We start with the basics: every team member is inherently worthwhile and we all deserve each other’s respect.

Companies are groups of people working together, trying to accomplish a common goal. A company can only reach its full potential when the people there all respect each other, listen to each other, and work together.

Each of us has experienced what it feels like at other companies when decision making is divorced from facts on the ground. When you are the expert and are not empowered to make important decisions or even sit at the table where they are made, it is extremely demoralizing. Not only does it stifle individuals at a company, but it is a sign of poor leadership that will likely make bad decisions, and eventually lead the company in the wrong direction.

We actively practice inclusion in all communications by practicing the following principles everyday:

• Everyone has a chance, and is encouraged, to speak once before anyone speaks twice. We encourage everyone to say what they are thinking.
• Assume good intentions. We remind ourselves that in all but the most outrageous cases, people want to do the right thing. When they act, they are trying to help.
• Utilize technology for inclusion, not exclusion. We practice email transparency and share all information (except when it specifically has to be confidential, i.e. HR information).

As a small, democratically-run workplace, every worker is included in every important decision.

We switch off on facilitating meetings and take care to hear each person’s viewpoints and not let any one of us dominate.

We also try to think about how diverse and inclusive we want to be in the future when making decisions. We don't have any trans members, but is our health insurance trans-inclusive? None of us have kids, but are our work hours good for parents? We try to consider these things in our policies while taking into account the near-certainty we'll get it wrong and need to change in the future.

We’ve sponsored Alterconf NYC, MoonConf, and Recompiler magazine, because we believe it’s important to support inclusive tech communities and resources.

We prioritize diversity and inclusion as a small company.

Alto focuses tremendous energy on diversity and inclusion, both in hiring and our day-to-day practices. An exceptionally talented engineer who nails our interviews won’t make the cut if s/he doesn’t also share and embody our values. We make sure every candidate speaks with at least two female interviewers and when discussing technical challenges with current team members, we strive to create an environment where everyone feels they can speak openly and without fear of judgment. Our company culture of transparency, compassion, and open-dialogue is something we’re set on maintaining as we grow, even in the face of competing hiring goals.

Atlo values technical expertise and a strong programming skillset, but it’s almost more important that every member on our team embodies humility and compassion too. After all, our patients face the same problems regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, age, sexual orientation, or gender. As you can imagine, a problem facing a diverse population requires an equally diverse team to solve it. We can’t overstate how highly we prioritize our commitment to inclusivity.

Our small engineering team has 50% from underrepresented minority groups.

We proudly represent women, people of color, and LGBTQ on our engineering team. Having diversity at our company is in line with our company’s learning-centric culture. We learn so much from one another because of the diversity of our backgrounds and experiences, which also enriches the process of learning new things together. In addition to hiring diverse engineers, we also focus on creating an inclusive and safe environment for everyone. We take turns doing the “office housework” making sure that everyone takes notes, plans social events, and runs meetings. Even jobs like refilling the water cooler or building new teammates’ desks are things that we all take part in helping with. We understand the dangers of looking for a “culture fit” and our interviews reflect that. It’s about the value add, not value fit. We’re committed to maintaining employee inclusion and engagement as we grow the company, using tools like Culture Amp to survey, measure, and identify areas to improve.

Diversity and inclusion is integral to Hustle’s DNA and culture.

As our CEO, Roddy Lindsay, puts it:

"We firmly believe that the success of our business and our product will be determined by our ability to recruit and retain a high-performing team that is diverse at all levels of the company. We do not look like other Silicon Valley companies, many of whom pay lip service to diversity; for us, diversity is a key strategic advantage for our business.

There is a lot riding on Hustle’s success — more than just the outcome of a single company, Hustle is out to prove that one can build a highly successful business that is truly diverse, civically engaged, mission-driven and powered by impact. And we believe that in the future, successful companies will look less like the companies that are considered iconic today, and look more like Hustle."

We are proud to have 51% women and 48% people of color at our company, and we measure ourselves not just to create marketing materials and brag, but to also understand where we can and should do more a company. For example:

• We see the greatest room for improvement in representation in management. We will prioritize solutions that support racial diversity in management and leadership at the company. This aligns with another company goal of supporting transparent pathways for advancement for both individual contributors and managers.
• In our OKRs we are committed to two equity/inclusion trainings per quarter. We are starting out next quarter with trainings on 1) bias in the workplace and 2) inclusive hiring best practices.
• In our next survey, based on great team feedback, we plan to offer expanded options for sharing racial background(s), be mindful to not ask questions that reinforce binary genders, and ask more questions to measure “inclusion.”

Our team should reflect the diversity of the businesses we serve. Because at the end of the day, we’re all here for the same reason: to make great work accessible for all.

There are many affinity groups at Gusto including Women with Gusto, Gaystos, Vets of Gusto, and others. We also partner with industry leaders to offer company-wide training about unconscious bias and inclusion and belonging.

We’ve been vocal (#transparency) as a company about increasing our team diversity. Women currently make up 26% of our engineering team, and we remain as ambitious as ever when it comes to our diversity goals.

The company is 70% female and our leadership team is 50/50.

Our company’s gender ratio is pretty unheard of in Silicon Valley, even though our founders are both men. We are a feedback and learning-oriented company and we believe that having diversity on our team enriches communication and improves learning outcomes for all of our employees. Whether it’s true or not, it’s not about gender but how we can build the best place to work. If you join Eden, it means we value your ideas and opinions, and everyone wants to hear them. At the end of the day, we strive to empower each other and to create a better place to work, for everyone, Eden included.

We’ve open-sourced our employee handbook.

