We’re committed to building an inclusive and diverse community – both on our platform and across our team.

At Classy, we’re transforming the way nonprofit fundraising is done, enabling more people to make a difference for the causes they care about. We believe in presenting a diverse set of perspectives and giving our nonprofit customers solutions to help them raise more funds so they can solve the world's toughest social and environmental problems. To ensure the best solutions rise to the top, this starts with fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within our own team. We have a wide range of employee resource groups, aka Classy Communities, such as LatinX and Nine to Thrive (for women in business) that have consistent meetings, volunteer agendas, and employee engagement plans. Another great example of fostering inclusion is our Slack bot, which was created by one of our own engineers. It uses corrective feedback to help us learn how we can be more inclusive in our daily communications. For example, instead of saying “hey guys” it might recommend “hey everyone.”

In addition to openly sharing our community guidelines, we conduct DEI trainings for employees and host speakers. For instance, we reached out to a member of our community, Dr. Atira Charles, to help lead us through a guided conversation on diversity, equity, and inclusion to help our team be part of lasting change.

Finally, we created a DEI committee, consisting of both external and internal advisors (including Classy employees) and conduct an annual DEI report that provides a comprehensive assessment of our company demographics, income equity, and DEI staff survey results. This report celebrates the progress we’ve made and outlines the roadmap for future improvement. You can read the latest report here.

Inclusion is at the forefront of everything we do.

We believe photography has the power to create positive change in the world, and people have the power to create positive change within our company. We work every day to build inclusive products, and this includes fostering an inclusive culture. We provide interview training to every hiring manager and interviewer to ensure every potential employee has a consistent, inclusive, and equitable experience with our company.

We foster an inclusive environment through several programs, including quarterly engagement surveys, ad-hoc employee health surveys, and mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training to help ensure every person feels supported and has a place to share their concerns openly. We also operate a formal, structured quarterly performance assessment process and ensure that employees receive valuable, actionable feedback.

Since 2017, we have actively engaged DEI thought leaders to execute various meaningful projects related to our ongoing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, including internal process and policy audits, employee surveys, interviews, and more. These projects resulted in recommendations that have shaped our DEI efforts as a company. We strongly believe that company-wide DEI education is valuable to every role and individual within our company and have introduced required training to prioritize this critical education. Creating an inclusive workplace is an ongoing process that requires persistence, a growth mindset, and a willing team. We are fully committed to doing the work necessary to create the world we imagine for our people.

We want to learn from every person who works at Dark.

Whether it’s adding more women to the team (we’re currently evenly split) or people of different ages, ethnic backgrounds, parenting status, and abilities — diversity is extremely important to us. We want to learn from one another and believe our different backgrounds are of the utmost value. For example, one of our engineers creates new stem vocabulary for ASL.

For us, inclusion means helping people get in the door and thrive once they’re here:

• When candidates interview, we give them lots of ways to show us their best work: from the type of call they prefer (phone or video) to how they’d like to share code.
• We cover 100% of Kaiser Platinum for employees and their dependents. You can have a PPO, too, and just pay the difference! We don’t want you to have to worry about going to the doctor.
• At work, we encourage employees to share their preferences around working style. We each write a “how to work with me” document that highlights our regular hours, habits, and things we’re trying to improve. So everyone is able to contribute, we let people have time to think before jumping into conversations (it’s okay if you think out loud, too!)
• We caption all of our videos, and openly share our captioning script for other teams to use. We want to be good citizens to the overall community.

That’s just the start. We know that many issues around inclusion are systematic, and some are invisible if you don’t have firsthand experience.

To combat that, we actively solicit feedback on our salary policy, benefits, office, team policies, and how we communicate. Everyone who works at Dark has a different background and set of interests. We’d love to hear your unique perspective, but we also understand that some things are private. When we get feedback on something we didn’t even know to ask about, we listen first, think, then respond.

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 as 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. We’re open to folks from any educational or professional background as long as they are eager to learn and grow into the role.

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.

Inclusion is top of mind in everything we do.

