There are many examples of how inclusion permeates the culture at Lever. Everyone at has a voice and a seat at the table, regardless of role, level, or tenure.

Whenever someone new joins Lever, they do a “meet me” presentation to introduce themselves beyond who they are at work. Every member of the team also shares their user manuals whenever kicking off a new project. User manuals are documents that each engineer completes about their working styles. How do you like to receive and give feedback? What skills, technical and soft, are you focused on developing? What do you want your teammates to know about you and how you work? They set teams up for success and help “Leveroos” focus on open communication.

The entire company actively practices inclusion by including sessions like “You Belong Here” in onboarding. We get personal with why D&I matters, celebrate the wide variety of identities in the room, and talk about how each person can help keep Lever diverse and inclusive, from being pronoun conscious on Slack to how inclusion has shaped each program and initiative at Lever. We’ve have multiple employee resource groups (ERGs), including Leverettes Who Code, a growing subgroup of our Leverettes Women’s ERG. Leverettes Who Code get together for lunch once a month and create open forums to have discussions about work, company culture, and any topic that may impact members of the group, both personally and professionally.

Twice a year, every employee goes through a compensation calibration to reassess market data and ensure that you have a candid conversation with your manager about your compensation, growth, and promotion path. We do this at Lever because women and other minorities often don’t advocate for themselves, and we believe that promotions and raises shouldn’t just go to those who who ask for them.

Every engineer at Lever has the opportunity to review code, even if they are not the responsible reviewer or primary decision maker. We’ve also incorporated demo sessions into our Eng Weekly meetings. Spearheaded by our newer engineers, our demo culture allows folks to show bit of what they have been working on and provides a way to celebrate work in every form. We encourage everyone to participate as a way to feature what each person has build or is working on.

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).

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.

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.

Open communication only works when coupled with respect and inclusion.

During meetings, everyone gets the chance to speak, uninterrupted. We believe teammates should show respect in how they communicate and listen, and that is critical to ensuring inclusion. To reinforce this, we timebox each team member’s discussion to 15 minute increments - ensuring quick and cogent responses while ensuring time for everyone to speak.

Inclusion to us also means accepting and celebrating every person as a whole. As a small team, we have the luxury of knowing one another well, and understanding each others’ perspectives. When someone first joins the team, we often ask a deep question to get to know them - i.e. “what’s the music genre to describe your life”. We unearthed some truly wonderfully weird quirks in the past… like how Bilal really likes Adele and Taylor Swift.

We want each new hire to feel at home at ClearBrain, and help make ClearBrain their home too. Kind of like how Cindy incepted the office with Dungeons & Dragons… and now everyone has an elfish secret identity now. Or how Eric’s girls are often in the office leaving fun irreplacement contributions to our walls (like heart drawings in permanent ink).

We understand that people have their own lives, and we want to support whatever lifestyle you have. We work long hours, but not necessarily in the office. Eric leaves at 4:30PM every day to pick up his girls from school, but he also codes from 9PM - 1AM regularly after they go to bed. We work hard, but we also work smart.

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.

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 from or were inspired by it. Why make it public? If we’re lucky, people will fork it, work on it, and perhaps use it as a starting point to create their own.

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. Areas like clear communication, organizational design, and well being are held at the same level as technical growth.

We support a diverse community of creators, and we actively seek to reflect that diversity on our team.

We don’t just welcome the weird and kooky at BackerKit, we prefer it. Not only is different good, but it’s also necessary for us to relate to our customers, who are generally people that have niche passions (and that’s why they’re crowdfunding!). In this way, we are inherently inclusive at BackerKit.

It seems like everyone on our team has at least one “weird thing” about them. It makes BackerKit an extremely colorful place to work, but it’s also a business strength of ours. Our team members come from diverse backgrounds, have a wide variety of interests, and as a result, bring unique perspectives and opinions to the table. We have tarot card readers, dancers, beer-makers, and even a professional cello player on our team. As an engineer, you should look forward to pairing with John (our ex-punk-rocker-turned-lawyer-turned-dev) and Lindsey (our ex-librarian-zine-creator-turned-dev).

Of course, we also make conscious efforts to increase and promote inclusion at our company. Early in BackerKit’s history, we defined core competencies and standardized interview processes across all roles to limit any bias in our hiring process. Our leadership team attended unconscious bias training workshops early on as well, and we often refer to Project Include, which helped us to revamp our interviewing processes in 2015. As a tech company in Silicon Valley, we’re also proud to have a 50-50 gender balanced across our company.

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.”

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.

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’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.

Belonging, Inclusion and Diversity is core to our mission.

It’s not lost on us that the intersections of finance, technology, and crypto has historically left communities behind. We’re ready to change that.

At a high level, we have commitment across our entire company. We’ve hired Tariq Meyers as our first Head of Belonging, Inclusion, & Diversity; our CEO and VP of People participated in Project Include’s “Tech Inclusion” Cohort; we have an employee-led Diversity and Inclusion Committee that meets regularly; and we’ve positioned D&I as a key metric reported out monthly to the company. For us, diversity, inclusion, and belonging is simple and stands on three separate pillars:

Who and how we hire.

• Sourcing. We know that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity isn't. To reverse this paradigm, we start at the beginning of the candidate life cycle, and dedicate sourcing resources to identify underrepresented talent that may get lost in more amplified channels like referrals. We’re also committed to building better relationships with emerging talent and are proud to attend Grace Hopper and expand our university relationships to include HBCUs, starting with Howard University.
• Interviewing. Finding the best talent is only the first step. It’s equally important to offer a fair and inclusive selection process. To start this journey, we’ve implemented a bar raiser program and values-based interviewing system that positions us to be consistent, focused, and fair for all of our candidates, no matter who they are or where they come from. We make sure that our bar raisers go through an iteration of interview training to ensure each candidate receives the greatest opportunity and experience possible. Coinbase also offers unconscious bias and allyship training for employees interested in understanding how bias impacts decision making. We’re in the process of developing our own curriculum for more efficient, global delivery as our company continues to scale.

How we feel once we’re hired.

• Metrics for progress and success. You can’t fix what you can’t measure. Each quarter, Coinbase launches an annual engagement survey. In the last three months, Coinbase added Belongingness factors to the survey to better measure and architect programs around employees’ sense of safety and inclusion in the workplace. In tandem with company-wide belonging, we also dive into individuals’ experience at the team level.
• Employee Resource Groups. To create safe spaces and offer a greater sense of community for underrepresented groups, we’ve launched our first three communities: People of Color, PRIDE, and Women at Coinbase. Each group’s goals align with our overall company goals and their strategies impact the entire employee lifecycle.

Expanding access in the marketplace for consumers.

• Democratizing access to our product. This is both our greatest challenge and greatest opportunity. There is tremendous amount of work to do to make Coinbase more approachable and accessible to communities that don’t trust our present financial system.
• Educating the world about crypto. We have a number of initiatives to promote more understanding about our industry spanning from the Crypto Curious videos our CEO Brian launched to the fireside chat one of our engineering managers Amy curated for over 100 women in tech to discuss the important of women in crypto.