The Shape of Change: Diversity & Inclusion, Sustainability, and Equity

At World Innovation Lab, our mission is to support both startups across the US, Japan, and Asia, and our corporate partners - global companies such as Suzuki and All Nippon Airways - by helping them drive innovation through new business creation, partnerships with startups, and organizational cultural change. Through acting as the bridge between startups and corporates across key innovation hubs around the globe in driving growth, we’ve found diversity to be a crucial piece to delivering on our mission.

As we are constantly connecting companies and teams across different industries, cultures, and geographies, we want to facilitate an ongoing dialogue on Diversity and Inclusion. Last month, we co-hosted an event with our portfolio company Intertrust and invited our friend Amy Skeeters-Behrens to chat about how she founded the Diversity & Inclusion group at DocuSign four years ago, as well as the global philanthropy and sustainability programs she’s currently running.

Docusign D&I and CSR - Models to Leverage

Amy is Executive Director of DocuSign Impact, DocuSign’s global social impact initiative. When she joined DocuSign in 2015, social impact, diversity, and inclusion were just coming into DocuSign management’s focus. Their employees were already starting to self-organize into employee resource groups (ERGs), one key element of a diversity and inclusion strategy that can be implemented without great initial overhead. In a sense, DocuSign’s management team really just started supporting what employees were doing already by showing their commitment through these ERGs. This organic evolution of DocuSign’s strategy has had a positive impact on their business overall. Not only have ERGs been a strong first step to growing DocuSign’s approach and overall strategy to D&I, they have also helped differentiate DocuSign in the job market as a D&I-forward company that goes beyond mandatory diversity training, helping them create a strong candidate pipeline, as well as retaining employees over time.

Amy also launched the Global Diversity & Inclusion Council of senior executives to create globally relevant strategies and monitor progress against D&I initiatives. She created DocuSign’s D&I Dashboard to aid prioritization, track progress, and support Affirmative Action planning. In addition, Amy helped DocuSign build a global philanthropic and sustainability initiative to deploy the team's people, products, and profits to maximize community impact and minimize environmental impact. Under her direction, the DocuSign Impact Foundation now includes grants strategy and impact measurement for the company’s $30M philanthropic investment. The company also maximizes employee engagement through ongoing employee giving programs and event-based activations such as DocuSign's annual Global Day of Service (1,000+ employees, 80 nonprofits, 20 cities.) These are models that other companies can learn from and leverage in building their own diversity and corporate social responsibility strategies.

Tangible Benefits of Promoting Diversity & Inclusion - By the Numbers

In 2015, McKinsey looked at diversity levels at 366 companies (albeit in mostly western countries), and followed up with an expanded study in 2017 with 1000 companies in 12 countries including a number of Asian countries. They found that:

• Gender-diverse companies are 15-21% more likely to outperform their competitors in terms of profitability (the trend is rising)
• Ethnically-diverse companies are 33-35% more likely to outperform their competitors in terms of profitability

  

Ongoing research concerning diversity has been in the works for a while now. A Credit Suisse report from 7 years ago reveals that companies with at least one woman on the BOD consistently outperform those with no women on the board in stock performance. This shows how even one small change, as simple as putting one person on the board with a different perspective, can lead to great outcomes.

These diversity research results continue to bolster the argument for greater diversity in the workplace. In November 2016, Harvard Business Review highlighted how working with people who differ from you may challenge your brain to stretch beyond its status quo ways of thinking and essentially work harder. This outcome seems to be corroborated in a 2018 study by BCG. This study, which looked at 1700 different companies across 8 different countries, with varying industries and company sizes, revealed that companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenue attributed to innovation.

At WiL, our findings tell the same story. Over the past five years, we have conducted design thinking / corporate transformation workshops with ~1000 corporate team members. Among these workshops, we have seen that more diverse groups (in gender, level of experience, function, and different industries) are more engaged, collaborative, and productive as a team. Discussions and collaboration on creative ideas continued long after the week-long workshops, compared to less diverse teams whose collaboration would typically end with just the workshops.