We want to make sure everyone at Mode is included, even interview candidates. All of our processes are designed to be inclusive to all of us and guard against implicit biases. Below are just some of the ways in which Mode practices inclusion.

Meetings:

• Facilitators create intentional space for quiet folks to speak up.
• Agendas are set ahead of time, so everyone is able to come to meetings prepared.
• A designated note-taker ensures that there is a clear record so people can review outcomes later.
• Note-taking duty is distributed equitably.

Interviews:

• All candidates get the same interview experience with a clear, specific set of criteria.
• We require all interviewers to be trained in implicit bias.
• Our interviews, as much as possible, attempt to simulate the things that come up in real, everyday work situations. We don’t ask people for esoteric trivia.

Growth:

• In addition to continuous feedback from their managers, Mode engineers receive quantitative and qualitative feedback once a quarter using our performance framework. Transparent performance evaluations are important for inclusion.
• New engineering ICs get an “onboarding buddy”—a mentor and helper who can give context on the company and help answer questions that might come up.
• Engineers work with their manager to set goals and create a personalized growth plan in areas that benefit both them and the team.

Events:

• Events are planned with everyone’s unique needs and situations kept in mind.
• Company events don’t revolve around alcohol.
• Company events almost always take place during working hours.

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. For example, when recruiting in Mexico, Edgar often reaches out to potential candidates in Spanish. Being able to connect with people in their native language is just one great way to help foster a more inclusive, diverse team.

We also 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. To support equity from Black Americans, we created Brilliant Black Minds, a program that helps prepare Black software engineers for future interviews. Engineers are also working on projects such as making sure equitable language is used in our U/X and that we’re labeling the right buttons for candidates to use with non-binary pronouns.

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.

Change.org’s goal is for our organization to reflect the beautiful and diverse world we inhabit.

We are actively questioning and working to disrupt systems that lead to oppression with a wide range of commitments and initiatives including giving $10M to support racial justice advocacy, expanding our DEI team, and instituting company-wide anti-racism training in partnership with The Equity Paradigm. We also have programs such as Allyship training, WHOA (Women Helping Others Achieve), and several ERG groups for cisgender women, transgender/non-binary, people of Black, Asian, Pacific Islander and Latinx heritage on our staff.

One major way we fight systemic inequality is with our compensation practices. You can learn more about how we pay our people ethically and equitably here. We see our work in fostering inclusivity as a constant process to improve ourselves, the places we work, and the world around us so everyone can thrive. We do this with integrity, honesty, and humility at every step. With this approach, we’ve seen consistently high ratings for personal support and safety through anonymous team member surveys.

Other ways we practice inclusivity are by having open communication lines across the company, and always putting the team first. Leadership shares detailed information about financials, employee happiness, and the health of the business company-wide on a regular basis, which is what we call radical transparency. Additionally, we are continuously improving how our teams operate independently and together. We are in the process of moving to a true autonomous organizational structure within the engineering team. This means decision making and teams will be led by key stakeholders.

Lastly, as part of Change.org’s inclusion practices, we are dedicated to making this a safe space for everyone regardless of their upbringing or what they’re going through today. We understand that mental health is a struggle for many people in the world and occasionally for the people who work here, too. Our #1 priority is the health and wellness of our staff, which is why we offer a $200 monthly stipend to support the overall wellbeing of our employees. Team members have used this to buy new books, treat themselves to a nice meal, purchase candles to make their desks feel cozy, or even invest in new workout equipment. Ultimately, we have an open environment where employees feel safe and comfortable to take care of themselves without judgement.

We believe in fostering diversity and inclusion not just at New Relic, but also in our greater community.

We are committed to hiring a diverse workforce and supporting the career growth of people who are underrepresented in tech, starting with how we speak to potential applicants in our job descriptions. We are thoughtful about the language we use and do our best to welcome all applicants to apply.

Once a hire is made, we have a wide variety of employee resource groups (ERGs) available, too. Fireside chats, panels, social events, and workshops are regularly held by ERGs such as Relics of Color, Rainbow Relics, [email protected], NeuRelics (Relics who want to help build a culture with neurodiversity and mental health in mind), and NR-VERG (Relics who have served).

