Following this year’s scandals, Uber’s board commissioned an independent investigation from Eric Holder’s law firm into their business culture and processes. Last week Uber published the report after unanimously voting to adopt all the recommendations.
If your company has not had to weather the level of scandal that forces a retired attorney general to review your business practices, and ultimately forces the CEO to resign, you might be inclined to pass on his 13 pages of business advice. However, the report is full of valuable suggestions that can be used to set you up for success, regardless of your current stage of growth.
Hire more diverse people
Hiring is hard. It is time consuming, awkward, and mistakes can be disastrous for your happiness at work. Adding more requirements is often the last thing anyone wants to do, but the initial time investment can return incredible results.
Get more diverse candidates
Find more diverse candidates by including a variety of sources in your candidate pool. HBCUs, bootcamps like Hackbright or Techtonica, and special interest groups like Code 2040 are all great places to start. It also helps to look outside of the seven square miles of San Francisco. Your next unicorn might currently be living in Florida, and you won’t have 100 other startups competing for them, just alligators. Holder: VII C
Institute the Rooney Rule. Simply, this means you should interview at least one underrepresented candidate for each position, like a young man for your elementary school teacher, or a black woman for your security engineer role. Holder: VII E
Review communications for unconscious bias. Job postings often unintentionally attract specific genders because of word choices and requirements listed. Manually review job postings and communications, or run them through an online tool. Holder: VII J
Reduce bias in the interview process
Institute mandatory training for all interviewers at your company. This should cover not only legally prohibited questions but also strategies for revealing unconscious bias. Done right, this can be a fascinating exercise in human psychology. Done wrong, it leaves a room full of people rolling their eyes at wooden performances of bad behavior. Do the first type. Holder: V A, V D
Remove indicators of gender or ethnic background from the resume review and through any initial technical screening. This is probably the name, but might also mean removing the year of graduation for older candidates, or not showing a school name at all. Holder: VII D
Standardize the interview questions and methods for providing feedback on the candidate. Repeating questions means that you need to be careful not to expect a specific answer, or have everyone be able to memorize a solution after it leaks on Glassdoor. It also means that you are holding everyone to the same standard, and you don’t have to spend 30 minutes before every interview frantically preparing — you already know what you’re going to ask. Holder: V D
Retain more diverse people
According to the Tech Leavers study done by the Kapor Institute, inequality is one of the primary factors people leave tech. Moreover, it’s not only when the individual in question has lost out on an opportunity or been harassed, people also leave in response to injustices to others around them.
Communicate your support
Your company values should be good values. They should also be memorable. For Uber, this meant removing some of their 14 values, and recognizing that “Always be Hustlin’” and “Let Builders Build” can be used to justify poor behavior. Holder: IV
Policies should support stated values. Back up your ideas in writing, even if you think it’s obvious that no one should get black out drunk at the company happy hour. Uber was specifically recommended to use a zero tolerance policy, but whatever your policy is, document it. Other standard business policies that Uber was told to put in writing include “no romantic involvement within a reporting relationship” and “have guidelines for drug and alcohol use”. Holder: VI C, VI D, VIII A, VIII B, VIII C
Recognize the work done by managers and individuals. When I was the female engineering manager at a 500 person company, I did a lot of unseen work to support other women and diversity initiatives (as did the female engineering manager before me, and the two female engineering managers after I left). If you always approach someone to speak in front of new college grads, or you want them to coach other underrepresented team members, make sure you recognize them for it. Realize that this work is real, time consuming, work, and might mean that an engineer has less time to devote to building the product. Bonuses, promotions, and “Thanks for highlighting how I might have misinterpreted the background of that candidate!” all help. Holder: VII G, VII H
Back it up with action
Have a sponsorship program where you train and mentor people new to the industry. Make sure the mentors have the correct training. One of the most damaging situations is when a person in a position of authority is the person doing the unwanted behaviors, as it doesn’t leave a junior employee anywhere to turn. Holder: VII F
Review your benefits & pay to make sure they support different backgrounds. Do you account for adoption, or is your family leave only for biological children? Is your all star financial analyst actually getting paid half what her coworker makes because she hasn’t demanded a raise? Likely no one will complain about the free dinner that they can’t ever eat because they need to pick up their kids after school, but I can almost guarantee that they are quietly comparing salaries and wondering why the person who sits next to them but isn’t ever there is making 10k more than they are. Make sure your benefits can be taken advantage of by the people you want to support at your company. If you want to maintain peak Silicon Valley, you can always get kegs of kombucha to sit next to the kegs of beer. Holder: VII I, VIII H, VIII G, X