At one of our company offsites, we spent a significant amount of time discussing our company values. From those conversations, we decided to model the company that we aspired to be, and make it easy for others to fork that handbook if they wanted to borrow or were inspired by it. Why make it public? If we’re lucky, people will fork it, work on it, and perhaps borrow from it to create their own.

Within Nylas, we partner with Paradigm to host D&I workshops at the company. These workshops range from “how to conduct yourself at meetings” to “how to write performance reviews,” and have helped us be more conscious of our biases towards different races, genders, and ages. Our VP of Engineering, Tomasz, also spearheaded a partnership with Code2040 after participating in the program as mentor. We partner with Code2040 to focus on diversity for our intern recruiting.

We make a big effort to create an inclusive environment that is open, frank, and predictable. One of the ways we are working to maintain this is by implementing a new engineering growth and leveling framework that recognizes contributions which are typically undervalued or ignored in traditional engineering ladders.

As a company, we strive to be the change we want to see in the workplace.

The workplace we want to see in this world is radically inclusive. In order to be this change, we must actively practice inclusion—from the moment someone hears of Asana, through their interviews, first day, and entire time on our team. We do this by maintaining a culture of openness and kindness: encouraging every employee to bring their full selves to work and recognizing the value that diversity brings to our team and work.

Inclusion isn’t just a feeling we strive towards; we set goals and build programs around it, too. Our head of Diversity and Inclusion leads these efforts, but every Asana contributes to them. Whether employees are attending CLG to learn how to be open and curious when their beliefs are challenged, or participating in one of our three employee resource groups, we recognize that inclusion is an active practice that contributes to Asana’s success.

Finally, we’re committed to measuring the impact of our inclusion practices, because without measuring it, we won’t know if we’re succeeding. We conduct annual employee surveys and maintain open channels for feedback so that we can make incremental improvements.

We’re working towards a more inclusive future for cannabis.

At Eaze, we recognize that major reform of the cannabis industry must come from diverse and inclusive internal teams. Making decisions that change the outward-facing image of cannabis in our web and mobile products, as well as in media, requires us to celebrate diverse perspectives, and model a future of a just and upstanding industry. To this end, we take noticeable measures to prioritize inclusion. We encourage flexible work schedules, diverse hiring discussions, and weekly team building activities celebrating our backgrounds. We discuss inclusion actively and are always amenable to new ideas!

Women make up half of our company.

Our cofounder is female. Our first engineering hire is female. Our only product manager is female. Inclusiveness to us means eliminating that hesitation for anyone to voice their opinion. As a small team, we want everyone to feel like they have a seat at the table when we discuss our OKRs or our next hire. We don’t center all of our social events around alcohol and we’ve found that conversations and discussions are richer when they include a diversity of opinions. We believe in creating a workplace that welcomes everyone, regardless of gender, age, technical background, or race.

We aim to empower all employees to be heard and respected and have several processes that we practice day-to-day to promote an inclusive culture.

Inclusion starts at the very first interaction: hiring. Our interview process is designed to mitigate bias. We explicitly do not screen for school, previous companies, or open source contributions. As a full-time employee at Medium, you’ll also find that meetings begin with a check-in round, where everyone has an opportunity to share where they are at and what they’re bringing to the meeting with them. Similarly, everyone has the opportunity to add items to the agenda, so that different personality types can contribute to the conversation. Finally, our team events and offsites rotate (previous ones have included a ropes course, pottery making, and trapeze), so that no one feels excluded. We know that not everyone wants to or enjoys drinking, which is why none of our event revolve around it. However, chocolate making, woodworking, and museum visits are in the rotation.

What does it mean to you to have diversity? To us, it’s spans beyond the categories that the industry measures around gender and race.

We’re working with very diverse populations of customers, who are then serving very diverse communities within their cities. While we often hear about company diversity being a top-down effort that starts with leadership, we at Remix hope to personalize our diversity efforts for every individual at the company. It shouldn’t feel like another diversity charter that every company is out to do. We aim to have a company that represents the urban community that we serve which includes diversity beyond gender and race, and includes includes diversity in age, background, sexual orientation, political affiliation, and religious views. We’ve set clear diversity metrics and are incorporating training on diversity, inclusion and belonging, and unconscious bias at the company.

We really care about building an inclusive environment, and are actively trying to maintain and improve this as we grow our team.

We aim to keep sensible working hours, and support working from home wherever it makes sense. A number of our team members have young families, so we aim to support parents and be family-friendly when planning both office policies as well as team events.

On the recruiting side, we've spent a lot of time trying to eliminate bias in our recruiting process. We run our job adverts through textio, and try to keep our requirements as open as possible to avoid excluding candidates through overly strict requirements (e.g. requiring degrees when work experience can easily be equivalent/superior).

We are a company that really values diverse thought, talent, and skills.

We know that diversity and inclusion in the Bay Area is a troubled area, and we are truly committed to improving. Our engineering team is 34% female, but we don’t compare ourselves to industry averages, nor do we believe that gender diversity is true diversity. Our entire company is dedicated to creating a more inclusive environment, and have hired Paradigm to help us deep dive into our inclusion efforts. We host Pride Month every year and are proud to be involved in the Pride Parade, a trick-or-treat session at our headquarters for our employees’ children, and Girl Geek dinners in the past. We have a primary and secondary caregiver leave policy that has nothing to do with maternity, paternity, the type of relationship, or whether the child is biological or adopted. Even our vacation policy is centered around the spirit of being your best self.

Diversity and inclusion is not a box that you check. It is a continued commitment and effort that encourages people to not only be their best selves, but to also promote the people around them to do the same.