Fostering a diverse and inclusive community is important to us not just within New Relic’s walls, but also when we’re outside of the office. Employees get paid time off to leverage their skills and contribute to a cause they’re most passionate about. (As one example, several of our DOS team members went to local schools to read to kids last year.) In order to create more equality and accessibility in the tech community, we also offer free software licenses to non-profits and invest in STEAM education. You can learn more about our non-profit work here!

Last, but not least, we also conduct a company-wide inclusion survey every year. We take the results from this survey very seriously, quickly act on the feedback provided, and always use a 3rd-party service to ensure confidentiality. Personally, for those on our DOS team, we continue to be impressed by the anti-oppression analysis New Relic brings to the forefront. There is ongoing education for staff on how to address culture add vs. culture fit, equality vs. equity, and talking about systematic oppression in an industry that has a lot of work to do. Overall, New Relic has the capacity to support the empowerment and growth of people who are underrepresented in tech and believe we have no excuses in helping shift the status quo.

Inclusivity is top of mind for both our users and internal team members.

From a product standpoint, we are constantly asking ourselves how to make Seesaw as inclusive as possible. Thinking through a diverse, equitable, and inclusive lens is critical for our business. It’s how we can provide the best service possible to our users. Seesaw needs to be intuitive for students at all grade levels to use, as well as for parents and teachers across various socioeconomic, cultural, and educational backgrounds. We serve an extremely diverse population and build features that facilitate connections between disparate parties that are also easy to use. For example, we added a translator in our messaging app so that parents and teachers can communicate even if they don’t speak the same language.

Internally, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) plays an important role as well. We make sure our people programs are equitable, and are always looking for ways to refine or improve our processes. As a company, we regularly survey employees with tools like Officevibe to help us identify areas we can be improving and keep employees engaged. We’ve invested in DEI training at the manager level and all our new hires go through DEI onboarding. Each quarter, our DEI Committee (which represents various teams and identities) identifies an educational focus to create greater awareness around DEI topics within the company. To kick off 2020, we decided to focus on education. We’ve been giving educational presentations (i.e. about K-12 student demographics in the U.S.) and brought in a panel of SFUSD school teachers to talk about the demographics of their classroom and how they differentiate their teaching for different learners like English as a Second Language (ESL) or students with disabilities.

Overall, everyone is incredibly open and welcoming at Seesaw. Many of us agree that Seesaw is the humblest company we’ve ever worked at, and that we noticed it as early as our interviews. When you walk around our office (whether virtually or IRL once we open our office again), you won’t be able to tell who’s on the leadership team and who joined us last week, and you’ll likely find yourself in conversation with multiple people. 😊

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.

Two of our core founding values are "Self-awareness" and "We're all in it together."

We're not only tackling hard technical challenges, but also working with the foremost communities and institutions in neuroscience and neurology to help bring about completely new therapies and modes of patient care based on data. It's going to take every viewpoint, every background, every way of problem solving, and every person to truly break new ground.

We work hard toward a recruiting process that doesn’t rely solely on inbound applications (which is inherently biased toward overrepresented groups). Rather, we strive to engage and reach out to underrepresented candidates and groups that may not discover Rune otherwise.

We work hand-in-hand with People Ops to regularly review our resume screening, phone screening, and technical interview structure for bias or other ways we can improve. For example, in technical interviews, we try to address pressure-bias by giving applicants a choice between a bring-along code challenge they can complete on their own time, or a white boarding session where there's problem solving on the spot.

Being a hybrid onsite/remote team also has its challenges. All our meetings are hosted in a remote-friendly format, with everyone on video conference regardless of whether you're sitting next to each other or a thousand miles away. We rely heavily on collaboration apps for white-boarding and note taking so that everyone can access the same information to the same degree, and have a say in conclusions and action items.

