>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida,
it's The Cube covering Grace Hopper's
celebration of women in computing.
Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media.
>> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the
Grace Hopper conference here in Orlanda, Florida.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight.
We're joined by Aubrey Blanch.
She is the Head of Diversity at Atlassian.
>> Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
>> Well, thank you for coming on the program.
>> Absolutely, it's great to be here.
>> So, tell me a little bit more about what you do
as the Head of Diversity at Atlassian.
>> Yeah, so I was always tell people
that my job is to make people really happy
and to give them an equal opportunity to succeed?
But what that actually means day-to-day
is that I spend a lot of time looking at the data
that tells me are we hiring the right people,
are we hiring people equitably,
do they love coming to work and are they having an impact?
So, I, that means sometimes designing programs,
sometimes doing focus groups, but always trying to
think about how do we make sure that everyone
has the thing that they need to be really successful
at Atlassian and sort of fulfill our company mission
which is to help unleash the potential of every teams
and for us, you know, we, we unleash the potential
in every team and we know that every team is diverse
and so we know that it's just an imperative for us
to look like the customers that we're serving
because it means that we understand them
and it means that we can help them do better work.
And I know that you are really dedicated
to the idea of including empirical science--
>> Yes. >> In, in what you do.
>> Aubrey: Yes.
>> Talk to me about some the, the most powerful studies,
the most powerful research that you try to
bring to your thought process in terms of hiring.
>> Yeah, absolutely, so I'm a recovering social scientist
by training so I get really excited about
the idea that you can use research to make
little tweaks to the way that you do things
that changes outcomes in really big ways.
So, one example.
We know that women, on average,
when they have the same contributions
as their male colleagues, actually tend to
rate themselves lower.
Right?
Same work and then they say,
"No, that's not quite as good."
And so, last year we made a change to our
performance review process that helps get rid of
problems that might be introduced by that.
So, if you're a manager and you're reading
two people's work and one person
has given themselves a three
and one's given them a four that might affect your rating.
So, we actually changed it so that now managers
right the review without seeing their direct reports review.
Turns out it removes bias, it shortens the process,
and it helps identify whether people have an agreement
about what people's work is.
And we found that that meant that
everyone was getting a more equitable set of ratings
and we could say, "Eh, we removed bias
"and it made it easier for the business."
And it meant that people were getting rewarded
for the value that they were creating.
>> And you're also, you're also big on data.
>> Aubrey: Yes.
>> And so you, you first of all have to collect the data.
>> So what's kinds of-- >> Yeah.
>> How are you collecting data and polling employees
about whether or not they are happy?
Absolutely, so first, you have to collect data
about who people are and how they identify.
So, things like gender, race, disability status.
We collect that data.
And then we survey people, right?
Asking them not, are you happy, but have you grown
in the last six months?
You know, does your manager support you
in doing those things?
And you can sort of triangulate
what a person's experience looks like that way.
But you also look at bigger things.
You look at things like promotion velocity.
Or what is your attrition and retention rates?
And those tell you a lot of things.
You dig into exit surveys and you say,
"What's the number one reason that people are leaving?"
Let's fix it. >> Right.
>> And the other piece of data that I get
really excited about and something that's sort of
Atlassian's thing, I guess, is that
we actually report on the diversity of our work force
at the team level.
So, you can check it out.
It's atlassian.com/diversity.
But in addition to those corporate level statistics,
we really think that the diversity on your teams matters
because your teams are who you're engaging with day-to-day.
And you get the value out of diversity
because two different people come together.
And so it doesn't actually matter if you have
30% women in your company if all the women are in
HR and marketing and all the men are in engineering.
What matters is each of those teams is diverse
because it helps them build better.
And so we think it's important to measure it that way.
>> That is such a great point because I think that
a lot of companies can bolster their diversity numbers.
>> Aubrey: Yeah.
>> And with women in the more traditionally
female-oriented parts of the company.
>> Absolutely.
But that cut of data also helps drive bigger impact.
So, I'll give you an example.
When we cut our data at the team level,
what we saw, and this was about a year ago,
that about 13.5% of our technical employees were women
but when we looked at all of our teams
that were developing software,
two thirds of them had a woman team member.
