Five simple ways to think about DE&I from a global standpoint

DE&I strategies are often thought about through a US-centric lens, but organizations are increasingly working with global teams.

Executives at Reddit, Workhuman, Salesforce, and Greenhouse, companies that each have a presence outside of the US, shared some simple ways leaders can think of inclusion from a global standpoint during a panel at SXSW's Ireland activation on March 11.

Time doesn’t revolve around the US. Vijay Pendakur, founder and principal at Vijay Pendakur Consulting, and a senior strategist for employee experiences at Salesforce, told the audience that technology can encourage behavioral changes in employees. Slack’s schedule integration tool, for example, tells users if a meeting is scheduled outside business hours, forcing them to think about what’s convenient for colleagues in other regions. “Small little bumps and jostles can lead towards behavioral change or awareness opening,” he said. “Oftentimes, when it comes to American exceptionalism, and us being the center of power, there is this unconscious harm.”

Diversify your employee resource groups. Meisha-ann Martin, senior director of people analytics and research at Workhuman, said that while Workhuman is based in the US, global employees are encouraged to join its ERGs. “That way, we’re having an authentic conversation about, what does it mean, for example, to be Black in the US versus Black in Ireland,” she said. “We’re teaching ourselves, but we’re also teaching the company about the different cultures that exist within the company.”

Listen to what people need. This may go without saying, but Christina Guckert, head of DEIB at Reddit, said that listening to employees and looking at trends in data can help leaders offer better benefits for their workforces. “Towards the beginning of my career, I was doing HR for six Latin American countries, and one of the things that I saw was that a lot of our women were leaving the workforce at a certain time in their lives, normally late 20s, early 30s, [and] they were not necessarily coming back,” she said. That data informed her decision to create a regional mentoring program for women that, she said, led to a 6% increase in female executives during its first year.

Understand regional demographics. Finally, Guckert said that while organizations should have representation goals, they must be realistic. For example, a company may want to increase Latinx representation in the US, but that may not be possible everywhere. “If we try to do the same thing in Ireland, we’d get really frustrated,” she said. DE&I leaders should instead lean on internal and external data to help determine what representation looks like in each country they operate in.

Change your language. Donald Knight, chief people officer at Greenhouse, said that simple language shifts can help create a more inclusive environment for global employees. “We [Americans] view ourselves as the center point of the world, which is ridiculous,” he said. “We don’t say that they’re abroad. We don’t say ‘Dublin.’ We say, ‘That’s our EMEA headquarters’…And so we try to use inclusive language as a means of trying to pull people in.”