Three lessons from building a great place to work for all genders
If you’re a woman in the professional world, chances are, you’ve found yourself in a workplace where you feel like an outsider. Sometimes it’s blatant — your colleagues go out to a strip club as a team social activity; your company’s marketing campaigns openly objectify women; you’ve heard, seen, or personally experienced sexual harassment. Sometimes it’s more subtle — you find yourself frequently interrupted by male colleagues during meetings; you see people get raises and promotions simply because they are louder and more aggressive; your office has two fridges worth of alcohol but no menstrual supplies. Even with all the references to your company being a “family,” you somehow feel like you don’t belong.
I’ve definitely worked in jobs like this. Have you?
That’s why, when Fortune and Great Place to Work recently named my current company Lever not only as one of the 100 best companies to work for in the U.S., but also #13 on their list of best companies to work for for women, I couldn’t wait to tell our story. I couldn’t wait to tell employers around the world that hey, look, you can succeed as a business and be an inclusive workplace (in fact that is exactly how you will succeed!). I couldn’t wait to tell women around the world that hey, don’t lose hope, there are great companies out there where you do belong, where you can thrive. And I believe Lever is absolutely one of those companies.
We are proud to say that we have a 50:50 gender ratio as a company, and that more than half of our leaders are women. Every single team at Lever — yes, even our Engineering and Product team — is at least 40% female. In fact, 42% of our coding engineers are women.
This didn’t happen accidentally. Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is very much something you need to design. D&I has been part of Lever’s DNA since the very beginning, and as we’ve grown, how exactly we go about it has definitely evolved, but what hasn’t changed is our commitment to making sure that people from all walks of life can succeed here. We are most certainly not perfect; I think we still have a lot of room to improve! But on the heels of the Fortune recognition, I do want to share the biggest lessons we’ve learned from our intentional efforts — often behind-the-scenes — to cultivate a work environment where all genders can thrive. (Note: we apply the approach in this blog post to many dimensions of D&I, but for the sake of this particular post I will primarily focus on gender).
1. Think of D&I as a key criterion for every decision you make.
It’s simply not enough to treat D&I as a siloed set of initiatives.
2. Pay just as much attention to the small daily moments.
These micro moments reveal what you really care about, and they’re what your employees will remember.
3. Be equally intentional about what you aren’t inclusive toward.
A big part of being inclusive is knowing what you won’t tolerate.
Think of D&I as a key criterion for every decision you make.
At Lever, we have five core work values that are designed to guide our day-to-day decision-making. For example, one of our values is “Know Why” — the idea that it’s important to understand the bigger-picture purpose behind what you’re doing, so that you can make the most impactful choices. If you walk around Lever’s office, you will hear people reference these values a lot, because they’ve become an important set of criteria that help us make decisions everyday.
The second we start thinking of some initiatives as “D&I initiatives” and others as “not D&I initiatives,” we’re in trouble.
I think of D&I in the same way. Just like you wouldn’t silo “Know Why” to a subset of decisions (imagine if someone said, “Well we have to know why when we talk about sales needs, but who cares about the why when we’re working on product features?”), you shouldn’t silo diversity and inclusion. The second we start thinking of some initiatives as “D&I initiatives” and others as “not D&I initiatives,” we’re in trouble. The only way for D&I to become infused into the everyday fabric of the organization, is if every program, process, policy, and decision you make pays attention to being inclusive.
So how does Lever do this? For one thing, the People team is constantly asking and calling each other out on ways we can make something more inclusive or more fair. Seriously, just come to one of our meetings. It won’t take very long before someone asks, “How can we make this more inclusive of ______ (fill it some group we had previously left out in our thinking)?” If your team isn’t doing this, it may be worth designating someone on your team to always ask about inclusion in your team meetings, to help keep it top of mind for every decision.
In addition, we’ve intentionally looked at every major stage of the employee lifecycle and made sure that each stage promoted diversity and inclusion.
For example, during the hiring process, instead of job descriptions we use “impact descriptions,” which focus on what impact you can expect to have by month 1, 3, 6, and 12. Harvard Business Review reported that whereas men usually apply to jobs even when they meet just 60%+ of the requirements listed, women tend to apply only when they feel they meet 100%. By focusing on impact rather than background requirements, we help men and women see themselves here at a similar rate.
