Getting familiar with intersectionality, or the complex ways multiple identities intersect, helps companies better understand their diverse and multifaceted employees; it also helps them deepen their diversity and inclusion initiatives.
By adopting an intersectional lens, the following four employers said they have been able to foster more inclusive workplaces that advocate for continuous growth and learning about the experiences of colleagues (as well as those outside of their professional circles.)
The first step? According to respondents from the following local tech companies, employers must create safe spaces for employees to talk, learn and initiate change.
Employee-led DEI groups, unconscious bias training, diverse panel discussions and specified Slack channels are just some of the ways employees at Addepar, Wunderkind, Haven Technologies and Knotel are promoting D&I in their professional lives as well as outside the office.
However, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
It’s important for leadership to check the pulse of their employees and be open to feedback. At local tech company Addepar, engagement surveys are passed out twice a year to measure impactful changes of its core culture. As a result of previous surveys, leadership has helped form affinity groups to support underrepresented communities.
SVP of People and Workplace Sally Buchanan credits the affinity groups at fintech company Addepar for deepening the company’s D&I practices. To continue enacting meaningful change in the workplace, Addepar sends out engagement surveys to employees twice a year.
How does your company approach intersectionality in the workplace, and how does that help shape your broader DEI initiatives?
Our affinity groups are open to all employees and consist of Women@Addepar; AddeParents; AddePride; BOLD (Black Organization for Leadership and Development); and Intersections, which supports all underrepresented communities including vets, Latinx individuals and those who identify as Asian American Pacific Islander.
Our affinity groups help educate and celebrate our employees, as well as inspire collaboration. For example, during Pride Month, our AddePride group partnered with AddeParents to host read-alongs with LGBTQ+ friendly children’s books. During heritage month celebrations, we seek to honor meaningful historical figures by sharing bios and resources in a company-wide email. We look to include individuals who represent intersectionality whenever appropriate.
During Pride Month we shared the stories of Marsha P. Johnson, a Black transgender woman and Sylvia Rivera, a Latinx transgender woman, two activists who fought for rights in the LGBTQ+ community.
We hold it as a shared responsibility to promote inclusion and belonging.”
What has been the most impactful action your company has taken to create a more inclusive and equitable work environment?
Giving our employees the space to share their thoughts and feedback on how we are doing as a company in regards to culture, engagement and development. Each spring and fall we hold an engagement survey to measure how employees are responding to the actions we have taken based on their feedback and research.
In one of our engagement surveys, affinity groups were in the top four suggestions identified by employees to help Addepar create a more inclusive environment. Based on those results, we did research and held focus groups to ensure our affinity groups were sustainable through communication, policies, funding and guidance. When we ran the survey again in 2020, we saw a meaningful increase in our core culture factor, which measures elements related to diversity, belonging and a culture of inclusion.
What role do your employees play in leading or supporting DEI efforts, and what have you done to ensure even the most marginalized voices on your team are represented and heard?
We hold it as a shared responsibility to promote inclusion and belonging, and we’ve always believed that it is critical that we recognize that we are at our strongest when we celebrate the full range of backgrounds and perspectives of our teammates at all times. To this end, our employees are key drivers of our DEI efforts by running our affinity groups, which plan and run our heritage month activities, sponsor employee training, lead charity efforts and sponsor our employee mentorship program.
To ensure everyone has an opportunity to voice their thoughts and provide feedback, we hold engagement surveys twice a year and leadership roundtables on a weekly or monthly basis depending on demand. Any and all employees can choose to register for these small-group conversations between employees and executives. The goal is to hear diverse perspectives across the organization to help us identify how we can best support Addepeeps and our communities.
At digital marketing company Wunderkind, promoting inclusivity is better shown with actions than words. Senior D&I Director Ryan Lathrum said the company pledged to support Black-owned businesses and social justice nonprofits by offering pro-bono services for one year.
How does your company approach intersectionality in the workplace, and how does that help shape your broader DEI initiatives?
