10 Strategies for Building a Diverse and Inclusive Company
As a co-founder of CareMessage, a fully-remote health tech non-profit, I have spent the last six years putting diversity & inclusion at the forefront of our organization. The diversity of our team has been a crucial and important advantage in building and designing products for a diverse user base that today serves over 3 million patients across the United States and almost 1 million of those on a monthly basis.
I won’t spend time here talking about why diversity in tech is important or restating the many problems that plague the industry. Instead, I hope to share ten strategies that have worked for us in building a diverse and inclusive team.
Conduct structured interviews
If you want to hire the best talent, then you need to evaluate every candidate the same way. Once you start taking shortcuts or changing your interview process for certain candidates you run the risk of introducing your own bias. With a structured interviewing process, where all questions are pre-defined, you give all candidates the opportunity to showcase their skills. You also make it easier on your team to substitute an interviewer if needed because you know the interviews will still be consistently assessing for the same thing.
Implement values and skills-based interviewing
Every single question asked in our interview process is assessing something directly related to the role for which the candidate is applying. We use the scorecard provided in our applicant tracking system (ATS) to ensure we are measuring candidates based on the defined values that are important to us (Collaboration, Empathy, Remote Experience, etc.) and the core skills needed for the role. This ensures we avoid scenarios where someone may reject a candidate for something unrelated to their role. At CareMessage, “Is this someone I would grab drinks with?” is not an acceptable way to evaluate a candidate.
Hire by committee
Hiring with a committee has been a very effective way to avoid any one individual from blocking the hiring of a candidate. As long as a candidate does not get a strong “No” or multiple “No’s” during the interview process we may still move forward with hiring. In fact, some of our best employees got a “No” somewhere in their interview process. Having multiple interviewers gives us a more holistic view of the candidate and allows us to better understand their viewpoints.
Train interviewers
This cannot be stressed enough! Untrained interviewers can be a major liability for your company if they ask something they are not legally allowed to ask. Before stepping into an interview, we require employees review an Unconscious Bias Training and read up on the factors that should never be used to evaluate a candidate such as age, gender, religious background, etc. Employees train by shadowing an experienced interviewer before interviewing on their own. Candidates are interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them and it is important your interviewers are prepared to provide a consistent experience.
Implement compensation bands, and make them non-negotiable
We’ve implemented a “no negotiation” clause on all our offers. We use standardized compensation bands, matched competitively with venture-backed Series A and B startups to create our compensation packages which are pre-determined before we even open a role based on the level we are hiring for. Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to negotiate, and our approach is designed to limit wage gaps between employees from underrepresented backgrounds.
Create a structured onboarding plan
One of the most frequent pieces of feedback we get from new employees is that our onboarding process is very robust. We’ve designed a 4-week plan that introduces all new team members to the company, product, healthcare and their team. This started as a google doc, moved to a Trello board, and now exists within Greenhouse Onboarding. Over time, we have noticed a correlation between onboarding experience and employee performance. It is crucial to set 30/60/90 day expectations when someone joins and to give everyone the same tools to get ramped up to their new role.
Create career paths for managers and individual contributors
To retain any employee, you need to make sure you are giving them opportunities to grow within your company. In 2017 we implemented dual career paths and ladders across the organization to help individuals understand their growth opportunities as either People Managers or Individual Contributors. By making growth and promotion criteria clear to everybody, we ensure people understand where they stand today and what their opportunities for growth may be. This is especially important for people in technical roles where your strongest technical leads may not want to grow as people managers, and an area where senior women in engineering roles feel the industry is falling short. By having expectations clearly outlined you will be better able to assess performance equitably and help everybody see their growth potential.
Train your managers
As the old adage goes, “People don’t quit companies, they quit their managers.” Without the proper training, similar to hiring, you put your company at risk by having untrained individuals managing your people. We host leadership roundtables where we review and track company goals. The roundtable format ensures that our people managers have a space to learn, collaborate, and help drive the company strategy. We also conduct trainings on hiring, performance reviews, giving feedback etc. Within our Product Development team we use tools like Plato to provide additional support to people managers who may want a second opinion on a problem they are facing. This ensures managers have the tools and support they need to help their direct reports succeed.
Make Diversity & Inclusion everybody’s responsibility
One of the reasons diversity numbers in the tech industry are stagnant (or in some cases declining) is because many Diversity & Inclusion leaders are asked to make sweeping improvements at companies that don’t support their efforts from the top-down and bottom-up. At CareMessage, we have made contributing to our D&I efforts an evaluation criteria within our career ladders for everyone at the company. Our initiatives are driven by the founders, with support from our People Operations team, and with input from the entire company.
Focus on retention
Diversity & Inclusion is not easy, but it’s also not impossible. For example, we take extra steps to ensure that when we meet up in person (we are now fully remote) we are mindful of any potential inconveniences on employees or their families, and offer accommodations accordingly. More recently, I’ve been providing trainings across the company to help people practice saying “no” to more things, promoting wellness days, and helping people find more meaning using the Designing Your Life book. It is not on our teams to change, it’s on us as leaders to embody what we want our team to do and remind them of why these values are important.
BONUS: Be a remote team
2019 Product, Design, and Engineering Leads Retreat in Orlando, Florida
1) Hiring skilled people from a variety of backgrounds who did not want to live in San Francisco. This aligned with our belief that good talent can come from anywhere.
2) As an execution-oriented company, we don’t believe sitting in an office next to your manager guarantees your best work. By giving people more freedom on their physical location, we allow our team members to prioritize a healthy work-life balance.
3) Work is overall less intrusive, you have more control of your schedule, and it leaves space for important things outside of work. I know for me leaving the Bay Area has given me mental and physical space, the opportunity to spend more time with my family, and I finally got a puppy!
Meet Peanut, my vizla-mix rescue!
We have a long way to go and a lot of great ideas from our team on what comes next. At 50+ employees, we are currently ramping up our first three employee resource groups (ERGs) focused on Parents, People of Color and Women. All three were equally selected by our team! We remain excited about the future and the ways we will continue to support all employees regardless of their background.
What strategies have or have not worked for your organization? For more information on CareMessage, check out our post on our interviewing process and our series on remote work.