It’s not only the potential customers of companies that care about diversity and are actually actively committed to ensuring it. It is also the current and potential employees who keep an eye out for this. It’s more than just sharing a post on social media once a year about the importance of diversity. It’s about a continuous commitment to promote and ensure diversity.
Let’s take a look at 4 companies and their journey towards embracing diversity!
4 companies committed to diversity
Myos. Creating a diverse team through unbiased candidate evaluations
Let me give you an example of a Scaleup that has proven that implementing the right strategy when it comes to hiring can lead to improved diversity.
They are a FinTech scaleup from Berlin, founded in 2018. The idea behind their business – use the transparency and availability of data on e-commerce platforms to take the future sales potential of retail products as a basis for financing decisions. In this way, they enable retailers worldwide to grow fully digitally and flexibly! Needless to say it’s been a success and their team is growing faster than ever.
However, as you and I both know, growing a team rapidly can often result in processes that are unbiased and unfair. Myos recognised this problem and they acted on working towards eliminating it immediately. This is how.
Creating a diverse team through (soft) skill-oriented & unbiased candidate evaluations
After realizing that evaluation of candidates solely based on their resumes leads to biased hiring decisions and less diversity within teams, Myos set out to create a hiring process that is unbiased and allows to gather objective insights about candidates.
Through the implementation of (soft) skill-oriented, data-driven hiring, their goal was achieved – they not only managed to successfully remove bias from their hiring process but also ensure that the teams they are building are diverse in terms of skills/personality and also demographics. In 5 months, they successfully made 10 new hires who diversify their teams in terms of soft skills, such as problem-solving and risk-taking.
Do you want to read more about how exactly they managed to do it to foster diversity? Read more about it here!
Accenture. A commitment to people – a vision & ultimate mission
Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security, sure you’ve heard of it more than once.
With more than 624,000 employees that serve customers in over 120 countries across the globe – Accenture, for two consecutive years has earned a spot in Refinitiv’s diversity and inclusion top 100. Not in the middle, not close to the top 10 – both in 2020 and in 2021, Accenture is in the 3rd position when it comes to the most diverse and inclusive companies in the world!
And without a doubt, ranking in the top 3 most diverse and inclusive companies, Accenture must be doing something right when it comes to ensuring diversity and inclusivity within the workplace. Ensuring diversity and inclusivity at Accenture is a continuous commitment that revolves around preaching and practising what they believe in on a company-wide level. This is how they do it.
A diverse board of directors
By creating and nurturing a board of directors that is diverse both in gender and geographic representation. In 2019, for example, their board of directors already consisted of people from six different countries across four continents and 42% women. After all, leading by example starts from up-top.
Take an active stance against racism
Accenture takes action against racism by increasing their race and ethnicity representation, introducing anti-racism training and continuously investing in communities (such as Accenture Black Founders Development Program, OneTen, and MOBOLISE in the UK).
Ensure equal opportunities throughout the hiring process for all
They foster equal opportunities in their hiring process by empowering workers from diverse employee networks, as well as making unconscious bias training mandatory for everyone involved in the hiring process.
Continuously reassess their workforce demographics on a global scale
On a yearly basis, they reassess the workforce demographics across the US and Canada to effectively (and based on data) establish the future goals when it comes to hiring, employee retention and overall advancement. For example, they were one of the first few companies to set a goal on a global level to achieve a workforce that is gender-balanced by 2025.*
And seemingly, this is a goal they are on the right track to achieve. Today, more than 275,00 of their employees and 49% of their new hires are women.* They’ve managed to achieve this by focusing on three main aspects: allowing flexible working hours, investing in employee development programs and enabling their people to foster connections on a global scale.
It’s all about practicing what you preach
To sum up, ensuring diversity, equality and inclusion when it comes to building and nurturing a company that is diverse should be treated as a business priority. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do and allows to create a world in which everyone has an equal opportunity, as well as it also leads to significant improvements in terms of innovation levels within the company and the overall growth of the company.
Asana. Ensure DE&I through a data-driven recruiting strategy
Over the past years, Asana as a company has come a long way thanks to a new strategy for developing a diverse & inclusive company. For five years in a row, Asana has been acknowledged as one of the best places to work.
