Part four: Culture, part 2

- So you do want to be careful that you don't violate fair employment laws. Those laws are far from perfect, but they try to help and maybe in the process of trying to be fair to people, you can find out and document loudly what's wrong with the existing law. I feel that the people at the top of the hierarchy should give some real power to the people at the bottom to do what needs to be done, and in that case then, to allow people at the grassroots of any company to take a look at existing problems, to talk to each other, and then to do what needs to be done. In a lot of cases, the idea would be open to discussion of measures to allow people to get ahead who might never get a break, to raise the issues of people who might feel threatened by this kinda thing. Of course, there are some tough issues in our culture as we try to be fair and to make amends for decades or more of unfairness. - Asking really thoughtful questions is really the key. So talking a little bit about the way that Atlassian, we've tried to embed inclusion across the workforce. And that means that in different departments, it might look different. Sometimes it's an employee issue. But for our creative team, you know, I ask them questions about our brand. Why don't we have very dark-skinned illustrations? If I'm disabled, how would I see myself in the brand? And what I found is by asking those questions and leaving them with the experts, they come up with very novel solutions. So you'll now see that our brand reflects the diversity of our global customer base. And I think that can be true in engineering also. So one, reading broadly. But asking questions like, what does adding a comment section do to who uses my tool? We know on the internet, it reduces women who interact with products because of the harassment they experience online. Or what about when you're setting up a product and what's your default avatar? What does that do for your trend rates for particular customers? So taking a very product-oriented focus, you can actually improve your business by taking an inclusion lens to how you build. But the questions you'll ask will be different based on your specialty. - I'm a little bit hesitant to recommend that people go to HR without having a good relationship with HR already because human resources is there most often to protect the company. And so there have many cases recently documented in Silicon Valley of people going to HR and HR trying to cover for the company. And approaching it from a place of understanding and empathy is better than coming out and attacking. Although it can be very frustrating to be faced with so much injustice or bias, discrimination, to not speak more strongly about it, I think sometimes that encourages more of a defensive response as opposed to helping people to get onboard and become allies. Another thing that Pinterest has done, which I think is very cool, is rethinking how hiring works and bringing back the sort of apprenticeship model. - There's been other a-ha moments. Like, a lot of the times, I would see male humans interrupt female humans even though they have something to say and then often the male humans would actually not have anything to add. So what I try to do is sometimes find ways to cut off the unfair interrupters. To be clear, sometimes there's people of either gender who may be speaking and not have much to say. Well, after reading Deborah Tannen's book, You Just Don't Understand, I finally caught on. - We have this direct impact in terms of creating this army of girl computer scientists that didn't exist before. And I think we have really seen that grow as we've reached more and more students each year and probably impacted over six or seven thousand girls, you know, from being part of our programs. But I also think one of the benefits of Black Girls Code is really being able to be a part of the conversation. So for our girls, that connection with women that are walking this path that they wanna do in the future, that conversation has happened. We really push that, we really invite women that are engineers and computer scientists into the program to meet and mentor our students. That's a key piece of the work that we do, but it's also, I think, important that we stay in the game because this is not gonna change, like, tomorrow. It's a long game in terms of creating this culture that's really gonna be supportive. - For all of my ERG, employee resource group leaders, right before the performance cycle, their managers get an email from me detailing their contributions and sort of giving them a review. That way, I'm making sure that they get credit for their cultural contributions, which we believe are just as important as their technical contributions to the workplace. It's important that your leaders not only talk about how important diversity and inclusion is, but that they're open about their own journey. What I mean by that is sharing what it looks like, making public commitments about how they're gonna become more inclusive because what we know is that people respond and model the behavior of their leaders. So it can be something as simple as, for a leader who maybe takes up a lot of the air in the room, they're gonna step back, create space for others. And so one of the things that we found is by taking a very broad approach to what diversity means, it helps everyone feel like it's about them, like, they take ownership for it. So this year, for example, we've started talking more about autism and how it creates unique both challenges and strengths for people in the workplace. And what I'm seeing is folks who maybe thought that they, quote, weren't diverse before, are suddenly bought in and they're engaging and they're proactive. And they wanna talk about their stories and they're suddenly more open to hearing stories of their colleagues. So it seems a little bit counterintuitive to go broad to create that, but I think that that's a huge step change.