Self-awareness is the value that allows us to be better at these things. At all-company meetings every quarter, we talk about our inherent biases and how the assumptions and labels we grew up with don't apply to everyone. Little things such as asking how candidates and employees self-identify help us be better at providing a psychologically safe environment at Rune.

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.

We strongly believe that we will fail our mission if we fail to build a diverse and inclusive environment.

Our mission is to help everyone live their lives with more clarity, purpose, and passion, and we need representation among those building the product experience in order to do so. While we are more diverse across gender and ethnicity than most technology start-ups, we are not interested in doing the bare minimum. We always want to improve the inclusivity and diversity of our workforce. We ensure that we have a diverse candidate pool through sourcing and connecting with underrepresented communities. As an example, we have adopted the Rooney Rule for the on-site stage of our process.

To support growing families, we offer eight weeks paid parental bonding leave, in addition to paid disability leave for the birth parent. We also have several Employee Resource Groups (ERG) where you can connect with other communities within the company. Some of our ERGs include Black BetterUppers, Women at BU, Military Veterans, and more to come!

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 pace 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 to hold more formal staff management 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.

We’re proud that we have a diverse and inclusive team, but we won’t rest on our laurels.

We created an organization within the company called Kaleidoscope that aims to activate change by challenging the system, not people. You can apply to be on Kaleidoscope (we rotate members every two quarters) and also join our #Kaleidoscope Slack channel. The committee has a $25K budget per year and meets to propose events. For example, everyone at Academia is expected to attend one 90-minute Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training session per quarter, led by a professional facilitator. Some of the 2021 topics include fostering diversity, gender and pronouns, understanding unconscious bias, and allyship at Academia.

When it comes to hiring, the Kaleidoscope team also meets twice a month with Stuart, our VP of Talent Acquisition to review DEI in recruitment and discuss best practices and solutions. We also work to ensure we have a diverse hiring pool, which starts at the top of the funnel. To keep us accountable, we make sure DEI hiring goals are data-driven.

What’s more, if you’d like to level-up your DEI understanding, you can take Shine Diversity’s JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) path, which features advanced trainings like DEI in recruitment, LGBTQ+ Inclusion, anti-racism training, and moving from micro-aggressions to micro-affirmations. We also hold informal events such as watching movies for Black History Month (such as Selma) and Women’s History Month (we watched On the Basis of Sex).

While we’re actively taking steps to ensure we have a diverse and inclusive environment, we recognize that there’s always more we can learn and improve on. At the end of the day, celebrating our diverse experiences is what will enable us to succeed.

We celebrate and support our individual identities. In order to do our best work everyone must feel respected, valued, and that they belong.

Here are several ways Asana engineers practice inclusivity and build community:

• Employee Resource Groups foster trusted, safe spaces for underrepresented groups and allies. Our thriving communities include AsanaWomen, Asanapac, Blacsana, Team Rainbow for LGBTQIA+ Asanas, and Gradient for Asanas of color.
• Gigabytes is our growing community of women, transgender, and gender non-conforming individuals in technical roles.
• Ask Me Anything sessions with members of our leadership team and external thought leaders forge connections and bring unique perspectives to the table.
• The Real Talk event series promotes candid, open conversations. Asanas come together to discuss important, often uncomfortable topics, such as experiences around identity and workplace challenges.
• Organized group learning programs like book clubs, learning talks, and movie screenings provide ways for every Asana to build community and connection.
• Gender-inclusive spaces: From gender-neutral restrooms in every office, to pronoun fields in our product, we recognize and embrace all identities.

Diverse backgrounds build better products.

We welcome everybody and do not discriminate based on gender, race, what school you attended, or what big company you worked at previously. We are actively seeking diversity of experience in all facets to enhance our company so we’re able to emphatically serve our users. We are currently a team of mostly men and fully acknowledge this must change in order to build the strongest culture and best products for our customers.

What matters most to us is that you are the right person for the job and can take ownership for the product you’re working on. Your GitHub contributions, previous work, and ability to contribute a ton of value to Point is what’s most important.

If you’re interested in meeting us or learning more about our vision for the future, we’d love to meet you. You can view our open roles here!

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.