Valerie Merosier, Revenue Operations Analyst says that “Asana has created an environment where a diverse group of people are not only hired but given a place where they can really succeed”.
At Asana, diversity and inclusion are perceived (and treated) as critical elements of how they work and run their business. That’s exactly why they have chosen to focus primarily on two initiatives to focus on as means of improving their DE&I efforts: data-driven recruiting strategy & fostering a workplace environment in which every single employee feels like they belong.
Data-driven recruiting strategy as means to ensuring diversity
Asana has made a conscious choice to move towards creating and sustaining a hiring process that is data-driven as means of ensuring diversity. For example, they have built Asana2sq to allow the members of their recruitment team to not only improve the quality of hires but also to increase the diversity of candidates that actually accept their job offers.
Their approach to hiring revolves around recruiting the best talent out there, whilst being consciously aware of the fact that there is a direct link between the diversity of teams and innovation. And that’s ultimately what also helps to retain employees in the future.
Sonja Gittens Ottley, Head, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Asana, in an interview for SiliconRepublic, highlights that placing emphasis on diversity and inclusion is a powerful way to lean into the belief, that one day we will be able to live and thrive in an equitable society and to dismantle systems that preach the status quo within the hiring world.
An approach to diversity that’s well thought out
Data-driven recruitment is one of the aspects of ensuring a hiring process at the core of which is diversity. The other aspect is making sure that there are already in place programs and policies that are there to support these efforts. In this case, it’s important to:
- Create (and follow-through) anti-harassment policies.
- Invest in manager training as means of empowering them to build inclusive teams.
- Focus on ensuring a hiring process that allows for a fair and level playing field.
At Asana, building diverse teams is all about creating a working environment for both current and future employees that is diverse and inclusive. The key to their success has been the fact that Asana has successfully developed a real strategy that clearly is aimed towards solving this and measuring their progress. To give you an example, Asana is transparent about all race/ethnicity data per department and have multiple established Employee Resource Groups. That’s not all though, Asana also:
- Partner up with organizations aligned with underrepresented communities in tech, such as YearUp and Afrotech.
- Are committed to sourcing candidates from underrepresented communities within tech.
- Have established an interviewing policy that makes it mandatory to interview at least one non-male candidate for each leadership position and one candidate from an underrepresented group.
SAP. Bring everything you are. Become everything you want
SAP is a global organization with more than 100,000 employees in over 150 countries. And yet again, their journey towards ensuring diversity and inclusion has been one to admire and learn from.
At the moment diversity and inclusion is an incremental piece of all the HR processes within SAP. This goes way beyond ensuring gender diversity, the focus is also equally placed on cultural intelligence diversity, generational intelligence and so on. What once used to be just a philosophy has over time become an integral part of SAP hiring strategy. SAP has even been acknowledged as the best employer for diversity by Forbes! So, what were the steps they took to ensure that diversity is at the core of everything SAP does?
An outcome-based strategy by harnessing the power of data
Not so long ago, achieving diversity within the workplace in terms of representation for most companies was “big talk, little do”. And even if there were companies that genuinely cared about diversity, most of them did not really have a clear idea on how to act on it.
It all starts, the same as in the case of Asana, with gathering data that allows identifying (or that shows) whether there is a lack of diverse representation within the workforce. Sadly, it’s mostly the tech sector that tends to suffer from diverse representation. The next rational step is to evoke a shift from awareness about it to action.
What SAP did was shift its efforts towards an outcome-based strategy as means of ensuring diverse representation within the workforce. A strategy that is present within every single stage of the talent pipeline – starting from attraction and going as far as promotions. Guess what – all of that has to come from within the company.
That’s exactly what SAP has managed to successfully do – hire more diverse candidates through using their cloud analytics dashboard to continuously measure their progress around creating a diverse workforce. Because after all – how can you know if something is working if you’re not measuring the impact it’s leaving?
Striving towards diversity is a continuous process
Working towards ensuring diversity when it comes to hiring, as well as within the workplace, without a doubt, means that not always things go as smoothly as we plan. Why? Because the behaviours and opinions of people are not always as easy to change as we think, so there are always some instances where bias have a tendency to creep in and this has also apparently been the case within SAP.
Cheers, Anete
