Easing the burden of D&I work from those who are most marginalized.

Stefan Kollenberg,

Crescendo

Pleasure meeting you, I’m Stefan Kollenberg.

Crescendo helps employees learn about different cultures so they have stronger working relationships across global and distributed teams. Our clients include...

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Co-Founder and Lead Enterprise D&I Researcher

(he/him) White, Male, Canadian, Millennial, Pansexual, Recovered Addict

Quick overview of Crescendo’s research

Since 2017 we’ve been conducting market research to understand why D&I programs fail, and how we can work to fix them.

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47 D&I Practitioners

72 HR Practitioners

87 Non HR or D&I employees

82.4% North American Technology Companies

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Our goals for today’s talk:

1. Mapping the system: Enterprise D&I Programs
2. Exploring solutions to the core problem
3. Actionable steps on:
1. Creating more impactful and intersectional D&I programs
2. How to understand and spend our privilege
3. Take care of our own mental health in the process

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Enterprise

D&I Programs

Mapping the system

Mapping the system: Enterprise D&I Programs

1. What motivated their existence?
2. What problems do they aim to solve?
3. How do they try to solve these problems?
4. When they are executed, why do they fail?

The workforce is diversifying, and so are consumers.

What challenges are they trying to solve?

Enable collaboration & trust for diverse teams.

Increase diversity of the employee population

Ensuring everyone feels safe to be themselves.

Example of a company thriving: Atlassian

Demographic breakdown of their workforce

Metrics on their sense of belonging

Breakdown of the markets they do business in

https://www.atlassian.com/belonging

https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/balanced-teams

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It isn’t easy to create this kind of change...

1. Bias in organizational systems
2. Exclusionary organizational culture
3. Workforce accustom to uniformity

The Experience of Marginalized Employees

Challenges exist throughout the entire employee lifecycle

1. Getting a job and being promoted
2. Building trust & rapport with their peers

3. Feeling like they belong at

the organization

Getting a job and being promoted

Referrals are crucial for finding work in the tech industry.

• Referrals make up 3% of all candidates, but 21% of all hires (Atipica, 2019).
• Despite making up 30% of the US population, candidates of Black & Latinx backgrounds only account for 10% of referrals (Atipica, 2019).
• Compared to men, women are 26% less likely to ask for a referral (Linkedin’s Gender Insight Report).

Getting a job and being promoted

Marginalized employees often have to take active roles in supporting D&I, as majority groups are disengaged.

• 100% of ERG leaders were not financially compensated for their work leading the group (Crescendo, 2019).
• 74% of D&I leaders claim poor participation with their D&I programming from the “majority group” of employees within their organization (Crescendo, 2019).
• Almost one-third of underrepresented women of color were passed over for promotion--more than any other group (Kapor Tech Leavers Study, 2017).

Building trust with peers in a diverse organization can be harder

(James Davis, 2014)

Perceived Ability

(Are they qualified?)

Perceived Benevolence

(Do they care?)

Perceived Integrity

(Do our values align?)

Belonging: a story of the El Paso Shooting

Side note: watch this keynote about the Biology of Belonging given by Rajkumari Neogy

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How Enterprise D&I Programs Function & Fail

How D&I Programs Run

79% of D&I leaders wanted better data analysis capabilities (tools or staff with data skills).

2. Amount of resources (money, staff, time)

Educating why D&I is important, how it is relevant to their everyday work, and how they can support the programming

1. Leadership buy-in

8. Measures impact of program

7. Execute program to improve culture and increase diversity representation numbers

6. Adoption of your programming from independent contributors

5. Adoption from people managers & recruiters

4. Launches D&I strategy to company

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3. Head of D&I sets goals + allocates resources

Employee resource groups, D&I training, leadership development training, group-specific events or campaigns, diversity recruiting, process reviews, CSR, etc...

84% of D&I Leaders have “one-size- fits-all” D&I programming for employees at their organizations. (Crescendo, 2019)

74% of D&I leaders didn’t have tools to help them track the effectiveness of D&I trainings.

(Crescendo, 2019)

79% of D&I leaders said that D&I wasn’t embedded into the day-to-day work of their employees. (Crescendo, 2019)

What Happens When D&I Programs Fail

Impacts on the business:

Increased cost of turnover

Harder to hire new people

Less innovative & productive teams

Nearly 40% of employees surveyed indicated that unfairness or mistreatment played a major role in their decision to leave their company (Kapor Tech Leavers Study, 2017)

Cycle Repeats

5.Adoption from people managers + recruiters

6. Adoption of your programming from independent contributors

Hard to hire talent

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Increase in turnover

Lack of diversity across the organization

Less diverse talent in leadership pipeline

Lack of representation in leadership teams

D&I gets treated as an after-thought

Problems like exclusionary behaviour, bias in processes, etc… continue

44% of D&I leaders mentioned non-inclusive behaviour from their employees was a consistent challenge (Crescendo, 2019).

