According to Built In’s State of DEI in Tech 2022 report, many companies have doubled their commitments to support equity and inclusion in tech since 2020.
However, one in four of the companies surveyed said their teams remained more than 70 percent white, and 30 percent said their companies had yet to launch any DEI programs. While having conversations about DEI is important, actions speak much louder than words — and for many minority groups in tech, the silence is deafening.
However, for the following Boston companies, amplifying employee voices through transparent DEI forums and initiatives has been essential to continuous innovation. While it can seem daunting for individual contributors to speak up and enact organizational change, DEI experts have a strategy: Listen to your people.
“One of our main missions that we live by each and every day is to empower workers — not only those who use our platform, but also our own workers,” said Farrell Ross, director of people and culture at Jobcase. “That’s why we strive to make every employee at Jobcase feel included, respected and, most of all, heard.”
For Ramon De Jesus, director of diversity and inclusion at ActBlue, it comes down to utilizing an annual engagement survey to serve four distinct purposes for internal teams. “One of the most salient takeaways from our team members’ feedback has been the importance of how shared decision-making and transparency positively impacts and increases feelings of belonging,” he said. “To that end, we’ve learned that – particularly in a remote-first work environment – inclusive and intentionally visible decision-making is important to ensure that team members are brought in.”
Built In Boston sat down with Ross, De Jesus and Stack Overflow’s Director of DEI & Belonging Tabitha Calhoun to learn how harnessing the power of employee feedback can create real change in the DEI space.
Stack Overflow’s products include a public Q&A platform and employer branding, content and advertising, all of which help tech brands capture institutional knowledge, collaborate and reach developers with relevant content.
How does Stack Overflow solicit employee feedback on DEI practices?
We solicit feedback on our diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging program in several ways. First, we use categorical data through quarterly surveys that measure employee sentiment on DEIB using the Gartner Inclusion index. We use this same survey tool for our annual engagement survey, our performance evaluation cycles and our continuous feedback module, so we’re able to analyze data across numerous intersectional experiences. This helps us focus on our biggest gaps when it comes to addressing challenge areas.
We’ve also created a strategic plan for all DEIB initiatives. We build these plans in collaboration with our ERG leadership council and other organizational stakeholders. All staff can provide feedback on the process through direct comments and AMA sessions.
Direct comments come from our survey tool, which collect anonymous employee feedback through open text comments. Open text comments are mapped via sentiment into a heat map, which allows us to quickly synthesize and action vast amounts of anecdotal data.
We also hold regular AMAs with our senior leadership team and have a monthly managers meeting to enable leaders to share updates directly with their teams. Although these lines of communication aren’t solely dedicated to DEIB, they build trust and create habitual communication. This provides us the feedback we need, whether it’s about DEIB or something else.
What have been some key takeaways from that feedback?
Our biggest takeaway this year has been the importance of linking employee feedback data of all types to key outcomes across the business. For example, our attrition rate has dropped steadily over the past twelve months while engagement and inclusion feedback scores remain steady. While we can’t say for sure that our DEIB efforts are the sole cause of lower attrition, it’s a good clue we're on the right track.
We’ve also been able to examine feedback by demographic — for example, women leaders — to ensure that we don’t have gaps in employee sentiment based on identity or demographic factors.
As we move into next year, we’re looking for ways to improve our feedback loop. We want to focus our feedback channels so that the information we’re asking for and the actionable insights that come out of it are shared rapidly with our employees. The biggest risk to any feedback mechanism is that people feel like their opinions aren’t heard or don’t result in change.
The biggest risk to any feedback mechanism is that people feel like their opinions aren’t heard or don’t result in change.”
What actions or initiatives have been taken because of employee feedback on DEI practices, and what was the impact?
Our ERG leadership council has been instrumental in providing focused feedback — in most cases sourced directly from their ERG members — on all DEIB strategic initiatives. Whether it’s planning work for product accessibility, designing our annual developer survey or identifying which community impact organizations to partner with, our ERG council serves as a focused, scalable conduit for feedback from hundreds of employees.
ActBlue is a nonprofit tech organization that helps Democratic candidates, progressive organizations and other non-profits build grassroots campaigns.