As a general rule, we also do not negotiate salary. We know that men, and certain personalities, are more likely to negotiate, and we do not want something as important as pay to be affected by likelihood of negotiating. Instead, we put a lot of work behind-the-scenes into making sure we have a competitive pay rate for every role at Lever, so that every time we make an offer, we are already confident (and the candidate can be confident) in its competitiveness and fairness.
During onboarding, we ensure that all new hires understand their role as stewards of our inclusive culture, through a recently-added session called “You Belong Here.” We get personal with why D&I matters, discuss and celebrate the wide variety of identities in the room, and talk about how each person can help keep Lever diverse and inclusive. We continue to reinforce this message throughout team members’ career at Lever, often in partnership with our amazing Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), which are employee-driven groups that represent and advocate for sub-communities within Lever (for example, Leverettes — our ERG for everyone who identifies as female — regularly organizes activities that help members support one another and help build awareness and empathy across the company on gender issues).
When it comes time for performance and comp reviews, we try to mitigate biases by applying a consistent timeline and methodology across the company, so that we’re not unintentionally favoring people who are more vocal. Having a common goal-setting framework across the org (we call it “Individual Impact Plans”) helps managers and ICs align on concrete measures of success which reduces subjectivity in the performance assessment process, and we’ve also partnered with larger teams to define more granular criteria for good performance and promotions so that we’re holding individuals in the same role to the same standards. Knowing that managers have a disproportionate amount of influence, we also equip leaders with techniques for facilitating inclusive team meetings as part of our Leadership Accelerator Program, and we’ve started helping managers check for unconscious bias when evaluating performance.
As a final example, every year we revisit our benefits and perks to make sure they keep pace with our evolving employee demographics. We’re proud to say that earlier this year, we partnered with our Lever-Parents ERG to roll out a parental leave policy that is designed to be applicable to a broader range of family arrangements: birth and adoption; same-sex and different-sex parents; one-parent, two-parent, and multi-parent households; arrangements where the birthing parent is the primary caretaker, or the non-birthing parent is, or both share the responsibility equally, or none of the above.
We truly believe that for D&I to become a core part of our culture, it needs to become a core part of our decision-making. […] It’s simply not enough to sequester it to one training or one fireside chat series or one isolated set of initiatives.
We truly believe that for D&I to become a core part of our culture, it needs to become a core part of our decision-making on the People team and beyond. It’s simply not enough to sequester it to one training or one fireside chat series or one isolated set of initiatives (although those could be good places to start). This is also why we believe D&I is never “done”: no matter where your company is at today, there will always be decisions and areas that can be more inclusive, and it’s about continuing to push yourself to do better and better.
Pay just as much attention to the small daily moments.
Embedding D&I into every decision you make doesn’t stop at your most critical processes and policies. It’s just as important to pay attention to the micro-moments that happen everyday. Culture, at the end of the day, boils down to how people behave day in and day out, and these behaviors and moments will not only give you a lot of insight into what’s going well and areas of improvement in your culture, but are also great opportunities for you to reinforce what you want your culture to be.
For example, before we moved offices a few months ago, it was up to Lever employees to run the dishwasher. We knew from studies and from personal experience that even in the workplace, women are more likely than men to take on “office housework,” mirroring what often happens in their home lives. So the Lever team came up with a simple system: we built a randomizer that each day would pick two names from the employee roster to be on dish duty. The result was that different people ran the dishwasher every day: women did it, men did it, new hires did it, veteran employees did it, execs did it — at proportional rates. Perhaps this sounds really small, but that’s exactly my point. Small moments matter. What message is it sending to employees if everyday they saw mainly female colleagues doing the kitchen chores? What does that say about how much people at the company really care about diversity and inclusion?
Recently, we also encouraged everyone in the company who is comfortable with it to specify their pronouns in Slack. We knew this was something “small” we could do, that would help people to more easily acknowledge and support each other’s gender identities, whatever those may be. Pronoun usage had been a topic of discussion among our LeverHues group (our ERG for LGBTQ team members) and other employees, and our Office Manager, Lindsey, took it upon herself to set up this feature in Slack and inform the company about it.
