What role do diversity and inclusion play in your work?

Diversity is important right from the brainstorming phase, because having different backgrounds is what makes the ideas richer and more innovative. You have to hire people who are different from you. The Myers Briggs assessment through Wendel is also a great tool to use

As a member of a fully remote team, I get to firsthand appreciate the benefits of diversity. I work with people from all over the world and exploring new perspective and trains of thought is always satisfying.

One company I work for had not been very diverse traditionally, and now with a new CEO and Exec they are using recruitment of diverse staff as a way to shake things up and change the culture. I find it fascinating!

For me, it is essential to have a diverse top management team. This includes gender diversity, ethnic diversity, and more.

For me -- it comes from both individual approaches and company-wide efforts. On an individual basis, I make sure to understand potential biases that often occur in the hiring process so I can overcome them (i.e. overlooking those different from me while hiring people that are similar to who I am). On a company-wide basis, we are currently going through a rebranding, and it is important to prioritize brand elements (such as messaging and imagery) that do not alienate any part of our userbase or target customers. Right now, we are proud to be a small company comprised of 11 people from 10 different countries 😀

+1 to @vivekkatial's answer. I think it's critical to talk about the systemic causes of bias, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, so that as a company, we can create system-level change in our organisation, domain, and industry as a whole. We don't shy away from topics like anti-racism, decolonisation, indigenous data principles - these are all professional topics that will 100% impact the success and value of our product. We find that talking about these topics and applying them to things like design reviews, exploratory data analyses, and UX research helps us to avoid entrenching existing inequalities with our product.

Always love to reference Verna Myers: "Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance" Our business was founded through DEI principles (diversity, equity and inclusion) and it pervades every part of our business from product development, internal ops and hiring. There is a whole bunch of stuff we do which probs I cant list out but here are some examples Product Development: - In our user research, actively measuring and showing our ideas to people from diverse groups - Building data tools, following best practices around data ethics - We only collect data if we are able to provide value to those same people (reciprocity). - When we do data labelling, we divvy it up across a diverse group of people. This is important to minimise the bias that our model learns from the labelled data. - For analysing the quality of feedback given during code review, we avoided using features like the demographic information of the feedback’s authors, because this could end up penalising certain groups of people. - We commit to doing intersectional evaluation of all of our models on our own team (since we have our own demographic data and a diverse team) Internal Operations: - Quarterly training and L&D sessions about the histories of oppression in ANZ - Allyship training for all employees - Internally transparent salary bands and ESOP allocations - Consciously creating an environment that listens to those different voices, e.g., considering the share of voice in our team meetings; and making sure to rotate “office housework” tasks - Aus and NZ based employees learning about Te Tiriti o Waitangi, histories of oppression of Maori in NZ and we also do Te Reo workshops Hiring: - Reach out to people from different communities to share opportunities for working at Multitudes - Check for values alignment and people who are adding to our culture as an organisation - Ask candidates to reflect on their privilege and how they think about oppression

Diversity is a topic that is very important nowadays especially in a globalised world. It comes with great advantages and also disadvantages if it is not managed properly. Therefore, for organisations embracing diversity or about to adopt this strateyg; it is essential to mitigates its challenges, as a result managements should be able to provide trainings, mentorship/coaching, policies and access its hiring policies. Without these and other effective strategies there will be loopholes and conflicts between employees leading to great dissatisfaction in the workplace.

Multiple perspectives create greater perceptions of depth. We complement Marketing Leads and Founders' effort to reach and speak to their target audience the way they would like to be spoken to. It's important for us to know how to speak to different people. We've benefitted a lot from having a diverse team by virtue of their wealth of unique experiences. Wouldn't trade that for anything.