How does ActBlue solicit employee feedback on DEI practices?
ActBlue’s Annual Engagement Survey (AES) is one of the organization’s primary tools used to obtain feedback regarding the DEI experience of team members.
The AES serves four distinct purposes:
- Assessing the cultural health of our organization with a specific focus on engagement, diversity and inclusion measures
- Understanding how employee experiences have changed in the past year
- Monitoring progress on the organization’s focus areas and measures of success
- Informing strategic decision-making
Through both the individual sections and in questions that explicitly address DEI, the AES seeks to assess perceptions of belonging and engagement. Moreover, the survey data is disaggregated by identity, allowing us to peer into the experiences of our team members across race, age, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, disability and generation status.
While the AES is one of the primary ways that ActBlue is in regular conversation with DEI, consistent dialogue with our employee resource groups and our recently established 2022 D&I Working Group have allowed us to further engage with feedback on DEI practices at our organization.
What have been some key takeaways from that feedback?
We’ve learned that true transparency goes far beyond answering staff inquiries, and should feature proactive sharing of information that provides a window into the process of arriving at key decisions. Oftentimes, organizations mistakenly view transparency as the simple act of relaying information after a decision has been made. At ActBlue, we aspire to provide our team members with opportunities to engage in shared decision and meaning making.
What actions or initiatives have been taken because of employee feedback on DEI practices, and what was the impact?
One of the most impactful actions to honor feedback through a DEI lens was the creation of the D&I Working Group (D&I WG). In our 2022 operational plan, diversity and inclusion emerged as a strategic priority. To remain responsive to staff calls for increased transparency and shared decision making, a D&I WG was selected and formed to incorporate the ideas and vantage points of colleagues from across the organization.
Composed of representatives at various levels of the organization, this group gathered on a regular basis for six months to identify a set of strategies that would move the needle on equity, belonging and inclusivity. At the close of the journey, the D&I WG delivered a set of strategic recommendations to ActBlue leadership and board members. Additionally, they created internally facing artifacts to guide DEI efforts, including a DEI vision statement and a glossary of DEI vocabulary to serve as a common set of understandings.
One of the important ways this group invested in feedback was through outreach to the entire ActBlue staff, distributing an organization-wide survey to align on recommended DEI actions while also hosting department level discussion.
Jobcase is an online community where millions of workers come together to help each other get ahead.
How does Jobcase solicit employee feedback on DEI practices?
We run anonymous quarterly engagement surveys with the full employee population to continue to evolve Jobcase in a data-informed way and drive our people-first culture. We ask questions generated by people scientists at Culture Amp that get our employees’ insights on our DEI practices, offerings and general sense of belonging at Jobcase.
We also include open text questions so employees can provide specific feedback. The people and culture team shares the DEI practices results with our DEI council so we can continue to live by our cultural principles — specifically “We continuously learn and rapidly evolve.”
What have been some key takeaways from that feedback?
Another one of our cultural principles at Jobcase is “We are owners who focus on results.” We know that we can’t achieve success in our DEI initiatives without getting employee feedback on how we are doing. Feedback from our engagement surveys consistently indicates that a strong majority of Jobcasers believe that the company values diversity, feel respected at Jobcase and believe they can bring their whole self to work.
Comments from the surveys show that employees value the time we take to recognize and invest in diverse communities both with our employee population and our company mission. One major takeaway we received was that employees wanted visibility into our DEI metrics and wanted to understand our DEI recruiting practices.
Feedback consistently indicates that a strong majority of Jobcasers believe that the company values diversity, feel respected and believe they can bring their whole self to work.”
What actions or initiatives have been taken because of employee feedback on DEI practices, and what was the impact?
As a result of employee feedback, the people and culture team partnered with the DEI council to align on what DEI data we wanted to collect on our employee population. We then partnered to promote and execute a DEI data collection campaign internally.
Through our efforts, we were able to drive extremely high participation with 94% of employees self-identifying their gender and 83% self-identifying their ethnicity. We then shared these results along with additional DEI metrics we collected with the Jobcase team companywide. It will allow us to measure progress on DEI recruiting efforts and evolve our internal practices. We plan to share progress annually and have received positive praise from this action.
