Creating a Diversity and Inclusion Group From the Ground up: A Step-By-Step Guide

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93% of engineers are men. 93% are heterosexual. 74% are white or of European descent.

These statistics from Stack Overflow’s 2018 Developer Survey shed light on the enormous challenges engineering teams face worldwide. With numbers like these and a lack of resources, what’s a group of Diversity and Inclusion newbies to do in order to create positive change within their engineering organization?

Although many companies showcase their D&I (let’s call it that from now on) achievements, few of them provide a roadmap that led them to their successes as an example for others. In 2017, a dedicated committee at WorkMarket was formed to advocate for D&I in the workplace and we would like to share the progress toward our goals.

Step 1: Rally the Troops!

Luckily, it wasn’t difficult to find woke folks at WorkMarket that were eager to rally around the cause. Our D&I efforts truly began from a core group of people sharing and discussing articles on Slack. From there, nine open-minded coworkers naturally gravitated toward wanting to take action. We started holding informal weekly meetings to vent, plan talks, review industry statistics such as the ones in the Tech Leavers study put out by the Kapor Center and discuss successful D&I efforts at other companies. Honestly, we didn’t really know what we were doing, but we were excited about it. As our committee grew, so did the varying perspectives. This range of perspectives challenged our ideals and proved the benefit of diversity.

Step 2: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Do your research; a lot can be learned by looking at what has been successful at other companies. We looked at efforts by employers lauded for their D&I practices such as Johnson & Johnson, Apple, ADP (shameless plug for our new parent company), Etsy, Clarifai and Kickstarter as organizational guidelines. We found they had diversity chairs dedicated to championing change, employee resource groups and budgets for unconscious bias workshops for executives. By comparison, we felt small and ineffective.

Step 3: Get Executive Buy-In

Our first few meetings were like trying to gain traction in quicksand. We were all over the place. At this point, we had gathered a great group of contributors but lacked a roadmap, budget and anyone of substantial power in the company backing the group. We put together some preliminary ideas and presented them to WorkMarket’s founder and president, Jeff Wald. He quickly became our committee’s champion.

Jeff began attending our meetings and noticed that we lacked direction. We had all the passion and drive but none of the structure. In the beginning, he would join our meetings and ask the tough questions that we weren’t prepared to answer — like what our main purpose was and what our KPI’s were. It was a steep learning curve at first considering no one in the group had experience running a D&I effort. He encouraged us to structure it like any other development here at WorkMarket, we needed to create a roadmap including measurable goals with action items. Thankfully, we made it to the other side of the quicksand and are grateful to our founder Jeff Wald for the tough love and holding us to the highest of standards.

Step 4: Evangelize the Mission

Once we established a regular meeting rhythm, we formally needed to introduce ourselves to the rest of WorkMarket.

A member of our committee gave the inaugural talk. The deck opened with a brilliant quote from lawyer and diversity and inclusion advocate, Vernā Myers:

“Diversity is being invited to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance.”

We reviewed our internal D&I statistics, different types of diversity that are important (don’t forget about age and disability) and where we stood in regard to the norm. We also presented statistics to reveal the financial and cultural benefits of a diverse and inclusive workplace. We concluded the event with a call to action for people interested in joining the group.

Overall, our introduction to D&I was such a success, the then-CEO jumped into the air exclaiming that he was on board with the cause and we attracted a few more members.

Step 5: Set Long-Term Goals

Without goals to work toward, meetings of any kind can be directionless and unproductive, we needed long and short-term goals. We worked as a group to define goals to drive the D&I effort forward. We simply started with nouns to describe what we wanted to bring to WorkMarket — education, enlightenment, awareness and change. These nouns helped define our committee’s long-term goals.

We have defined our long term goals of our D&I organization as:

  • Raise awareness to diversity and inclusion issues.
  • Engage with WorkMarket on the issues while providing a platform for open discussions/difficult conversations.
  • Bring value to WorkMarket as a business and as a platform.

Step 6: Set Short-Term Goals

After we had long-term goals in place, we created actionable short-term goals. As a committee, we defined short-term goals that could be tracked and achieved in each quarter.

For example, one of our long-term goals is to raise awareness to diversity and inclusion issues. We set a measurable, short-term goal of having one onsite talk per quarter. In order to support this goal, we had our inaugural speaker Jennefer Witter in the fall of 2017. She is the CEO of The Boreland Group — a PR firm specializing in corporate transparency. She came to WorkMarket to educate us on unconscious bias in the workplace, a starting point that we thought anyone in the company could benefit from.

Having talks are great — but how do you measure effectiveness? We started with surveys to track the progress of education, awareness, employees’ personal feelings of inclusion and safety within the WorkMarket culture. Our goal for this initial survey was an 80% survey completion rate, and we hit it.

Step 7: Keep Going!

Congratulations, you now have a functioning D&I group up and running at your company. Here is where the real work actually starts. Along the way, you will have wins that will make your heart swell (“Great! The Male Allies talk was a hit and got a conversation going at the company!”) and you will have losses that will make you want to tear your hair out (“Due to some oversight, we stopped publishing our open jobs on Fairygodboss.com?!”) You must not give up, no matter how frustrating it gets. We are still figuring it out, but we thought we’d put this out there in order to be transparent, accountable and to help others interested in directly impacting change at their companies. Every organization’s goals will be different and by no means are ours idealistic. In order to begin, all you really need is a group with passion, commitment and some goals.

Interested in working with us at WorkMarket? We’re hiring!

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"We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value." -Maya Angelou