This article was originally posted on Medium. Additional notes added within this Founder’s Journey column.
Amazing news this week from the Tribe! We just hit the century mark for the number of employees worldwide. This is an enormous triumph for us to have grown this organization to 100 of the smartest and brightest in digital innovation in just a year and a half.
As we scale our team, we’re also putting a big emphasis on diversity. I want to come clean and be honest with everyone. When we started TribalScale, diversity was not my top priority. We were more focused on finding our product-market-fit. As we started growing, it really hit me that our strength was coming from a variety of people with different backgrounds and experiences. So we set a mission to create a more diverse Tribe.
I feel that amping up our diversity DNA at the 100 mark is perfect timing. We have a chance to do this now and make a real impact that will scale our values well into our future as we get to 250 employees, 1,000 employees, 10,000 employees, and so on. It gets harder to do this as an organization gets larger. The time is now.
In the past year, we’ve been actively involved in the community about diversity issues by hosting events and sponsoring diverse causes. We did this not only to attract diverse talent to TribalScale, but to also create more awareness about diversity issues in the current tech ecosystem.
Key Stats
- About 22% of our leadership team is female
- Our Tribe speaks 22 different languages
For a start-up or any business, we ask ourselves what we could do to either increase or adjust diversity numbers. Having a multi-stage interview process also helps eliminate bias, especially when we have different interviewers speaking with the candidates. We have a group of engineers, product managers, designers etc. of different races, and genders that are involved in conducting interviews. That being said, when we’re hiring we are committed to looking at the quality of prior work, level of experience, and level of knowledge above gender, race, or languages. This can have the effect of reducing diversity. We’re aware of this issue, and which is why we’re attending, sponsoring or facilitating diversity-related events, especially women-in-technology-related events in order to advertise our career opportunities in those forums.
Meritocracy is one of our core values and we reward and empower our employees based on their accomplishments. During our daily company-wide stand-ups, we have a ‘Kudos’ section where we dedicate time to recognize people’s achievements and successes no matter how big or small it is. We also have a “Kudos” Slack channel where people are recognized on a regular basis. We also embrace failure and have our tribe at our standups share their fail fast moments so everyone learns.
However, we have A LOT more work to do. So I’ve been on the hunt for diverse talent, and meeting with various leaders to ideate and strategize on how to build a diverse team. As a first step, I want to publish our diversity stats to the public, and I’ll continue to publish more often. I also challenge others to do the same.
Sheetal is a member of Founder’s Only and occasionally guest-posts here.