Remove internal transfer barriers by publishing opportunities in your company. If you’re a tiny team this might be as simple as posting in your #general slack channel “Hey, we need someone to handle billing, who wants it?” If you don’t make an active effort to open up opportunities to a wider organization, you might assume that Bill down the hall isn’t interested in customer communications, when he’s been quietly dreaming of a product management role. Its also worth sending him a message saying that he would be a good fit. I would not have asked for an official management role 3 years into my career if both coworkers and managers had not pointed out to me that I was already acting as one. Holder: VIII D
Be transparent about performance reviews and promotions. Performance reviews, and specifically the uncertainty around what’s going to happen, might be one of the most stressful things about a job. I’ve known people who have spent weeks preparing arguments for their promotion, only to be told that the company was looking for entirely different behaviors. Consistent feedback and clarity into company goals and requirements will mean that more of your team will be doing what you want them to be doing. Holder: VIII E, VIII F
Ensure policies apply to everyone: Just because the guy calling your junior engineer an idiot in the code review is the senior architect doesn’t mean he should get away with it. Make sure consequences apply to everyone, and don’t sweep complaints under the rug just because the asshole is brilliant. Holder: VIII I
Neutral third party exit interviews & address the issues raised. This is where things have probably gone differently than you wanted. It’s also the best time to get honest feedback into what to improve to make it better for everyone who is still there. Holder: IX
Make Change Happen
All of the things above are great, but you’ve probably been in a situation before where everyone in a room looks at a plan of action, smiles, nods, agrees, and then promptly goes back to their regular business and never thinks about it again. The next steps are ways to track and encourage company change.
Give Stakeholders Knowledge & Responsibility
Have an HR team with authority and training. Too often HR is a figurehead where complaints go to die. Make sure that they have the authority to investigate and make positive changes. They should be held accountable to metrics and overall employee feedback, which means they need to be able to take action and have senior executives back them up. Furthermore, if your HR team of one spends 90% of their time as recruiter and office manager and espresso maker, make sure that they can get the training they need to do this new — and incredibly important — job. Holder: I E, VI B, VI E
Identify owners for each initiative. As a manager, I often struggled with prioritizing diversity support projects against my “real work”. Identifying who owns and is responsible for each initiative helps them budget their time and points out who other stakeholders should approach. The owner should be someone in a position to implement any necessary actions identified. Holder II E, VI A
All leaders should have official management training. Startups are great and exciting because everyone is growing and learning along with the company, but just because you’re managing 50 people doesn’t mean you’ve learned everything there is to know. Compensate for this by providing comprehensive training programs. This should cover diversity, inclusion, and bias, but also fundamental skills for management like communication, providing feedback, and helping career growth. Holder V A, V B, V C
Hold Stakeholders Accountable
Have goals and measure outcomes from each initiative. Diversity numbers, employee satisfaction ratings, metrics related to responsiveness to complaints, and solicited feedback should all be part of measuring impact. These goals and measured outcomes should be communicated clearly to everyone, and brought up during performance reviews. Holder: I C
Have repercussions for failing to meet goals, and rewards for exceeding them. Responsibilities, titles, salaries, and bonuses are all levers you can move in reaction to employee performance. If you have a brilliant strategist who consistently receives negative marks for responding to employee requests, you could give him training, reduce his bonus, or restructure the teams so he is in an individual contributor role doing what he is best at. Similarly, if he has a team of happy, productive, employees, he might deserve a raise or be ready to take on a bigger team. Holder: I A, II D
Be accountable to HR, the board, and the public. If you are too small to have HR or a board, you can still publish your diversity stats. Also, please explain your numbers. Don’t include design in your engineering team just to make your gender numbers look better. Most companies have a long way to go. If you are honest about where you are and how you’re going to improve, I’d love to join your team (in theory that is, in actuality, my team is kicking ass and I want to stay there). If you say that 40% of your team is diverse but when I come talk to you I see a sea of white dudes, I know something’s up. Holder: II A, II B, II C, III A, III B, III C, III D, VII B
What to do first
Now that you’ve read a summary of the report, I recommend reading the original with an eye for how it can apply to your company.
After you’ve synthesized everything, discuss with your team and write down what you’re going to do. You might not be able to institute everything immediately (whether your company is too small, or your CEO isn’t receptive yet), but you can still start the conversations. And even if you don’t think publishing diversity numbers when you only have 5 people makes sense, you can set out a timeline for when it does. E.g.: “When we have too many people to put everyone’s face on the website, we’ll put together a summary”
As an individual contributor at an 11 person company, here are my action items:
- Write an article summarizing how the Holder report applies to more than just Uber
- Do a lunch n’ learn about good interviewing practices
- Institute the Rooney Rule for all engineering positions I source candidates for
- Shoutout on our #gratitude slack channel to the team members who are keeping diversity and inclusion front of mind.
Step one, check!