Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: Tips To Find Out A Company's Real Values
💎 What is diversity, equity, and inclusion? Learning to identify these can help you decide for yourself if this company is the right fit for you, personally, and professionally. Watch the video to the end to learn how to really know if a company values diversity, equality, and inclusion.
📼 How can I find an organization that truly values diversity, equity, and inclusion? Here are some tips that can empower you to have this type of conversations and help you find out a company’s real values. You'll hear from Gráinne Sherlock, sales director, Anesha McCormick, senior product manager, and Den Hudson, former principal consultant at Pluralsight, who share some key insights that they've learned throughout their careers.
📼 How to identify if a company values diversity, equity, and inclusion? Tip #1: Know who they are. Find out what specific goals or objectives a company has in place to drive diversity, equity, and inclusion. Your goal here is to better understand where a company is at right now and what the workplace might look like a few years down the road. There are other questions that you can also ask to glean more, such as, what initiatives have they implemented to meet their goals? What is their long-term vision? How do you and other team members contribute and get involved in the work? What are their success metrics? All in all, this will not only help you understand if a company is truly valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion but it'll let you know who they are.
📼 Talking diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Tip #2: Speak your truth. Den has always believed that speaking your truth is a really powerful tool within any organization. Look for employee resource groups or employee councils from within. Look to see where sponsorships are available: this means, senior sponsors within the organization who can advocate for you and your groups. As Den puts it, diversity from within brings true color to the organization.
Sharing Stories About Diversity, Equity & Inclusion - Tip #3: Be Vulnerable
Being vulnerable can mean different things to different people. In Gráinne's opinion, being vulnerable is sharing a story or sharing a situation that's close to your heart. Maybe you felt like the only person who was X or Y within a company, and that made you feel can truly open a conversation with the person you're speaking with. If a company you're speaking with is very early in its journey, you may be there to help spearhead those opportunities. So your story can not only just inspire, but it can also feel and drive ERGs within companies.
📨 Are you interested in joining Pluralsight? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
Get to Know Gráinne, Anesha, and Den
Gráinne Sherlock is Global SMB Sales Director. She’s a hardworking, reliable, target-driven, and customer-oriented professional, with an outstanding ability to adapt and be versatile in an ever-changing business world. Anesha McCormick is a results-oriented product leader with 20+ years in people and thought leadership roles. She has experience building and leading cross-functional teams specialized in front-end development and integrations to deliver digital solutions. Den Hudson is an enthusiastic inspirational leader, coach, mentor, trusted advisor, solutions technologist, L&D, workforce transformation, and life-long learner. Their background is in coaching, operations, learning experiences, learning science, customer success, digital transformation, customer experience, leadership, learning & development, technology, online experiences, and communications. If you are interested in a career at Pluralsight, you can connect with Gráinne Sherlock and Anesha McCormick on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to mention this video!
More About Pluralsight
Pluralsight is the leading technology workforce development organization that helps companies and teams build better products by developing critical skills, improving processes and gaining insights through data, and providing strategic skills consulting. Pluralsight Skills helps enterprises build technology skills at scale with expert-authored courses on today’s most important technologies, including cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data science, and security, among others.
Allyship In The Workplace Top Tips By Automattic
💎 Practicing allyship in the workplace is crucial to help build a diverse and equitable work environment where everyone’s voice is heard. Watch the video to the end to learn some practical ways to accomplish it.
📼 Use these tips to improve your allyship practice in the workplace! To make people feel included and part of the group, you have to know how to become a better ally. Meet Jeffrey Zeldman, Principal Designer at Automattic, who shares his tips to be a better ally to underrepresented coworkers.
📼 Allyship in the Workplace - Tip #1: Research And Listen. Jeffrey starts by bringing up the old saying “you have two ears and one mouth for a reason” which means: you should listen more than you talk. Jeffrey’s advice is to talk to people who are different from you- lots of them! Also: research! You can read articles, watch videos where people talk about diversity, look up inclusion and diversity, and specifically look for ways of making people feel at home. Ask questions and be prepared to continue to learn forever. The good news is you'll benefit from the creativity and insights of people who may think differently from you, be from different cultures from you. Above all, listen, learn, ask questions, and try to learn a little more every day.
