Shaaron Alvares – Inclusion in Technology: Everybody Belongs and Anybody Can Contribute

I would like to introduce our next speaker Shaaron Alvares. Shaaron is a senior, agile and DevOps transformation coach at T-Mobile. She's also an editor at InfoQ and a DevOps ambassador of the DevOps Institute.

Her talk today is titled Inclusion and Technology. Everybody Belongs and Anybody Can Contribute. I'm really excited about Sharon's presentation today because she is going to provide an overview of a few very practical inclusion practices.

And one of these is is conducting a team inclusive collaboration self check. Thank you. And I hope you enjoy the presentation.

Hello, it's great to see you again and welcome to this session and welcome to my home in Seattle, Washington. I'm very excited to present a second talk about inclusion and belonging this time, considering that this year's theme is that You BelongHere. It is definitely a very relevant and important topic.

We're going to talk about how you can help accelerate innovation in your own organizations that we've inclusive practices. And as we go through the content, please share your feedback and ask your questions. I'd love to hear from you and from your experience.

My name is Shaaron Alvares, and I work as an agile and DevOps transformation coach, and at T-Mobile, I am also an editor at Info Q and a DevOps advocate at the DevOps Institute. R. or DNI professional, but that's exactly the purpose of this talk.

We all belong in inclusion and anyone can and should influence the future of inclusion in technology. This is my son, by the way, when I received the gift from a GitLab. First, we look at the research data to better understand the impact of diversity on innovation, then we describe practices that you, as an individual member of a manager, can literally deploy right after this presentation to drive a greater sense of inclusion and belonging within your own organization.

First, let's get some definitions out of the way, diversity here is not limited to race or culture. It includes various dimensions and intersectionality in diversity. We include diversity of culture, taught strengths, age, gender, race, sexual orientation, identification and many more.

You probably heard the statement from Verna Myers, Diversity is being invited to the party and inclusion is being asked to dance, I like to challenge the statement and say that inclusion is being invited to design the party, not just dance at the party. So based on the last 10 years, research had the benefits of diverse teams is absolutely irrefutable. We know that teams that operate in an inclusive environment outperform their peers by a staggering 80 percent organizations where men and women are equally members and inclusion.

Forty one percent more revenue and cultures that are racially and cognitively diverse outperform non diverse ones by thirty five percent. And these are the various reasons for that. Cognitively diverse teams are more likely to generate unexpected and out of the box ideas.

They are able to sensitize better with various cultures, therefore develop product tailored to a diverse and global customer base, and they prevent bad product decisions. They also contribute to developing non diverse teams because the challenge group thinking in terms of diverse workplace attract high performers, more diversity, and they foster a greater engagement and and and retention. So the case that we just saw that the case for diversity is no longer up for debate.

Yet we don't have to explain that tech is not diverse enough. The donor report and the accelerated book published global data in the last three years that showed that less than 25 percent of the developed workforce identifies as men are minority and only six percent identifies as women. But great news, we have two major opportunities that we can seize.

Now, the first one is the hiring horizon for the next decade, and the second is the millennial workforce. We know that the technology skill gap is estimated to cost the US economy two point five trillion dollars over the next decade, and that two point four million jobs will be unfilled over the next decade as well. And those gaps impact negatively and directly productivity, customer service, innovation and growth.

And one way to meet these shortage and grow your talent pool is to actually hire a diverse workforce and cultivate inclusive teams. On the DevOps font, based on the 2019 enterprise DevOps report, by the DevOps Institute, we know that 37 percent of companies are currently actively hiring and that 40 percent will be hiring in the next 12 months. The second key opportunity I mentioned is the millennials, millennials born between nineteen eighty one and nineteen ninety six, they will represent twenty seventy five percent of the global workforce by twenty twenty five, which is really just around the corner.

They fully recognize the relationship between cognitive diversity and innovation. And today we know that eighty percent of millennials are actively engaged at work when they see that their organization fosters an inclusive culture. And forty seven of them, in fact, are actively looking for diversity and inclusion when sizing up potential employers.

That's right, to attract millennials and diverse talents. We need to ensure that we have an inspirational, robust and genuine diversity and inclusion strategy in place because fifty four percent of women research a company's diversity and inclusion policies before accepting an offer. And sixty one percent of women specifically investigate companies leadership team before accepting an offer.

Women want to be inspired, but they also want proof that their hard work will pay. I'd love to hear from your experience as well in your organization, so please post your feedback and questions. So there is no doubt diversity makes things better.

It makes organizations wealthier and more resilient, and it is the right human and social thing to do. So why aren't companies more diverse and inclusive when the business case in favor of diversity and inclusion strengthens literally every year? So we say and we just heard that diversity equals innovation and revenue.

But does it really? Well, it actually doesn't work like that, diversity in itself won't drive innovation, and that's the reason why hiring diversity in itself hasn't led to much progress in the last 15 years. The equation is a lot more complex than that.

