How to create a company culture that embraces diversity
This post is the third in our “Lessons from the USV Diversity Summit” series. In December, USV hosted our first Diversity Summit. Below are some of the most helpful insights we gathered about how to take action.
If you’re just joining the conversation, you can find previous posts Part I: “Lessons from the diversity summit” here and Part II: “How to start talking to your team about diversity” here.
Take inventory
If you want your company to embrace diversity, the first step is transforming your corporate culture. Your first step is assessing what the current culture is like.
What exactly does culture mean? People sometimes use the word “culture” to refer to company perks like game rooms, free lunches, or vacation days. And while those benefits certainly have an effect on teams, they aren’t themselves culture. Culture is about how your team communicates.
At its core, your company’s culture requires three things: its mission, its vision, and its values. What problem does your company solve? How does it solve it? And upon what values do you base the decisions you make?
The mission, vision, and values are unique to each company, and each will no doubt be rewritten, revised, and revisited many times over the lifetime of the business, all the while shaping and influencing the culture of the company.
So to make sure that your corporate culture is welcoming toward diversity, you need to revisit your mission, vision, and values to assess how you’re communicating them to the people you employ, serve, and represent.
Beware of inadvertently sending messages that conflict with your values
Start by conducting an “external culture audit” to get a picture of how your company presents itself to the outside world. Imagine you’re a consultant and you’ve been asked to evaluate the company’s corporate culture from an outsider’s point of view. First, visit your company’s website and consider what messages are being sent by your landing page, job postings, careers page, and social media accounts.
- What words does your company use to describe itself?
- What visuals are provided—photos, logos, or graphics?
- If there are photos, how would you describe the people shown? The environment?
- Imagine you’re a world-class candidate for an engineer/sales/marketing/HR job landing on your company’s website. What would you find appealing and what would be off-putting?
- Consider how different types of people would respond to the messaging on your site. What if you don’t drink? What if you’re a parent? What if you only want to work with the best talent? Are there things on the site that would make you feel uncomfortable or unsure about whether this is the place for you? If so, ask yourself this question: Is your company intentionally trying to filter out certain kinds of candidates, or is it accidental?
Now, the most important step: Are there conflicts or inconsistencies between your company’s stated mission and the way it comes across online? Does your company’s Twitter feed accurately reflect the mission, vision, and values of the company, or is it filled with off-color jokes? Does your company’s digital presence successfully reflect the values you want to celebrate?
A lot of well-intentioned companies inadvertently deter the most diverse candidates not because they don’t care about diversity, but because they fail to control the subtle messages being sent by their public-facing materials. Last year, for example, I did an external culture audit for one of our portfolio companies. I found a lot of conflicts between how the company viewed itself and how it was presenting itself to the outside world. Conflicts will inevitably creep in, so be vigilant and make sure to get feedback to ensure the company’s voice aligns with its values.
Values-Messaging Conflict: The Case of RunKeeper
In a comment on a previous diversity posts, Emil pointed out that RunKeeper, a company that makes an awesome fitness app, may be sending mixed messages to its users. RunKeeper is not a USV portfolio company, but I’m a big fan of their product and I’ve heard only good things about their team. Let’s take a look at their website, one page at a time, and consider where there may be an unintended conflict in their messaging.
As you can see above, RunKeeper clearly states its core values, addressing the issue of inclusiveness directly.
(link: UX Job Description)
I love these candid job descriptions. It’s easy to get a sense of the fun, lighthearted tone of the company. There are some inconsistencies, however. The job post doesn’t list the core values, but there are some hints about what it takes to fit in. So the question is this: If you’re not into The X-Files and arguing about beer, can you still work there? Would you think twice about applying? What if you’re not into TV, but you’re a fantastic UX Designer? Would you still apply?
There’s no doubt that teams within companies have their own idiosyncratic ways of getting along with each other, and I have no doubt that the above description really does capture the kinds of personalities that make up the UX team at RunKeeper. And it makes sense that they’d look for someone with a similar personality who’d fit in easily.
But the problem with a job listing that describes what the people on the team are like—and subtly demands that anyone applying fit that same mold—is that it creates a bias against people from different backgrounds, excluding people who don’t fit the profile of the existing team. The message is, “This is what our team is like, and we want to hire someone just like us.” But if you want to increase diversity, that’s not the message you want to be sending. What you should be saying is, “We’re an inclusive environment looking for top talent, and we want to welcome you to our team no matter what your background is.”
How to align your messaging with your values
The good news is that there are straightforward ways to communicate your company culture by speaking about the things you value, not just the things you do.
Take Simulmedia, an advertising technology company. Simulmedia has been thoughtful about making sure the job descriptions on its website include the company’s mission, vision, values, and culture. The same language is used consistently on every job description. (Yes, they’re hiring).
The thoughtfulness of the language in these descriptions subtly reinforces the idea that Simulmedia values hard work and play, but it’s through multiple mediums and the emphasis is on team or individual perks: “While we work ‘startup hard’ we also believe in letting loose via Happy Hours, team activities, and an unlimited vacation policy.”
So write a list of the values you want to convey in your own company’s job listings. Check out how other companies communicate their culture.
Another great example is SoundCloud. They recently published a new jobs page. They discussed the project at the Diversity Summit and I think they successfully delivered a more inclusive and very SoundCloud experience. The took the extra step to use their platform to talk about the company culture by share audio recordings from employees.
The internal culture audit
After the external culture audit comes the internal culture audit, which can be more challenging. Running a business means communicating all day long, which often means that speed gets prioritized over thoughtfulness.
