Vend10: Year Six — Diversity

Vend10 : Year Six – Diversity

Every successful company is people powered. The diversity folks bring makes everything better. We challenge biases and collaborate on new ideas with different perspectives. It also makes for hanging out with cool people who are each a little or a lot different. My journey with the challenges of diversity not only in the tech industry, but with privilege in daily life is still very new. I am a middle aged white guy and although I have been trying to shed my bias it’s still there and I get stuff wrong, a lot. But at Vend we are a team are on a collective journey to make the world a better place not only through the innovation we do, but through our people and creating opportunities for them.

It’s why I founded another start up project with my partner Zoe, the Pam Fergusson Charitable Trust, where we exclusively focus on creating pathways for kids into tech that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise be there and we have worked with tens of thousands of kids not only inspiring them into tech and science, but blowing through the social, economic, cultural, geographic and emotional barriers stopping them. But that is a longer story to tell. For now here is our Vend journey with diversity as told by two amazing leaders at Vend, Talei Wood & Heather Polaschek.

Compassionate, caring, supportive, respectful and inclusive….these are just some of the words that describe our people at Vend. Inclusion and diversity (I&D) has always been central to our culture, it’s in our DNA. Ask any prior or current Vender (our employees) and they will say that we are extremely passionate about I&D.

Our commitment to I&D is reflected in one of our company values: Bring your best self to work — We say, “Vend has always been a place where people can be themselves, random quirks and all. We take care of each other, have fun and treat each other with respect. As individuals, we know that we can be better tomorrow than we are today and commit to making that happen.”

We don’t profess to have I&D nailed. We know there’s much to do. But our commitment is a defining part of who we are, and we will continue to build on what we’ve already done and be even better in the future.

How our I&D journey started

Vend was a quirky startup all about being different and disrupting the market, and this was emulated through the people strategy in the early days. We encouraged all Venders to be themselves by bringing their whole self to work, and that being different (and quirky) was a great thing to be celebrated. Our founder, Vaughan, is often heard saying,

“we’re not an ordinary company, so we don’t expect our people to be either”.

We quickly became a working family, with a culture that centred around it’s people and caring for each other.

Being a product led company our Engineering and Product team were integral in driving an inclusion culture; on the one hand celebrating difference and “not being ordinary” whilst at the same time driving a culture that calls out injustice, inequity and poor behaviour.

Great DNA isn’t enough, it takes real work

We’ve never been short of passion or commitment towards I&D. But we also learnt, creating a diverse and inclusive environment takes real work.

A few years ago some of our inspirational female Venders wanted to address the lack of gender diversity (and lack of inclusion as a result) within the Product and Engineering team. At the time, we had only 14% females in Product and Engineering and limited representation in leadership. To address it they sent out a survey to the women in product, design and engineering to understand what was working and what was not working for them. Some actions which came out of this (and still exist today) were: a commitment to being more deliberate in hiring women into senior leadership roles; meeting etiquette to create more inclusive meetings; and introducing new ways of giving feedback. This bottom up approach with seeking collective input has been a common theme at Vend. And while there is further to go Product, Engineering and Design is now 34% female

Our current environment

As we have grown and matured, and knowing that real change takes hard work, we have focused efforts on being more deliberate and structured with I&D. So in the last 12 or so months, we’ve embarked on a new journey to introduce a formal I&D framework.

An I&D global committee was established to set up the framework and assist with rolling out initiatives, and to be the conduit between the Executive and the wider Vend team. Our I&D framework has five key pillars: policy; recruitment; education; culture and community.

The initial focus was on setting up employee-led networks which sat under our culture pillar. Three were established: Women-at-Vend, Culture-at-Vend, and Vend-Pride. Here are some awesome examples of initiatives led by our networks:

Women-at-Vend network:

• Exec breakfast — An ongoing initiative to connect those that identify as women to hear from our wonderful female Exec about their career journeys, and to ask questions.
• Women’s journey lunch’n learn — Another ongoing initiative where a panel of female Venders share their career journeys and experience.
• Launch of Go Bridge NZ — A Meet Up held at Vend to teach underrepresented communities to learn Go
• International Women’s Day Celebrations

Culture-at-Vend network:

• Workshop discussions about the Black lives matters movement
• Cultural celebrations, like Diwali and Bastille Day
• Maori language week education

Vend-Pride network:

• Pride celebrations to coincide with local Pride festivals
• Vend Pride stickers to demonstrate our company commitment to the LGTBQIA+ community

We’ve also led our first gender pay review, and introduced improved recruitment processes including a recruitment framework to reduce unconscious bias (this includes the use of a gender decoder on all of our job ads).

The future for I&D at Vend

Our diversity focuses at this stage are gender and ethnicity, which we survey annually. We’re aiming to increase the number of women in senior leadership roles and have an ethnic diversity representative of the local regions in which we operate.

We also want to build on our inclusion aims, ensuring our Venders have a voice and are heard, continue to feel respected and have equal opportunities. To measure inclusion we will continue to ask (and respond) to the below questions in our engagement surveys:

• Perspectives like mine are included in the decision making at Vend
• I feel respected and like I belong at Vend
• People from all backgrounds have equal opportunities to succeed at Vend

We will continue to learn and adapt as our social consciousness continues to grow, and we will regularly review the I&D framework and initiatives.

With our I&D framework well underway, we now have an obligation to advocate for greater diversity in the tech industry. One way we aim to do this is by supporting and mentoring students from underrepresented groups to empower them to join the tech industry.

It’s been an incredible journey over the last 10 years, and we’re excited, passionate and committed to bringing more change over the next 10.

Vend10: Year Six — Diversity was originally published in vaughan.ai on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.