We need diverse teams are sure, but we also need teams, psychological safety, plus team inclusive collaboration, plus managers, inclusiveness, plus managers practice of equity. And that leads to innovation and growth and revenue. We need all of these parameters to work together every day and we can't remove any one of them is need to feel included and safe before they can better collaborate.

So we can see here that we have two key opportunities, one at the team level and one at the managerialism. And this is validated, confirmed by recent research by Gartner, and I wrote a paper about it, and you have the link on the slide. Organizations face three challenges for actualizing inclusion at the workplace.

First, we are unaware of how team interacts and how they perceive their current inclusion. State daily interactions informs that voting behaviors. But we don't try this at work.

And then the second one is team leaders are not actively involved in fostering inclusive environment. And then inclusion is not embedded in everyday decisions. But we can't improve if we don't know where we are, right?

So the first thing to do and the first practice I want to talk about is to simply assess how inclusive we are as a team. And to do this, I introduce the team inclusive collaboration, self checking, various organizations I work with. Collaboration is really important, but in order to get the full benefits of diversity, collaboration needs to be inclusive.

The collaboration, by the way, is the number one skill mentioned in the 2009 Enterprise DevOps Skill report. And it's the number two skill to be mentioned right after agility in the Big Nine organization values identified by MIT and Glassdoor. So what is the team inclusive collaboration self check.

The objective of this game is to identify what it means for a team to be inclusive and develop a team personal road map to improve on their inclusive objectives. The activity is composed of three steps gather data, generate insights and decide what to do. In gather data, the team asked them, said what it means to them to be an inclusive and collaborative team that collect this information on stickies are on an online board.

It's really important to identify tactics and actionable behaviors that they can apply every day in their day to day work and interaction, not values or vague behaviors such as we met or we listen. We listen is great, but who do we listen to and how do we listen? What does that look like and what's the outcome?

For example, some of the best actionable behaviors I've seen and that you can see on this board are don't interrupt when someone is speaking during a meeting and let them finish, ensure that they are understood by validating what they say and then share your opinion. Instead, to generate side said the team reviews the tactics collected, discuss and clarify these, combines them when they are duplicates. It's not an easy exercise to do, and it requires a lot of inclusive conversations and decision making.

In fact, then because we are trying to develop a road map for becoming more inclusive. The team that votes on the tactics they lack and that they want to prioritize and improve on here I use the ideas board, an online tool that allows you to run this activity fully online from anywhere. Teams can't reasonably improve on 30 different inclusive behaviors at a time, so we ask them to pick the top five that they want to work on and decide what to do.

The team decides how they want to work on these prioritized behaviors. And in practice, I've implemented a few teams to add the top five behaviors in a table and review it at the end of each. Generally every two weeks during the retrospective.

The team discuss which behavior they do well and which one they need to focus on by voting with a thumbs up, thumbs down or sideways. It's important to practice every day and hold everyone accountable because inclusion is not a one one time thing going to happen once a year. It's the behavior that needs to be lived with daily interactions and decisions.

We can also also a deep dive into some of these specific behaviors, and I work with teams who want to drive more accountability and results. They wanted to identify actions they can do to model the most voted on tactics and some of some of the most difficult tactics, in fact. So a team selected when we have strong reactions to someone, we check our assumptions and ask ourselves why.

And to do this, they identified three questions that they would ask themselves when they faced this situation, the first question, could I be wrong in my perception of the situation, then what do I know about myself that may have triggered this reaction? And then in what other ways could I have responded to this person or situation? This exercise created a shared understanding of what inclusion, belonging and collaboration meant for everyone on the same team.

It improved awareness of behaviors, and it made it really clear that actualizing inclusion is the responsibility of everybody on the team. It's not the responsibility of their manager on the off chance. It's really something they have to actualize and improve the team's trust and sense of psychological safety.

So here I want as best practices, I want to share some some some items that you can leverage if you want to run this activity, and I'm happy to help as well. By the way, we know that teams speak up environment and culture at three point five times more likely to contribute their full but innovative potential. For these reasons, allow your team to define the game and the inquisitive behaviors they want to display.

And becoming more aware and more inclusive won't happen overnight. But inclusive collaboration must believe every day during every interactions and decisions. Then managers need to support the team's inclusive investments and dedicate time for it.

Finally, make these practices open and transparent. Don't hesitate to share and pose the great work on a shared repository. Most teams team dynamic exercise are kept within the team's boundaries, but sharing this can actually inspire and benefit an entire organization.

Now, let's look at a few manager inclusive practices around, including the team in the hiring decision process. With great power comes great inclusive delegation. So let's see how we can inclusively delegate that power.

This is a real situation, by the way, I was part of a few years ago, two directors and a senior manager, all Caucasian, interviewed several technical project managers and scrum masters for a product and developed scheme. They landed on two candidates, but they were not sure about their final decision. And one candidate was Caucasian, a Caucasian male, a David, and a second candidate was Sangeeta, a woman from a diverse cultural background.