To conduct the internal audit, keep your company’s mission, vision, and values in mind as you consider these questions:
- How is good news communicated at your company?
- How is bad news communicated?
- How is feedback given or collected?
- What happens if an employee violates a core value when they’re in a meeting with colleagues? With a customer?
- How do you describe your company culture to friends?
- How do you describe your company to people you’re trying to recruit?
Do your answers align with your mission, vision, and values, or do they conflict?
Ask your colleagues the same questions. Are their answers the same as yours or different? Where are there conflicts, are they coming from a subset of employees who are dissatisfied? Are they the same or different? Explore the disconnect and see if the company culture is evenly distributed.
Right fit your mission, vision, and values
The purpose of the internal and external culture audits is to understand what the company truly is and believes. The audits will signal whether the company is acting in alignment with it’s values.
If you want to make your company more diverse, you need to say so explicitly in your official statement of values. The only way things will change is if you’re new values are actually recognized. If not, it’s time to revise the way business is done.
Most mission, vision, and values come from senior leadership, so it’s important to include top managers in your list of findings and recommendations. Keep the team small for the first version, opening up the process to feedback from the wider team in time.
Your company’s mission shouldn’t change very often, but its description can fluctuate, especially given how fast companies today grow and change. During my time at USV, I’ve always been able to get a read on the health of an organization by asking various employees to explain what the company does. If their answers vary widely—like if one employee says, “We’re a Facebook app that books flights” while another says, “We improve travel with social recommendations”—there’s a disconnect. It’s a signal that communication of the mission is getting muddy.
Inclusion is a practice, not a statement
Values may need closer inspection too. Is the behavior of your employees consistent with your company’s core values? Almost every company has a stated value that captures the importance of diversity. The problem with diversity is not with the values companies have, but with the execution. Inclusion is a practice, not a statement.
Although not in the USV portfolio, BufferApp came up as a great example of a company living its values. Buffer values “defaulting to transparency,” which they embody by publishing a full transparency report that includes real-time revenues, salaries, and equity. The value they place on transparency is demonstrated with visible behavior.
Our summit attendees celebrated Buffer, but most were not in a hurry to implement this kind of transparency at their own companies. Values are important, but can overlap at the edges. The best way to navigate values that seem at odds is to provide more context or multiple values. AMEE balances the trade-offs between transparency and privacy, values that can seem at odds, in their principles and values: “We have 5 main values that guide our decisions: Open, Honest, Transparent, Simple, and Respectful of Individual Privacy.”
Companies need to live the mission, vision, and values they set forth. If they don’t, they should change either the values or the corporate culture so they align. Diversity initiatives need to be part of the company’s values. Revising the company’s values statement is only useful if the company lives in accordance with them.
Putting values into practice
Once the vision is laid out, it’s time to put it into practice. Small changes add up to make a difference. Companies in our portfolio have had success printing posters with the company’s values and hanging them in every conference room. The posters get referenced during difficult discussions, helping ground the conversation in what the company values and not just what one individual believes.
A company’s mission, vision, and values should also be posted on its website, included when onboarding new employees, shared at the beginning of town hall meetings, and compared against employee 360s performance reviews. Consistency is best complemented with feedback loops. Whether it’s surveys or informal asks, find ways to get feedback from customers, clients, and candidates on how you’re performing against your values. Values are a tool to help set a standard across the organization of what’s expected, celebrated, and prioritized. They have the biggest impact when they are part of the everyday communication of the company.
Distributed diversity initiatives
Once you’ve made sure your mission, vision and values are in alignment, it’s time to start implementing diversity initiatives. In our summit, the most often-mentioned way to start is to create three small working groups to tackle different issues and set a budget.
The working groups should focus on increasing diversity in three areas: internal, external, and recruiting. The most common reaction is to push all implementation to HR. Don’t do this. Do not make diversity only an HR issue.
Return Path, an email deliverability company, found success breaking diversity initiatives into three internal working groups: Retention, Recruitment, and Communication. They saw even more progress when people from cross-functional teams participated.
Tumblr took a similar approach. Instead of making diversity an initiative siloed within HR, they have cross-functional working groups. There are members of the HR team, but the team is not limited to it.
The same construct works for larger companies too. Morgan Stanley, for instance, has one diversity and inclusion council, but three sub-committees:
- Recruiting/pipeline
- Internal employees
- External relationships
These sub-groups work best when they have a clear mission, support from senior leadership, and a dedicated budget to get things done. The council as a whole has a budget allocated to it, and the funds are split among the three sub-committees. Having a straightforward structure makes it easier for employees to pick up a project and run with it based on which sub-group they support.
Many startups are wary of setting a budget for diversity sub-committees. I asked Lisa Lee, Pandora’s Diversity Manager, how she suggests how highly cash-conscious startups should allocate funds. She advocates having a budget, “It’s important to do diversity work. You don’t need a massive budget. There are so many ways it can still be done. ” So whether it’s the cost of a team lunch or a team offsite, remember that making a financial commitment to get things done is a way to invest in change. Look for ways to put that money to work. We’ll cover those in the last two posts in this series.
Consistency and iteration
Diversity is never done. Adding it into the company culture requires time and constant evolution. But the earlier you start, the easier it will be to grow with your company.
Whether you’re an early-stage startup or a larger company, take inventory of your culture, build diversity into your values, organize teams to implement initiatives, and hold people accountable.
In our next post, we’ll explore more ideas on how to integrate diversity into your recruiting and onboarding processes.
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