Why is it so challenging to engage managers & individual contributors?

Exploring a Solution to This Problem

What should a solution look like?

Meeting the needs of individuals

Everyone is at their own stage of the D&I learning journey

Hard to relate to experiences that are different from your own

People often want to help, but don’t know how.

Provide people with an educational experience that:

1. Meets them where they are at.
2. Makes them comfortable with difference.
3. Gives them clear ways to contribute.

D&I Learning Journey

DEFINING AHA!MOMENT

CURIOSITY & EXPLORATION

NICHE CONTENT SOURCING

EVANGELISM

From the results of Crescendo’s 87 employee interviews.

How we can reduce the overwhelming weight of systemic problems...

1. Help them split up what they can control vs can’t control.
2. Give them permission to take a breath and make mistakes.
3. Offer ways they can contribute as an individual:
1. Diversifying their media and news consumption
2. Focus on their immediate team and job responsibilities
3. Putting themselves in situations where they are “the only”
4. Encourage them to actively ask for feedback along the way.

Meeting the needs of organizations

Provide D&I teams with a solution that:

1. Provides quality education, but is also scalable.
2. Automates a lot of work they were previously doing manually.
3. Gives them metrics that help prove a business case for the programming they run.

Very challenging to offer good D&I education to 1000s of employees

D&I teams are short-staffed & under resourced

D&I teams have less internal political power

Current D&I education options fall short

Doing it internally

Time consuming

Difficult to maintain

Lack of impact measurement

What factors limit D&I leaders?

Time collecting survey data

Time analysing survey data

Frequency of survey data received

Building educational curriculum

Internal communications

Why do D&I teams have less power, and how can they get more?

Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 33% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians (McKinsey & Company, 2018).

But it doesn’t help with these kinds of questions:

Why should my direct report go to an ERG event instead of an internal product meeting?

We get the best talent from our referral program, why should we change it now?

Why will a 3 hour diversity training benefit the company?

The Solution We Built

Crescendo: Diversity & Inclusion Education in Slack

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Available for:

Coming soon to:

1. Expert curated content about real people's stories
2. Personalize to meet the needs of every employee
3. Lets you measure progress & impact over time

3. Start discussions between colleagues right inside Slack

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We create a high-value, low-friction experience for individual employees, meeting them where they’re at.

Survey Results - 3-months post launch

Launch

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3 Months

350 employees, 214 opt-ed in to Crescendo, 145 survey respondents

Change

What steps can you take right now?

Recommendations for D&I programming

Positioning your program around building trust and developing stronger teams.

Focus on vulnerability, openess, and storytelling.

• 63% of D&I Leaders mentioned a lack of vulnerability and openness from employees at their organizations (Crescendo, 2019).

Hosting more frequent, shorter, and smaller discussion circles.

Training/education focused on how to give and receive feedback and how to be a good ally.

Doing the work yourself

Understand your identity and the privileges you have

Spending your privilege

Diversify your information intake

Exercise: Privilege Wheel from Canadian Council of Refugees

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Event suppliers

Gifts

Mentorship

Donations

Volunteering

Entertainment you consume

News & media intake

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New to organization

Tenured

Exercise: Privilege Wheel from Canadian Council of Refugees

New to organization

Tenured

Accounts you can follow:

D&I Practitioners active on LinkedIn

Canada:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahsaska/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristenliesch/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/avery-francis-a0630624/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sulafasilim/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/denise-o-green-phd-09a1761a

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Asia/Europe/Middle East:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/karayelfurkan

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sararoxannemohammed

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobymildon/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tashj

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-f-steele-phd

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vesselinatasheva/

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Twitter Lists

SF Bay Area D&I Leaders: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1208418050409746433?s=20

Other Amazing D&I Leaders:

https://twitter.com/i/lists/996941372312686592?s=20

D&I Communities:

https://twitter.com/i/lists/993203204593766400?s=20

Canadian D&I Allies:

https://twitter.com/i/lists/991394945754857473?s=20

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Podcasts

Experiences of Black & Brown Women:

https://anchor.fm/wearemeaningful

Exploring race, ethnicity and culture in America:

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/

Interviews with D&I leaders:

https://open.spotify.com/show/772oUtumaU4pcsP9YKBWxb?si=lvuGmyWBTT6axD5f3CoRRA

Taking care of mental wellbeing as you do the work.

Finding a community of like-minded people to go to for venting

Having your own personal self care routine

Using thought records from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to unpack guilt and shame (see example).

Crescendo’s article on coping with burnout as a D&I practitioner.

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