as women's history month and black history month before it comes to a close perhaps you're
reflecting on your organization's month specific initiatives to celebrate minority employees but
it's incredibly important to think about how your organization is celebrating and lifting up
the voices of its employees of color of its women employees of its lgbtq plus employees the other 11
months of the year computer world writer charlotte truman is here with me to discuss the idea of
diversity inclusion and importantly the idea of belonging within the workplace stick around
charlotte thank you so much for calling in and joining me all the way from the uk
i really appreciate it it's great that you're here thank you for having me julia so right off
the bat i talked a little bit in my intro there about this idea of belonging and i think we all
kind of know what the word belonging means but i'm wondering if you can define it for me within the
context of a workplace yeah of course so i think i think belonging is unique to everyone and everyone
will feel like they belong um in different ways but one of the the best definitions i've
come across for it is feeling like you can turn up to work every day and be your authentic self
that's a great point so also in my intro i hinted at this idea of the importance of
celebrating and importantly supporting your employees the other 11 months of the year
outside of whatever for whatever month aligns with their identity it's great to celebrate them within
that specific month but it's kind of all talk if you're not working hard to do what's best by them
the other 11 months of the year of the year so i'm wondering if you can point to some specific
examples of good advocacy in the tech space when it comes to dni one phrase always brings to mind
for me personally and in the uk it's very closely associated with the suffragettes and the fight
and the women's right to vote is the phrase deeds not words which i think
is really important when you're kind of looking at setting up initiatives or dna initiatives um
because it's all very good saying you're going to do something or this is how we can improve the
workplace for our minority employees but actually if there's no kind of tangible outcome or you
don't actually put in the work or the effort to make it happen to make the workplace more
welcoming for them then you might as well not have started in the first place yeah i like that words
so one specific example um i can think of is at mcafee so their chief people officer chateau lynch
has been working really hard over kind of the last four or five years to really kind of push for
better equality across the company with a real focus on gender equality i believe that's kind of
where she started um i actually spoke to her back in 2018 and already she had loads of initiatives
in place she had unconscious bias training for all-star she had gender balance interview panels
to the extent where um they wouldn't sign off and sign off on a new hire if um a female hadn't
interviewed that person or if a male and a female hadn't interviewed that person um and as a result
of that in 2019 mcafee actually achieved global gender pay parity across the whole organization
i think that's a great point and a fairly easy initiative to start and a good place perhaps
to begin when companies are looking to make their their workplace more inclusive because it's pretty
easy to just look across your organization and controlling for things like years of experience
or how long someone has been the company and making sure that everyone is getting paid equally
regardless of gender it's really no secret that here in the us and i'm sure it's similar in the uk
that women are paid cents on the dollar compared to men and it's even worse for women of color and
for men of color so it's incredibly it's an easy initiative to implement that can be done you know
pretty i'm not going to say it's just an overnight initiative but it's something that's pretty easy
to start today but i also like the point that you make about interviewing and obviously where the
where the job process begins is in applying and interviewing and recruitment so i'm wondering
if you can discuss how employees can make the recruitment processes more equitable
i know here in the u.s it's obviously very easy for people to recruit from the top universities
but the top universities are very often like disproportionately white disproportionately cut
people that come from wealthy backgrounds people that can afford to pay for quite expensive degrees
here in the united states you know you're talking 60 or 70 000 a year it's certainly not cheap to
go to university so i'm wondering what sort of measures companies can take to make sure that
they're recruiting equitably for their entry-level positions for example yeah like i said there's
some very basic things you can do internally like um make sure your interview panels are
gender neutral um implement unconscious bias training and also something that's gained a
lot of traction in recent years is um making sure your job adverts are gender-neutral and that your
language is inclusive and that actually you're not kind of turning people away or putting people off
from applying before they've even kind of stepped through the door for an interview but you make a
really good point um about where you recruit from because although university in the uk is
not quite as expensive as it is in the us um fees have tripled in kind of the last 10 years and it
has put a lot of people off um kind of pursuing more traditional educational rates so something
that's very popular in the uk at the moment are coding boot camps so um especially ones that are
kind of specifically targeted at um minority groups so one there's one um called code first
girls which offers free coding courses to women and non-binary people aged between 18 and 23.
