Engineering teams that actively practice inclusion

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 one another, listen to each other, and work together.

We value richness in perspective, experience, and background and have already built a team that is well represented across multiple dimensions. As we grow, every new hire has an opportunity to add richness to our team (and avoid creating a monoculture), which is why we eliminate interview practices that introduce biases like whiteboard interviews.

Inclusion is important to us on a daily basis, not just in who or how we hire. We practice it through the following principles every day:

• Everyone has a chance, and is encouraged, to speak once before anyone speaks twice. It’s hard to do sometimes, because we’re passionate about what we’re working on, but we try to enforce this policy during all of our meetings. Everyone should be able 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.
• Create space for different cultural norms. People should be able to make contributions without adjusting who they are in the workplace. That's how we all succeed together.

We are committed to doing the hard work required for true institutional change.

We strive to be a community where everyone is welcome to be themselves without fear of discrimination and encouraging of each other. We want all of our team members to feel empowered to stand up for themselves and each other.

Our leadership team has made concrete commitments toward fostering diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) at the company. For example, we hold ourselves accountable by using data to ensure our pay bands are equitable for each role. Being open, honest, and transparent with our staff about both our findings, as well as our plans to improve is important to us. Moreover, we have a very clear goal to build a team that reflects the diverse communities we live in, not just the dominant paradigm in the tech world.

We also maintain safe spaces to engage in open dialogue and provide our team members with monthly DEIB open forums, workshops, book clubs, guest speakers, cultural month celebrations, and more. You can read our complete DEIB mission statement here.

We value everyone’s input.

It’s important to us that every team member feels comfortable speaking up and expressing both their ideas and concerns. At our weekly all-hands meeting, everyone shares what they worked on the previous week, any highlights, and what they’ll be working on that week. We make sure to rotate the order so that we never start with the same person and always give everyone equal floor space. There’s also a fun grab bag question too, which can range from sharing the last book you read or your spirit animal to slightly deeper topics such as a favorite childhood memory.

It’s safe to say that we avoid silos, and our weekly all-hands is also a great place for engineers to learn more about other parts of the business and explain what they’re working on to folks who are less familiar. We’re happy to explain more technical terms to our marketing peers and vice-versa. In order to learn from each other, having diverse experiences and expertises is paramount. Maybe you’re self-taught or have a CS degree, a parent or an empty nester, just starting out in your career or further along – we welcome folks from all backgrounds.

Inclusion means making space for every Karateer.

Building an inclusive environment is top of mind in everything we do, because if you don’t have an inclusive environment, you can’t retain a diverse team. We hire from around the world and interview by one of our core values, which is human-centered.

We strongly believe in fighting systemic racism and supporting underrepresented groups. Historically, Black software engineers have been largely kept out of the highest levels of tech and not afforded equal access to career opportunities that interviews create. Only 5% of software engineers in the U.S. are Black and we’re in a position to affect real-world change. That’s why we created Brilliant Black Minds, a program that leverages our product to help prepare Black software engineers for future interviews with free interview practice, feedback, and coaching. In fact, Serena Williams partnered with us to help scale the program and double the number of Black engineers in tech! We’re even going one step further with Partners of Brilliance, which directly connects engineers to specific roles based on their practice interview progression. Eligible participants are invited to connect with a recruiter from one of our partner companies and fast-track through the interview process. Companies including Prime Video, Citi, Duolingo, Indeed, and Flatiron Health have all signed on as inaugural partners to help us close the interview access gap and are committed to hiring from the Black Brilliant Minds community.

We make it a priority to learn from one another and ensure that meetings are inclusive of those who are remote (i.e. figuring out the best angle, tech, or room to use so that everyone can hear each other and participate equally). During all-hands meetings, we often have presenters from the LGBTQ+ community and Brilliant Black Minds, to name a few. Our goal is for every Karateer to feel they have a seat at a table (or multiple tables). While it might not be the highest decision-making table, we always want your voice to be heard. That means you can even go to the CEO with feedback any time, regardless of your role.

Whether it’s working on projects such as making sure equitable language is used in our UX (and that we’re labeling the right buttons for candidates to use with non-binary pronouns), or providing interview engineers with ongoing training and mentorship, inclusion is core to our product, company, and how we operate day-to-day.

We think of diversity and inclusion in terms of 3 P's: Presence, Participation, and Progress.

Presence: The first step to inclusion is simply including a diverse set of people in your company. We actively discuss how to improve and diversify the culture in our #diversity-equity-inclusion chat channel and other forums. To reduce bias in engineering hiring specifically, we've introduced standardized rubrics and assessment metrics for our interview process. We're continually investigating methods for improving the diversity of our candidate pool. Our executive team leadership unambiguously supports devoting significant resources to this end.