We’ve built a robust and impactful employee resource group (ERG) platform that cuts across all identities. Our nine ERGs are focused on gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, generations, race and ethnicity. Our ERGs are strategically designed to execute programming for our people, the community, and the business. At the core of this strategy is identifying the intersections of our employees to create meaningful and long-term initiatives to ensure the belonging and psychological safety of our employees.
In addition to our ERG platform, Wunderkind is committed to creating a culture of allyship. Since 2019, our D&I team has delivered more than 10 authentic allyship workshops to all teams across the company. These workshops are designed to provide employees with a clear understanding of what it means to be an ally, how to lead as an ally, how to recognize stereotypes, and methods to keep ourselves accountable.
Within the workshops, employees learn how a person’s intersections can be hidden and revealed with trust. Our ERGs and commitment to allyship have helped shape our D&I initiatives, and drive our culture of belonging.
We’ve built a robust and impactful employee resource group (ERG) platform that cuts across all identities.”
What has been the most impactful action your company has taken to create a more inclusive and equitable work environment?
After the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, Wunderkind made renewed commitments to support our BIPOC employees. One of those commitments was an inclusive hiring initiative, and another was a $1 million commitment to small, Black-owned business and social justice nonprofits. These are long-term impactful commitments to ensure we are creating equitable communities inside and out of our company.
Our commitment to inclusive hiring includes partnerships with Jopwell (a career advancement platform for Black, Latinx, and Native American talent) and Dandi (a people analytics company for diversity, equity and inclusion). These partnerships provide additional tools and resources for hiring managers and recruiters to support our talent goals, allow for greater transparency and keep Wunderkind accountable to our commitments.
From a business perspective, Wunderkind has committed to helping small, Black-owned business and social justice nonprofits by providing our services pro bono for one year. To do our small part to address the systemic racism and inequities that exclude Black founders from the funding sources their competitors access, Wunderkind is rolling out an aggressive discount on our services. Our goal is to help these businesses scale with even better returns than our clients typically see, so they can open up their capital to even more growth opportunities.
What role do your employees play in leading or supporting DEI efforts?
All nine of our ERGs are completely employee-driven. Each ERG at Wunderkind has two co-leads and up to six additional employees on the ERG leadership team. While our ERGs have guidelines to follow, the development of small and large-scale programming is completely designed and executed by the leadership team. Each ERG has an executive sponsor who is a member of our senior leadership team (VP-level and above), and often the executive sponsor is an ally to the ERG they are sponsoring.
For example, our LGBTQ+ ERG called WunderQueers is sponsored by a straight ally. All members of ERGs have access to their executive sponsor, which provides them with opportunities to engage with the senior leadership team. The ERGs have laid the foundation for all voices to be heard by creating spaces for uncomfortable conversations to be had in the open and providing opportunities for employees to share their stories without judgment. Our ERGs are funded by the business demonstrating a commitment to our employees and recognizing their efforts to build an inclusive workplace.
Head of Recruiting Frannie Melegrito said intersectionality awareness was evident her first day of working at online life insurance company Haven Technologies. Employee-led DEI groups initiate panels and events that create a space for sharing and learning.
How does your company approach intersectionality in the workplace, and how does that help shape your broader DEI initiatives?
In the first month of joining the team, what I found to be both heartwarming and impactful was that everyone I interacted with treated me and each other with respect, understanding and the space to fully show up. Awareness of intersectionality was well-integrated within the organization’s culture and processes, which made onboarding, and now working here, a refreshing experience. While it included seemingly simple things — asking my pronouns before I started, providing context on meetings before they were scheduled, making space for me to ask a lot of questions and inviting me to be part of Slack channels that worked like ERGs — these actions made a significant difference and allowed me to feel comfortable and accepted.
As an organization, intersectionality is something we both think and talk about often. Our DEI initiatives are employee-driven and led, providing a diverse set of ideas, thoughts and identities to be part of the organizing and execution process.