and there's another really good um company that i've spoken to in the past called code your future
which specifically works with refugees immigrants and people from low socioeconomic backgrounds
and in order to help them kind of get a foot in the door of the technology industry
because they otherwise might be shut out because they can't afford to kind of pursue a pursue
degree an expensive degree um and i know in the u.s you have kind of some similar initiatives so
um our colleague galen gronin recently wrote a really good article about how to hire and
retain black employees in the us and he mentioned loads of really great organizations and that work
specifically with companies um such as code 2040 digital undivided and coding black females i'm
going to link those articles down below they're really great if you're looking for specific
resources and specific organizations that can help you acquire more diverse talent and importantly
these articles will also include some important measures about retaining the talent because
once you've got the talent that's important but retaining them is just as important and that
really ties into cultivating that sense of belonging so retaining talent
it's obviously any company wants to do it and i know some companies i mean especially tech
companies have specific measures um in place to intentionally try and retain talent you know like
making stock options etc but um like i mentioned that that idea of belonging is also important
on the topic of retaining talent i know we mentioned that there's a huge there's hundreds of
thousands something like that i believe of it job openings and there's just simply not enough talent
to fill them um and i know that you wrote a great article about re-skilling and mentioning that
you know it's sure it's easy if you have an i.t role to fill yeah you can poach someone from a
different company but that doesn't actually create a new person who's qualified to do this job so
i'm wondering if you can discuss the idea of re-skilling which i think is especially important
when it comes to dni measures and cultivating this feeling of belonging yeah that um sense of
belonging um goes hand in hand with uh retention because studies have actually shown that employer
and minority backgrounds are more likely to take a job which pays less money if the company feels
more kind of welcoming and um to them rather than go for a job which might pay more but actually
the invite the work environment might feel more hostile yeah so yeah that makes a lot of sense
cultivating that sense of belonging is integral to making sure your employees want to continue
working for you in terms of the skills gap um microsoft recently predicted that the
uk would require i think it was 1.9 million extra software developers by 2025. that's a
lie that's a lot and like you say you can't just kind of conjure them out of nowhere you can't just
yeah you could poach 10 developers from another company but then that company to go out and
find 10 developers and yeah you don't by doing that you're not solving the skills gap you're
just kind of kicking the problem into the law you can't poach 1.9 million people exactly exactly um
so what a lot of companies have started to do especially um or start to think about as a result
of the pandemic especially companies that perhaps were traditional retail companies but obviously uh
during lockdown in the uk retail has been shut for a lot of the year so a lot of these companies all
their business has moved online so now they might be thinking about okay well how do we continue
to make our e-commerce side of the business successful we need to hire all these new tech
employees so rather than kind of firing large t like large groups of people large teams already at
the organization instead of kind of leaving people to find new jobs and getting rid of all that kind
of knowledge and skill that these people have about the company they've worked for for sometimes
decades a lot of organizations are now actually looking to reskill those employees and say yeah
you might um have worked in our shop fronts but have you consider career and cloud computing this
is what it means this is what you could earn would you like to train and we'll provide you with the
training and the skills and therefore yeah they're building talent rather than coaching talent
that's a really interesting concept and certainly important but i also would imagine that it can be
quite intimidating to shift careers like that so i really commend people who are willing to make
this career shift and similarly i commend the companies that are willing to invest in their
people it's really important obviously to make sure that you're investing in your people you're
going to have a happier workforce you're going to have people that want to stay at your company and
turnover is not cheap but that um does kind of also relate to this idea of you know coming back
to work what is the workplace going to look like once the pandemic subsides and people are able
to return to the office and i know that there's been a really exciting in some cases push about
remote work and how exciting it is for companies to be able to hire from
by the nature of remote work a much more diverse talent pool i mean you can recruit in the entire
country or the entire world if you want to so you have a much better talent pool that is not only
more diverse in background diverse in education and but also you know diverse and experience