📼 Allyship in the Workplace - Tip #2: Use Inclusive Language. Learn how to pronounce people's names: one of the things people love the most is hearing their own names correctly pronounced. When using inclusive language, you'll be going a long way toward making people feel more at home and included. So do the work! Use language that makes everyone feel wanted, accepted, and understood.
Allyship In The Workplace - Tip #3: Opportunity And Visibility
What folks from underrepresented groups want most it's the opportunity that you've had and they haven't. So you have an opportunity to help them up the ladder, to introduce them to people, and to recommend them for projects that come to you. Bring them in! As Jeffrey puts it: “sponsorship over mentorship”. You can do that in your workplace just by inviting your coworkers to meetings, including them in plans and projects, and giving them a helpful push!
🧑💼 Are you interested in joining Automattic? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
Get to Know Jeffrey Zeldman
Principal Designer, Automattic, Inc. Founder & Publisher, A List Apart “for people who make websites” (founded 1998). Co-founded the multi-city user experience design conference An Event Apart with Eric Meyer. Founder Emeritus of Happy Cog™, an award-winning digital design studio. Publisher and co-founder (with Jason Santa Maria) of A Book Apart—brief books for web and interaction designers. Blogger & web designer since 1995. He has written two books, notably the foundational web standards text, Designing With Web Standards, currently in a 3rd Edition co-authored by Ethan Marcotte. It has been translated into 15 languages. Faculty member on the MFA, Interaction Design program at School of Visual Arts, New York. Co-founder and host of the internet radio program The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”), twice named Podcast of the Year by .net Magazine. Former freelance journalist, The Washington Post & City Paper. Former copywriter & art director (DeVito Verdi, Grey Entertainment, Campbell-Mithun-Esty). Played Casio in DC’s Insect Surfers. Composed & produced electronic scores for Upright Vertebrates Dance Co., and (with Robert Goldstein of Urban Verbs) for PBS. Former design columnist, MacWorld, PDN-Pix, Adobe. In 2012, was the first designer inducted in the SXSW Interactive Hall of Fame. If you are interested in a career at Automattic, you can connect with Jeffrey Zeldman on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to mention this video!
More About Automattic
Automattic are the people behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Tumblr, and more. Founded in 2005, and valued at $3 billion, they were one of the first companies to pave the way in remote work culture. The company’s 1,400+ people hail from 79 countries and speak 99 languages. Though the workforce is intellectually and geographically diverse, they’re united by a shared passion to democratize publishing and commerce—so that anyone with a story can tell it, and anyone with a product can sell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or country. And the company is growing rapidly!
Watch Our Webinar on Hiring, Attracting and Retaining a Diverse Remote Workforce
On February 27th, PowerToFly presented an interactive webinar focusing on how to hire, attract and retain a diverse remote workforce.
Hosted by PowerToFly Co-Founder & CEO Milena Berry, our impressive panel included:
- Supreet Hundal, Technical Recruiter, Zapier
- Andrea Breanna, Founder/CEO, RebelMouse
- Catherine Scallen, Head of People Ops, SkyVerge
Questions we discussed included:
- While some people may have previous experience working remotely, for most potential employees, this is a new concept. What kind of onboarding and training do you provide new employees who are used to working in traditional office settings?
- Some remote companies keep traditional hours while others offer greater flexibility, such as allowing employees to work at night. What have you found to be successful with your team and do you monitor when your team is online and if so, how?
- At PowerToFly, we believe remote work requires over communication. How do you maintain clear communication across your team especially if you are working across timezones and languages. Also, can you talk a bit about the tools you use to communicate and which tool you think works best for what? Ex. Slack vs. Email.
- Can you share a personal story or example of how working remotely has helped you achieve better work-life integration?