I want to point out here that these types of efforts don’t always need to come from the People team or the leadership team. In fact, it’s an incredibly strong signal about the health and strength of D&I at a company if it’s not always the People team or leadership team who steps up (and if it is, it’s worth thinking about how you can more strongly convey the message that everyone is a steward of D&I). I’ve mentioned a few examples above that speak to the crucial role that our employee-driven ERGs play in cultivating diversity and inclusion. Another example is that after our Office Manager set up the pronouns feature in Slack, Darin, the current chair of the LeverHues ERG, reiterated the option at a company All-Hands, and since then members of the team have been taking it upon themselves to update their Slack profiles and names and sharing their reasons for doing so:
Recently, we had a female candidate interview for an Engineering position at Lever, and due to busy schedules that week, all of her interviewers were men. Without prompting by others, one of those male interviewers then sent a Slack message to his team, opening up a discussion about how to ensure we have interview panels that more accurately represent the team’s makeup and provide a better experience for candidates going forward.
We also had team members call each other out when the majority of people who signed up to help with a company picnic were women — resulting in more men raising their hands to help, too.
It warmed my heart to know that Leveroos (that’s what we call Lever employees) truly care about the active role they play in making this an inclusive workplace, and that really comes down to being thoughtful about and holding each other accountable in even the littlest of moments.
Be equally intentional about what you aren’t inclusive toward.
Being inclusive doesn’t mean you should tolerate everything. In fact, it requires you to be just as thoughtful about what types of behaviors you won’t tolerate. As funny as it may sound, you need to know as much about what you are exclusive of, as what you are inclusive of.
At Lever, we believe that supporting one another is how we will all succeed (it’s a core part of another of our company values, “Champion Cross-Functional Empathy”). And because of that, we do our best to screen for prosocial behaviors in our interview process. This means that it will be a negative mark against a candidate if they — for example — regularly interrupt people, refuse to admit mistakes, or treat men and women differently during their interviews.
Similarly, because we believe race, gender, and other demographic factors should have no role in someone’s success, we do not tolerate leaders who hire, promote, pay, or “punish” employees differently based on these factors, and we do not tolerate behaviors such as making sexist or racist jokes or objectifying women that make certain groups feel unsafe. These are areas where we draw a hard line on what we’re willing to accept.
So much of building an inclusive culture does come down to team members stepping up and holding each other accountable in small but critical daily moments.
These types of unacceptable behaviors are rare occurrences at Lever, fortunately. What occurs more frequently, are micro-interactions that can happen subtly, daily, and usually unintentionally, that don’t exactly cross our line on what’s acceptable but can still leave certain individuals feeling excluded. This might be someone unintentionally saying “he” when referring to an open position they’re still hiring for. Or frequently calling mixed-gender groups “guys.” And we believe that just because something was unintended, doesn’t make its impact any less real. The People team can’t anticipate or see every single interaction, and when it comes to these “grayer” micro-behaviors, we actually think the immediately involved parties are often more able than us to solve the issue because they’re the ones with the most context. That’s one reason we’ve continuously reinforced the message that every Leveroo is a steward of D&I (as I mentioned earlier), because so much of building an inclusive culture does come down to team members stepping up and holding each other accountable in these small but critical daily moments.
But we know speaking up is hard. That’s why we’re also intent on giving people the tools and support to actually have these open and direct conversations. When an interaction like the ones above occurs and leaves certain individuals feeling uncomfortable, we do our best to encourage direct feedback among the relevant parties, so that the people involved can better understand the intent and impact of what happened and can work together to make productive changes (and can learn and grow from the experience!). This often involves us (the People team) doing 1:1 coaching behind the scenes on how to provide or receive feedback effectively, and sometimes it means we are present during the feedback conversation itself to help facilitate (there are other times when we do have to give feedback on someone’s behalf or otherwise intervene more deeply, although that’s a minority of cases). And because we know leaders have especially heavy influence, we’ve prioritized training managers on having “Clear the Air” conversations as a part of our Leadership Accelerator Program — so that they can help themselves and their teams resolve conflicts more productively and cultivate safer work environments.
We don’t have it all figured out, not by a long shot. Whether in terms of our core processes and policies, or the micro-moments that happen everyday, or what we shouldn’t tolerate — we have a lot of room to improve, and we’ve definitely made mistakes. But I am proud of what we’ve accomplished so far, and of the recognition from Fortune and Great Place to Work. And I’m so, so grateful for every Leveroo, past and present, for the crucial role they’ve played in making Lever the inclusive, thoughtful, and great place to work that it is. I had the honor of writing this blog post, but so much of the credit really goes to the people I get to work with everyday.
I see D&I as a journey that will never end, because there always is, always will be, and always should be higher ground for us to strive toward. As for Lever’s D&I journey? We’ve come so far, and I believe we are really just getting started.