so i'm wondering about how all of this kind of relates to the return to work and to hybrid work
so there are kind of pre-pandemic i should say there were already um some specific programs um
that exists um to help women because the majority of the time it is women that do take career breaks
they do take shame off they do take time out of the workplace to have children to raise families
and also just traditionally the burden of care even if it's not for children perhaps parents
or other relatives is kind of placed on women so there are kind of a lot of schemes and a lot of
opportunities to um help bring women back into the workplace after they've had a career break
but in terms of moving forward after the pandemic and this idea of the hybrid workforce
it's exactly kind of what you've touched upon you can now open up your hiring pool like you say
if you are committed to either having kind of remote or hybrid work and making making that kind
of business model work you can hire people that perhaps don't live in big cities or don't live
in the big city where your kind of hq is based or like you say live in a different country and again
people that might not have traditionally been able to make it into the office five times a
week people with disabilities again people with kind of child care or other kind of
caring responsibilities i wonder too just as we close out here the challenge that hybrid work
is going to pose to some of these remote employees that perhaps were
hired remotely onboarded remotely when some of their counterparts perhaps near
a physical office location are going back to work i would imagine that it would be easy
to sometimes overlook the employees that you're not physically seeing every day for
promotions for raises to take on new projects because like i said you're just not laying eyes
on them all the time and i think that this really importantly ties into diversity and
inclusion because like i mentioned you're hiring from a much wider talent pool and you're able to
give me to make your hiring process much more equitable because you can hire literally anyone
absolutely as much as kind of hybrid and remote work does open all these kind of doors and
opportunities for lots of people you also have to be very mindful like you say of kind of how
it progresses and how you actually like implement that kind of style of working to make sure it is a
level playing field it is kind of an equitable workplace and the the person that is in the
office kind of on the same days as the manager or that is kind of in the office more isn't kind of
favored or kind of looked upon looked upon more favorably than employees yes absolutely you can
work remotely that's your job you are a remote employee just because someone isn't physically
present in the office doesn't mean they're not working as hard although yeah doing their job
as well and yeah i think companies are gonna have to be really mindful of that because i do think it
perhaps will become a new form of unconscious bias um that we haven't seen before necessarily because
although companies do exist that have been doing hybrid and remote working long before the pandemic
the amount of companies that will be doing it moving forward um is going to be unprecedented
and studies have actually kind of been done around this i think there was one i think it was about a
decade ago now in china where a company had um employees physically in the office and
employees working remotely and they found that unfortunately the remote employees their careers
progressed a lot slower rate than the employees that were physically in the office so although
we haven't kind of seen that bear out as a problem i think it's definitely something that kind of
manages and companies need to be very mindful of moving forward i think that's a great point and a
really compelling point because even though in i guess you can say that yeah i guess it would make
sense that someone who's not being physically seen every day is going to be overlooked that certainly
does not mean that it is okay or that it is right so it is really important that manager managers
are actively thinking about not only their employees that are in front of their faces every
day but also the ones that they have working from home or whatever co-working spaces near them so
thank you charlotte so much for calling in and joining me i think this was a really valuable
discussion and i really appreciate it thank you so much for having me dude yeah it's a topic i love
to write about love to talk about so it was a real pleasure having this discussion with you and to
that end we will have some of your articles linked below specifically about reskilling and hybrid
work and like i mentioned we will also be linking below galen's articles that we mentioned about
attracting and retaining specifically black tech pros really important stuff to learn so please do
feel free to check them out and thank you all so much for watching this episode of today in tech if
you liked this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel hit the bell icon
in the corner so you're notified every single time we post a new video if you have any questions or
comments specifically around what your company is doing about diversity and inclusion and
importantly belonging please do leave them in the comments below i'm really curious to see
what companies are doing out there even if your company isn't a tech company i think it's
obviously equally important thank you again for watching and we'll see you next time