspectives about building the team? about building the product?
- Do we have perspectives on our team who are similar to our customers?
- Are there customer perspectives that are underrepresented on our team?
- Do you have ideas on how we can improve our workplace?
- How as a team do we work to solve this?
This can make people uncomfortable. It can be an awkward situation for any group that feels under- or over-represented. And there likely isn’t an easy answer on how to solve it. But it’s a future worth working towards.
A number of these discussions have already started. I’m curious to hear what you’ve seen work well or go wrong within your organization. Please let me know in the comments or on Twitter.