Key Insights on Implementing D&I

To think about this all simply and with a clear model for action, we’ve summarized key takeaways from the conversation, in a framework borrowed from Sonja Gittens Ottley who heads up D&I at our portfolio company Asana:

Build (Systems & Structure needed to support D&I)

• Conduct audits to assess and then prioritize problem areas. Look at employee survey data and cut it by different, focused populations, where information is available, whether it’s gender, ethnicity, orientation, etc., and also by roles and levels. Approach this just like any business problem and identify any gaps or improvement areas.
• Measure progress. Constantly track and analyze data to gauge effectiveness of ideas and initiatives.
• Benchmark the industry. Investors are increasingly interested in environmental, social, and governance aspects of business, and there are organizations that track and report on them. DocuSign started tracking those reports, and it’s a great way to raise the visibility of D&I both from a financial and a people operations point of view. Also, do the benchmarking on how other companies promote D&I to identify those first steps that make sense for you.
• Find executive champions.
• Have a structure and culture to support ERGs.
• Provide bias and inclusive leadership trainings.

• Continue implementing new approaches as needed.

Recruit

• Show that you care about hiring diverse talent. Share tangible proof-points addressing diversity and inclusion - be it on your website, marketing materials, or in the way you phrase job descriptions and employee profiles on display, or by how the company’s board of directors is framed. If talented applicants don’t see a diverse set of individuals or individuals like them represented within a company, that company may be out of the game for attracting leading talent.
• Demonstrate your commitment to diversity. In a market like Silicon Valley or Seattle, where the job market is tremendously hot and unemployment is so low, candidates have a lot of different options. It is definitely a job applicant's market at the moment. So showing your commitment via initiatives such as ERGs is a powerful way to get people in the door (and certainly to keep them over time).
• Recruit from diverse sources and keep an open mind on diverse, non-traditional backgrounds. This does take more work for the recruiting team to really understand and discuss the candidates’ fit. But by doing the hard work upfront (and by co-opting your team as allies) to diversify the pipeline, you will see improvements over time. Diversity in, diversity out.
• Develop a clear and common set of recruiting criteria that all stakeholders agree upon.
• Use the same aggregate set of questions for every candidate.
• Have a diverse panel of interviewers.

• As resourcing allows, hire two full-time dedicated diversity and inclusion company staff, one on the recruiting side to make sure that you’re getting as diverse a pipeline as possible, and one on the internal HR side for employee resource groups and measuring your diversity and inclusion data for helping your company to be compliant with Affirmative Action in the United States.

Thrive

• Establish ERGs. To continue building a community of diverse individuals and potential employees, ERGs are a natural place to start and they should be open to anyone. Find employee champions and give them permission to start taking actions.
• Find champions who may be outside of the ERG group. This helps build stronger allyship across the organization.
• Find executive champions as high up as you can. If the CEO is willing to talk about diversity and inclusion, ensure they have visibility into the organization’s work in D&I. It is beneficial for a CEO or C-levels to be vocal about diversity to ensure the entire organization is empowered to have the conversations and the understanding that D&I is a company priority.
• Find mentors to develop and access additional career opportunities as you network outside of your immediate group and function or even company. This fosters diversity of ideas and perspectives.
• Conduct unconscious bias training to create awareness across the organization on what inclusion means and what it looks like.
• Develop mentorship. Have senior leaders in the company take on high-potential junior people as mentees. Have mentees join certain executive meetings to give them insight into what decision-making looks like at that higher executive level, and for them to add value by offering an alternative opinion from their diverse experience or background. It’s one way of how a company can groom the next generation of leaders, and also to harness fresh ideas and perspectives.
• On a basic human level, listen more, empathize a little bit more. By doing that, we can open up our minds and accept different ideas and perspectives, which are key to having a change/ growth-mindset and using diversity to our advantage.

Diversity, inclusion and equity is a journey, and it's relative to where you are as a company, your existing culture, and your existing leadership. Diversity is a key component in the innovation engine, and the more we value it, the more effort we put in it, the more we can benefit from it. Finally, diversity isn't just about gender, culture, orientation, but also about personality traits, level of experience, backgrounds, ideas and perspectives. Whatever we do, the crux of it is to make sure we cultivate a change and growth mindset, listen and empathize more, practice building on top of each other’s differences, suspend judgment, understand and work with each other's diverse viewpoints.