And so from that insight we were able to say,
well those women are probably isolated on their teams.
And so they're likely lacking a sense of community
and belonging and so instead of
just investing in recruiting,
we created a variety of programs that helped women
collaborate across their teams.
So, things as simple as a coffee dates program
where women opt in and are assigned to another woman
in their office to have coffee with every other week.
Or something more structured like a peer-mentoring ring
that's cross-functional.
And what we found is that that actually helped
drive retention for women in those rolls.
So, while we're investing in recruiting,
we're also making sure that we're
keeping and growing the women that are
already on our teams.
>> So this is, this is incredible.
These small tweaks as you started off saying--
>> Yeah.
>> That are really changing the way you do business.
>> Absolutely.
>> What is you're, you're best advice
to the rest of the tech industry
where Atlassian, feels like you've
figured out something here?
>> Yeah, I think it's trust the data
and know that there are no best practices or silver bullets.
So, we've made incredible progress
over the last few years so--
>> And you do, and you publish your numbers.
>> Yes we do. >> As you said.
>> Yeah, every year.
We've improved our hiring of women in technical roles
by 80% over the last two years
and it's, we've honestly just adopted
the same approach that our software teams use.
Which is we test something, we see whether it works
and then we iterate and improve it.
>> Agile, right. >> Right.
And so it's not about one training or one program,
it's about re-thinking about how you engage
with your people and how you respond to their experiences.
Because they'll tell you what they want and need
and it's about providing that.
And I always tell people best practices are a starting point
but they may or may not work for you.
So, you need to be open minded to the idea
that the first thing you try just might not work
because your culture might be different
or something like that.
For us, we also like to think about diversity
in a really broad way.
So, my other piece of advice is
think intersectionally, right?
So when we say-- >> What does that mean?
>> Yeah. >> How do you define that?
>> So, it's a big, complicated word
but it just means that we all have layers.
So, I, for example, identify as a woman
but I also identify as American and Hispanic
and five feet tall and an HR person
and all of us carry all of those identities around
and what you, so you need to understand that
women is a diverse group.
But, when you do that, when you start
talking about axes of diversity
that are past gender, it turns out it turns what could be
an us-versus-them conversation into
something that's about we.
Because maybe someone says,
"Well, I don't identify as female
"but this is the unique thing that I bring in."
And suddenly you've created it where
everyone has an incentive and has skin in the game
to create inclusion and you will get
greater gender equity out of that.
So, it's a little bit counter-intuitive
to start backwards in a way, or start complex
and work towards simple but that's something
that we've found has been incredibly helpful
in galvanizing people to get involved
and really changing the culture in a way that
it's not a top down initiative or a bottom-up initiative,
it's everyone moving in the same direction.
>> Well, Aubrey, it sounds so common-sensical,
of course, yes, yes. >> Yeah.
>> But it's only obvious after you say it.
>> Right, yeah, yes. >> And after you've tried it
and tested and iterated on it.
(laughs)
>> So that would be my thing is,
is whatever diversity matters to you
because at Atlassian, for example,
we're an Australian company and so
international diversity is incredibly important, right?
Where you come from.
You know we, I always joke,
you're more likely to hear three languages
walking across the office than anything else
and that's a really cool place to be
but it means we've already gotten used to
working in a diverse environment
and now it's how do we just add additional aspects of
diversity to our culture and to our teams?
>> Right, and let's not fight that.
>> Absolutely. >> 'Cause it's working.
>> Right, and the other thing that I've found
which is really exciting is as I've seen teams
start to change their composition,
you don't just hear really great things
from those folks who come from under-represented groups.
People from those majority groups say,
"Wow, it's actually improving my experience at work,"
because they have access to more perspectives
and people who have different experiences than them.
>> So, it's firing different parts of their brains to--
>> Yeah. >> To--
>> It's just more interesting to do your job that way.
>> Have better ideas, yeah.
>> So, that's the other thing that's real important is
this is a win-win-win solution, it's not a zero-sum game.
>> Right.
Well Aubrey, thanks so much for joining us.
It's been a lot of fun talking to you.
>> Absolutely.
Thank you so much for having me.
>> We will have more from the Cube's coverage of
the Grace Hopper Conference just after this.