Participation: Once you get people in the door, you must ensure that everyone is involved in meaningful decisions. Our employees come from all walks of life: some are parents to newborn children, some are empty nesters, while others are part of the younger workforce. We believe that companies should mold themselves to accommodate their employees’ work styles. Most of our communication is asynchronously accessible (see Flexible Work Arrangements below). Company-wide celebrations happen at all hours of the day, not just after work, and include activities, food, and beverages compatible with a variety of lifestyles.

Progress: We want all employees to create the biggest impact possible. We've instituted a program of training managers in coaching skills to maximize every report's chance of success. Majority-identifying as well as minority-identifying engineering leaders lead our DEI working groups. We support both formal communities (ERGs) and organic communities (such as our Women in Eng group) which have developed within our organization – ask us about these!

We believe diversity flourishes when inclusion happens.

It’s not enough to build a diverse team, we also have to make space for and actively celebrate our diversity. One of the ways we do this is with regular events, activities, workshops, and celebrations throughout the year. For example, during Black History Month, we focused on amplifying Black voices within our own team as well as supporting black-owned businesses and leaders in our community (we scheduled a team lunch over Zoom and encouraged Remixers to buy lunch from their favorite Black-owned business). We also had an hour-long conversation with London Breed, the first Black woman to serve as Mayor of San Francisco, and much more. One of our team members “Remix offers a space to share your story and celebrate your journey with others. Working here has been a constant reminder that no matter who you are or what your story is, space can always be made and differences can bring people together.” We encourage you to read the full blog post, “What Black History Month at Remix Means to Me,” here.

We also hired a third-party diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultant to do an audit of our organization and come up with some recommendations to further our goal of becoming more inclusive. As a direct result, we decided to create employee-resource groups (ERGs). Even though we were only ~65 people at the time, we felt it would be a win to start ERGs such as womxn-eng, via-poc, litt-at-via, via-parents, the list goes on. Now that we joined Via in March of 2021, some of the groups are merged, but they continue to be a great place to bond with others, foster community, and find support.

Lastly, we encourage everyone who joins to create their own “user guide.” These are meant to serve as high-level overviews where you can talk about your core values, share where and when you feel you do your best work, your preferred communication style, and general expectations for how you can be best supported. While it’s optional, it’s a great exercise to help you think more intentionally about how you’d like other team members to understand you as a person.

An inclusive environment is crucial for both our product and our culture.

We’re on a mission to build tools that help restore financial health for millions of Americans with limited incomes. Having a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture is the key to creating the best product possible, starting with how we interview. We use a structured interview process with consistent questions and well-defined stages, grading rubrics, and scorecards to reduce bias. We provide interview bias training for our interviewers as well.

We’ve designed our onboarding experience to provide every new engineer with a level playing field to understand our product. We provide a peer buddy program and schedule 1:1 chats with teammates to make the first weeks of joining our remote first environment more comfortable.

We also invite all employees to join and participate in our JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion) Slack channel. We enjoy celebrating heritage months as a company with events and activities such as virtual African and Latin America diaspora cooking classes, identity-centered learning games, guest lectures, and more!

Inclusion is part of our company strategy because we truly want to enable a world where everyone can be their best selves.

Financial inclusion is one of the main parts of our mission, and we see inclusion at the company as a critical way to make the best product for the people we serve.

New and expecting parents have 16 weeks of paid parental leave, and those of us who are pet parents are always encouraged to take breaks during the day to take our furry friends on walks. If you have a doctor or therapy appointment you need to schedule meetings around, that’s A-OK, too. We survey the entire company every year to make sure the company’s benefits cater to what our team members need. For instance, based on employee feedback, we recently refreshed our medical benefits so that they were better for those based outside of California.

We invest a lot of resources in our internal committees dedicated to sourcing talent from under-represented groups and fostering more inclusive norms. We’ve structured our interviews to help reduce unconscious bias and once a candidate becomes a member of the team, we evaluate compensation every year based on demographics, too. We cherish the various perspectives people bring to the table and have several ERGs that have budgets to spend on events like an imposter syndrome workshop and a training led by a negotiation coach.

To get to know one another better, we’ll lovingly put you in the “hot seat” on your birthday or another special occasion (if you agree to it, of course). It’s a fun opportunity to answer silly questions like “What type of influencer would you want to be?” or ”If you were a talking doll, what would you say?” New hires are encouraged to ask questions in our #onboarding-eng Slack channel and you’ll also find friends in #skincare, #tv-club, #doggos, #build_memes_not_walls, #foot, and #nova_minis to name a few.

