How do you prioritize diversity and inclusiveness in your work and what steps have you taken to promote it?

Question

prateek · Accepted Answer

For build a high performance team making everyone feel valued becomes very
important.
There are few things which I do in my teams to make everyone feel empowered and
valued

* Fostering a culture open communication

* Enabling people to do experimentation

* Collaborative decision making

* Supporting career and personal growth

* Reviews and feedback

* Rewards and recognition

Fostering a culture open communication - Anyone irrespective of their experience
level should be able to respectfully critique any idea. Showing empathy towards
each other in team while challenging each other to become better as a group.
Started monthly ideation contest. A lead in one of the teams came up with an
idea that we need to break out login flow dependency from lending. This was
picked immidiately as this would have helped us launch other products in fintech
domain.

Enabling people to do experimentation - Team members look at a problem from a
multi dimensional point of view and do spikes to analyse the approaches before
fixating. We wanted to integrate cloud specific API gateway when one architect
proposed using an open source API gateway. Quickly did POC's and evaluated
Krakend, Kong. Captured the data points around maintainability, extensibility,
community support, scalability, observability etc. Presented the same to the
team and we chose Krakend as it checked all points and was aligned with company
wide KPI of reducing cost.

Collborative decision making - Involving all members for critical team decicions
e.g. querterly/yearly goal setting, meetings, vision doc, grooming, planning,
prioritisation calls, ideation. Empowering team to take decisions autonomously

Supporting career and personal growth - I work closely with team members to
align their personal and career goals with business objectives, providing
opportunities for growth within the team and beyond. Provided an opportunity to
an EM to run cross team project about notification system overhaul where EM
would get an opportunity to work on skills related to stakeholder management,
persuasion, project management strategy involving multiple teams, managing
business and technology.

Reviews and feedback - Doing retrospectives about what went well, didn't go well
as planned for participation and improvement. Working on the areas of
improvement as a team. Timely prividing constructive feedback for something
which should be continued, changed, stopped. I use various frameworks like SBI,
GROW, COIN, CEDAR for providing feedback during 1:1's and skip level meetings.

Rewards and recognition - Using different options, positive feedback in team
meetings, spot award, employee of the month, word of appreciation in
newsletter/townhall, vouchers.

Anonymous · Answer

First realize that no two people are the same and hence the same techniques will
not work on everybody the same way. There are some steps that I prioritize
diversity and inclusiveness
1. Meetings : When I participate or own meetings with a mix of in-person and
remote attendees, i ensure that the remote attendees have fair opportunities to
participate. Conversations in the room are impossible to avoid but I pull in the
people in the video conference and ask them for their opinion or call on
specific people since they have expertise. 
2. Participation : There are always people who tend to be silent even if they
are experts in the field. I identify and work with them 1:1 and let them know
how valuable their more recent interaction was and that I would like to call on
them initially in low pressure situations and cultivate their habit of
participating. For example I had a recently promoted Senior Engineer who start
attending my leadership meetings. He however remained silent for most of the
meeting which was dominated by well established SDMs and Senior Engineers. In my
next 1:1 I spoke to him about how he had earned a place in the room and how his
insights have helped in meetings and told them that I would like to call on them
more.
3. Cultural : There are people who need specific considerations, such as people
who need standing desks, additional time off on Fridays for prayers or some
physical disabilities. I listen to their needs and only asking for information
if they are willing to provide it and give them the flexibility as long as it
does not affect the rest of the team. For example, I organized a weekly
leadership meeting on fridays after lunch as a low pressure meeting to review
weekly progress, brainstorm new ideas, and identify opportunities. One of my
managers, indicated that he would need to miss 30 min of the meeting every week
due to prayers. I subsequently discussed with the team to move the meeting prior
to lunch without indicating specifics of why I wanted to, thus preserving
confidentiality.
4. Opportunities with leadership : While some people naturally tend to have an
audience with leadership, I identify opportunities to provide people a chance to
present or speak to senior leaders. I talk to them about their strengths and why
they would be good at presenting a specific opportunity and guide them through
it
5. Document reviews : Document reviews are a great opportunity to get people
involved and any presentation or document that the team writes, I ensure that
all relevant people get to review and comment on it. If I identify somebody
being silent, I reach out during my 1:1 to help them participate
6. Generating Ideas : Ideas come from all sorts of people and taking them out of
their normal roles and responsibilities helps them to come out of their shell. I
have organized hackathons about twice a year where I partner with a peer
organization and encourage both organizations to work together to come up with
innovative ideas outside of their normal roles.

Anonymous · Answer

Of course! One time I had an employee who was Muslim, and they participated in
fasting for Ramadan. They asked me if they could shift their hours around to
accommodate the fasting schedule. I checked in with the other teams' managers
that he was working with and everyone signed off, so we shifted his hours around
to let him still contribute and also keep his commitment to his religion.

Anonymous · Answer

1. Giving them chance to present their work to leaders and seniors
2. Making sure they know and understand the impact of their work on the product
and company. How their work is creating value and is important for the team and
company
3. Each individual's needs and requirements can be different and so does the
motivators, making sure each individual gets the unique support they need to be
able to perform at their best.

Anonymous · Answer

Conducted a group brainstorm on problems we should be solving in the coming
year 
Organised a team wide hackday with presence to leadership 
Encouraged the team to host brownbags and invited team globally to attend
Organised a team sport

Anonymous · Answer

I made sure every individual get right work and proper recognition. I create an
opportunity to showcase their skills in wider forum.

Anonymous · Answer

Of course! One time I had an employee who was Muslim, and they participated in
fasting for Ramadan. They asked me if they could shift their hours around to
accommodate the fasting schedule. I checked in with the other teams' managers
that he was working with and everyone signed off, so we shifted his hours around
to let him still contribute and also keep his commitment to his religion.

How do you prioritize diversity and inclusiveness in your work and what steps have you taken to promote it?

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