As an organization, intersectionality is something we both think and talk about often.”
What has been the most impactful action your company has taken to create a more inclusive and equitable work environment?
The development and commitment to our bonus structure, which impacts every member of our team, plays a significant part in creating and fostering an inclusive and equitable work environment. Our annual bonus program has been structured around the achievement of goals at the organizational level.
With the Haven program, the work that we do is directly tied to the compensation we receive in a clear way. In addition, our semi-flat organization allows us to hear all the ideas in the room and for all voices to be heard. Our approach allows for alignment, clarity and momentum that unites and unifies the team. Our annual bonus represents the hard work we all put in year after year and a positive reminder that we are all in this together.
What role do your employees play in leading or supporting DEI efforts?
Many of our DEI efforts are employee-driven, which we’ve had great success with and only plan on expanding. While our people and culture team provides support and assistance with programs and initiatives, we believe that in order for DEI efforts to be successful and representative of our team, they should be led by our team. One of the ways we’ve had success with this is through hosting events and employee-featured panels, including Blacks In Tech, Workplace Stories: The LGBTQ Experience and Black Lives Matter: An Open Discussion.
Each of the events, along with others we host to celebrate holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Diwali, Lunar New Year and Juneteenth, provide a space for employees to share their identities and intersectionalities, an opportunity to learn more about each other, and to truly bring our full selves to work. Engaging in conversation, creating space and learning from one another continues to feel like the most authentic step we can take to build and support inclusivity in the workplace and enable all voices to be heard.
CEO and Co-founder Amol Sarva said ERGs are a part of flexible work space company Knotel’s DNA. Each group receives an annual budget to host educational events and panel discussions. Employees are encouraged to express themselves on social media and leave work to march for important causes.
How does your company approach intersectionality in the workplace, and how does that help shape your broader DEI initiatives?
Employee resource groups have always been a crucial part of Knotel’s DNA. Each group receives an annual budget to use as they choose, which most often means hosting educational events and panel discussions attended by our employees, friends and family. We’ve found these groups have played crucial roles in cultivating a sense of belonging at our company, which has teams that span many time zones. Our ERGs include Out @ Knotel, Black Excellence, Asian Pacific+ and Feminetwork.
Employee resource groups have always been a crucial part of Knotel’s DNA.”
What has been the most impactful action your company has taken to create a more inclusive and equitable work environment?
Recently, we launched a new team within the organization, Knotel and Race, comprised of a group of employees who opted in, across multiple markets and varying levels, to collaborate and make permanent plans to ensure Knotel is an anti-racist organization. Efforts like implementing a long-term DEI program, making Juneteenth and June 28 company holidays, and implementing learning and research initiatives to understand, uncover and correct unconscious biases are only the beginning. We know we have more work to do and have made this a very important part of our business. Internally, we are encouraging our teams to express themselves on social media and to take time away from work to support the cause. We are matching Knotelers’ donations for social justice and anti-racism causes, retroactively and going forward. Working with our Black Excellence employee resource group, we are looking across our business to enlist ourselves further.
What role do your employees play in leading or supporting DEI efforts?
Externally, we are reaching out to our partners in the real estate community to use our outsized voice. Real estate taxes in cities like New York makeup over 50 percent of revenue, making our community an important citizen and powerful voice. And what matters most right now to this group of citizens is supporting the Black community in the face of systemic racism.
We don’t have all the answers right now. Mostly we are listening to our employees, our customers and our communities. We have to. As a company in the real estate industry, we recognize the role that land has played in the systematic disenfranchisement of Black people. From segregation to redlining, real estate has been part of the problem. Knotel and others in the industry would like to be part of the solution. As a flexible space operator, we know that “essential” workers, disproportionately Black and Brown people, are the heartbeat of our business. They power our customer experiences and humanize our physical spaces. They deserve our ongoing commitment in the fight against injustice.