We genuinely want everyone at the company to feel like they belong at Nova, and we’re committed to providing equal opportunities to succeed for everyone, regardless of who they are. Ultimately, by fostering a diverse and inclusive environment, we’ll be able to better serve our diverse customer base.

One of our company values is "Good Ideas Come From Everywhere."

This runs counter to how many design firms operate and the belief that “Good Ideas Come From the Top.” Instead, we deliberately build our process around entire teams working together to achieve the greatest outcome – regardless of exact job title, seniority, formal experience, gender, race, religion, or other characteristic. This is a really important cultural dimension that has kept our culture strong – but it’s fragile and fleeting unless we find ways to codify it into the company’s operating system.

That’s why we’re in the midst of developing stronger formal practices to promote inclusivity in everyone’s job. It’s becoming a part of performance reviews and a specific objective for us to improve as part of our quarterly goal setting.

Thus far, we’ve ensured that we’re up-to-date with the legal and ethical compliance you would expect from a firm our size, including standardized procedures around compensation, formal policies for sexual or other types of harassment, and holding DEI training and other company-wide summits.

But let’s be honest, these are things every company should do. Our challenge this year (and every year) is how can we go further? The past year taught us that if inclusion and creation of a safe space is a priority, it’s going to take more formal checks to ensure we’re living up to our standards. That’s why we’re working with groups like Canopy and Plucky to hold more formal staff management, coaching and hiring training, and provide additional opportunities for team members of different backgrounds to share their experiences.

In terms of our day-to-day work, we’re actively pursuing projects that have diverse points of view, as well as business partnerships and pipelines that allow our own views to be broadened. While we could easily fall back on a known vendor or contractor for a work engagement, instead we do the extra work required to expand our search and step out of our comfort zone. We empower all Upstatement employees to do the same at all levels of the organization – be it new business opportunities, the nitty gritty of a project, recruitment, or even choosing our catering partners (back when co-location was a thing).

Lastly (phew), we’ve created a new pro bono program to help under-represented founders in our community and broaden our own horizons. We’re donating our design/engineering services to help people or groups that don’t have the same networks or opportunities in the tech world. We hope this gives them a leg up for their venture and can meaningfully change the make-up of the industry over time.

Creating an inclusive environment is top of mind in everything we do.

Our mission to improve health outcomes for low-income communities and communities of color isn’t just theoretical, it’s personal. Vineet (co-founder and CEO) was inspired to use text messaging to fill a gap in patient care after his experience volunteering at St. Vincent’s Free Clinic in Galveston, Texas in the wake of Hurricane Ike. He turned down his medical school acceptance and partnered with fellow Stanford classmate, Cecilia (co-founder and VP of Product), to found CareMessage. Having grown up in a low-income immigrant household, Cecilia brings an invaluable perspective on how to design products and build technology for underserved communities. She’s also an advocate for diversity and inclusion in the broader tech industry, thanks to her work collecting and publishing data on Latina tech founders.

Internally, we’re committed to fostering inclusivity by continually reviewing and improving our equitable hiring processes. When it comes to compensation, we offer competitive and equal pay regardless of location. If we find we need to increase the salary for a particular role to be competitive, we immediately raise everyone in that role’s salary as well. What’s more, we allocate time and budget investments to our ERGs, which include BIPOC, Parents of CareMessage, and Women of CareMessage. We also place an emphasis on making space for everyone’s voice to be heard, not just the loudest person in the room. As we grow, we look to our team members to participate in these conversations, help mentor one another, and play an active role in shaping an inclusive culture.

Renan and Bruno, Senior Software Engineers (first and second from left) with other CareMessage colleagues at our Disneyland company retreat circa 2019.

We’ve worked hard to build a culture where everyone feels they belong.

As we grow, we’re committed to building a workplace where every single employee feels safe, welcome, and empowered to do their best work. Our diverse experiences and viewpoints allow us to build the best product possible. If you don’t have a traditional CS degree or come from a different technical background, that’s not a barrier at all. One of our team members, Vicky, started her career as an accountant before pivoting to engineering at Upduo. She’s now our Head of Product. We also have a couple engineers who switched from mechanical and aerospace engineering to software engineering.

Our product allows for conversations that create a safe space for employees to ask questions, practice skills, and learn, and we take that to heart internally as well. We use our own platform to get different team members to teach each other about their areas of the company (i.e. our Head of Marketing might explain an upcoming partnership announcement to one of our engineers, or a UI/UX designer might discuss a new feature with our Chief Revenue Officer).

We’re a highly empathetic and collaborative team where you’re more than just your title or role. Whether you’re an intern or a senior engineer, if you’re leading a project, you’ll have the full support of everyone on the team. That means even Wei (co-founder and CTO/COO) might be your direct report for that project. If you’re passionate about learning, you’ll feel right at home. Come grow with us!