As CEO, my role is to listen and lead and right now, I need my team’s help more than ever. There is no training, playbook, or framework for this. As a leadership team, we are re-examining how we operate and focusing on ways we can contribute to change. It starts with ourselves, and we can and will do better at Reflektive.
In our team discussions, we’ve learned:
- In the past year, we’ve pushed for increasing the gender balance across our organization and reviewing gender pay equity on an ongoing basis. While we’ve made progress here (we’re 38% female/62% male), gender diversity is not enough.
- Empathy for ourselves, each other and community matters.
- This is not a singular initiative. We need to make diversity, equity, and inclusion an ongoing investment.
It’s up to us to commit to change, and here’s what we are doing:
- An open dialogue: Every voice is extremely valued. We’re holding company, departmental, and 1:1s meetings to allow our employees to listen to one another and speak their feelings. This is not a conversation for last week and next week. We’re committed to this on an ongoing basis.
- A break: We’re supporting our employees who would like to take time off, whether it’s to join peaceful protests or take a mental break.
- Awareness: Our team has circulated a number of resources including Anti-Racism and Black Lives + Communities Matter documents.
- Financial support: We’re making a corporate donation and matching employee donations. And with sales & marketing programs, we’re donating to organizations that support social justice in place of using gift cards as incentives.
- Our product: Our engineering and product teams are committed to building products that will allow employees to surface biases and for managers and HR to address and commit to action.
- Company action: We believe diversity, equity, and inclusion need to be embedded in company practices, and should be led by our Employee Success team in partnership with employees. We have a dedicated culture task force, responsible for embedding our values, and diversity, equity and inclusion into our daily behavior. This task force will help us with actions that the company will take.
- Individual action: We are in the process of determining the guidance we’re going to give our employees with respect to where they can invest their time and energy to make an impact.
We are aware this is not enough. This is a start, and I am proud of every employee for listening, speaking up, and committing to change.
Post by Greg Brown, CEO, Reflektive