The manager had a clear preference for David when they said that they liked him by roughly sixty five percent and Sangeeta by thirty five percent. So they asked me to interview both candidate to run the final interviews. And that's because at that time I was overseeing my masters in training and development.

But instead of having me run the final interviews, I asked them to involve the team itself and allow them to facilitate a real life event or agile ceremony with the candidates. We chose a backlog refinement because we wanted to include the project owner in the interview process and the team identified the features they wanted to refine with both candidates. The result was eye opening for the team, but also for the managers, you are suddenly familiar with this saying we recruit in our own image.

Right after the interview with both candidates. One hundred percent of the team unanimously agreed that Sangeeta found a way better than David. There was no doubt among the team, especially in terms of how the skills they spent just an hour and a half with each candidate, but based on Sangeeta interaction with the entire team, that they felt that she had always been on the team.

The experience was a real success. Everyone on the team felt valued, trusted and empowered to make an important decision that impact them and everyone bought into the hiring decision as well. The result was so impactful that the directors decided to roll out more a team, including interview practices across the company.

So let's look at other opportunities that managers can use to include their teams in hiring decisions and where their team can help remove hiring biases. Managers getting their teams in reviewing resumes are in drafting job descriptions. Managers can also partner with other managers in the organization to design an inclusive Bar Raiser program.

Amazon has a program but not specifically dedicated to inclusion and inclusion. Bar Raiser program is an outside of the team interview work and generally someone residing outside of the group who is brought into the hiring process as a neutral third party that helps keep assumption and unconscious bias in check. And by bringing in somebody who is not associated with the team and a manager, we ensure that we hire a full culture and innovation and not for culture fit.

And we are therefore more likely to make objective decisions that objective decisions and a better long term hiring decisions. So the opportunity I want to talk about the developer relation or advocate was. The Developer DevOps advocates are really important influencers and disrupters, they contribute in designing the future of technology culture and internally they navigate across a wide range of strategic stakeholders from prodder develops product marketing managers and leaders, and they have a unique relationship with users and communities.

So we have an opportunity here to get them involved in designing an inclusive technology community through various activities. And again, here, I'm really happy to collaborate with you and develop a backlog of activities we can roll out in our organizations. So some advocates actually started it.

And here I'm sharing two great videos, one to one about where we can find diverse candidates by Chloe Condon. She's a cloud advocate. Are you looking for candidates in all the wrong places?

Really good talk and one about how to develop inclusive communities by Sy Brand who is also a developer advocate is a talk is about to include lessons learned, creating an inclusive space in a decade old community. Really great talk. By doing so, we need requires a great deal, by the way, of courage to speak about inclusion at technology conferences and communities.

So we need to support these as well, and we need more of them. As a conclusion and key takeaways, inclusion is real and it's not going away. Inclusion, exclusive collaboration is critical to drive safety, innovation and resilient cultures.

Understanding and actualizing, inclusion and belonging at the workplace is everybody's responsibility, and it needs to be embedded in everyday work processes and interactions. And managers play a really important role, as we saw, and they need to be the need to model the behaviors. So know, each person on your team equally invest honer in people that are different from you and include your team and important decisions that impact them.

Again, I am not an HR professional, and we saw that inclusion is no longer just HR's responsibility we can all contribute from our seat from where we are and influence inclusion that we're. And this is how you can help. Technology needs inclusive managers more than ever, test these practices with your teams together, design and implement every day inclusive practices, and I'm happy to work with you to make safe and inclusive a collaboration, not just a priority, but the priority on your teams.

Prioritize and embed inclusion in your hiring plans for the next five years and spread the word. Talk about inclusion and safety at work and talk about inclusion and belonging at conferences. When you're running a search on YouTube for diversity and inclusion talks, you will see that ninety nine point ninety nine percent of them are mostly TED talks and are delivered by women and minorities.

That's not very diverse. Very little to no diversity and inclusion talks are delivered by Caucasian male managers. Yet the vast majority of technology people managers are men and Caucasian.

So here are three talks I wanted to share. And then I highly recommend watching Octavius Black talks about empathy in a glorious manner. So great.

Watch Bridget and Clayton from Pivotal share the tactics or practices that anyone can apply in their organizations and John Skeet from Google delivered a five minute talk titled: Listen, Amplify, Make Space, Learn and Act in collaboration. Beautiful. I'd be happy to help anyone, in fact submit inclusion proposals at conference.

It's not that hard. And you can see I'm again, I'm not in each profession then. But it feels great to talk about these topics because they are really important.

So please make inclusion of priority and come back next year at GitLab Commit to share your inclusive practices, all of you, not just women and minorities. We can we did this noble cause if woman and diversity are no longer the only one who talk about. Please reach out, and I would love to collaborate.

Thank you very much and I hope to see you in person next year. Stay safe.