This post includes a wrap-up of D&I best practices from GoDaddy and Lyft. If you’re interested in digging deeper check out our webinar, 3 Diversity Recruiting Strategies from Lyft. 

We at Teamable were blown away by Lever’s Talent Innovation Summit last week. The first day’s Diversity and Inclusion Forum was an amazing reminder that leading brands are going well beyond theory and are well on their way to executing revolutionary D&I programs that are changing the fabric of their organizations.

There is nothing more gratifying than seeing theory and best practices put into action improve the work experiences of thousands of employees. At the end of the first day we had some amazing takeaways from GoDaddy and Lyft that we wanted to share with you.

Getting Started at GoDaddy

Katee Van Horn, VP of Engagement and Inclusion knew that GoDaddy had a lot of work to do. But, first the organization had to accept that there was a gap between where they were and where they hoped to get to. As a company, GoDaddy had to make the resource investment to gather and dig into their data, and identify the major obstacles and challenges on their road to building a more diverse and inclusive company.

What was blocking GoDaddy?:

• Significant underrepresentation of women in management roles.
• No women in tech roles past a certain level.
• Biased rewviews in subjective categories like potentail.
• Loosely defined idea of what it mean to deliver work well.
• Realiziation that bias had embedded itself in every part of the employee review process.

To address these disparate issues from GoDaddy’s pay gap challenges to working to ensure better representation in business and technical leadership roles, Katee knew that she needed a set of guiding principles that would help guide and define the company’s processes and tactics.

The guiding principles GoDaddy developed are:

• Develop fair and consistent values criteria.
• Allocate equal time to evaluate and discuss every person.
• Ask everyone to monitor consistency in talent review meetings.
• Introduce tools to drive consistency and efficiency.
• Pilot promotion flagging for level 1’s.
• Train everyone, employees and leaders at all levels.

Ensuring that you have a good grasp of where your organization is today and the major blocks that are standing in the way of your desired endstate is an important lesson for anyone trying to build a D&I function and transform the culture in their company.

Empowering Recruiting at Lyft 

We at Teamable are very excited to partner with Tariq Meyers and Lyft on their diversity and inclusion efforts. Lyft has developed a powerful strategy to drive their D&I efforts that rests on building a diverse talent pipeline, leveraging internal allies and cross-functional teams, and creating an inclusive culture. What we love about Lyft’s approach to D&I is that it leverages their unique mission of giving everyone access to transportation and their brand’s unique call to allow everyone to be their authentic self.

Build a diverse pipeline

Lyft starts with the proposition that there is no pipeline problem. That great talent that is representative of our society is out there and that it is our job as businesses and HR professionals to find, attract, and hire them.

To do this Lyft works to earn access to the communities they want to engage with by becoming true partners with community leaders and not simply being talent harvesters. Lyft looks to sponsor and participate in events that support and address the issues that are important to the communities they engage with.

Building inclusion from within

Lyft works internally with their employee resource groups (ERGs) to not only help identify and recruit talent into the organization, but also build  creative interview and onboarding processes that increase retention and employee satisfaction. The recruiting team also strives to put together cross-functional hiring teams that bring together allies and stakeholders from across the business to ensure that from sourcing to hiring, Lyft is the kind of place everyone wants to work.

Nurture an inclusive culture

Aside from recruiting and hiring best practices, Lyft is putting a lot of focus on creating an inclusive culture, where everyone can be their authentic self. For a company that is working to redefine how everyone travels and relates to transportation this is as close to mission critical as their work gets.

3 Lessons from Lever’s Diversity and Inclusion Forum

And to put a point on it, here are our 3 big lessons from a wonderful day of D&I sessions:

1. Put in time and effort to understand where your organization is today when it comes to diversity and inclusion.
2. Identify the things blocking your organization from getting where you want to be.
3. Build cross-functional teams that engage stakeholders and leaders in your organization to make sure things get done.

If you found the content in this post relevant, check out our webinar 3 Diversity Recruiting Strategies from Lyft.