Productivity Company Refuses to Slack on Inclusion
Beyond offering efficient cloud-based collaboration services and tools, Slack Technologies, Inc. outperforms other Silicon Valley companies in diversity and inclusion.
The organization released its diversity report in April 2017 highlighting women at Slack. Adhering to the format of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) approach, women make up almost half of the Slack staff.
“We have maintained pay equity between women and men since we began measuring more than a year ago, as confirmed by an independent third party,” the company stated in the report.
Last year, The Atlantic reported 31-percent of leadership roles are held by women and women occupy 34-percent of the technical roles. The publication compared these percentages to other companies like Facebook, Google, and Microscope which Slack’s percentages of underrepresented minorities double, or triple in some cases.
Slack’s diversity includes black or African-American, Hispanic or Latino, or American Indian or Alaskan employees, however, more importantly, the organization makes a visible effort to practice inclusion.
What is Inclusion?
Inclusion is making an effort to incorporate all people regardless of race/ ethnic background, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability and other differences into the fold of an organization. This is important because beyond just increasing the numbers of “diverse staff” in the organization, inclusion describes how that staff is treated.
“We’ve established recruiting captains for each of our employee resource groups — Abilities, LGBTQ, Earthtones, Women, and Veterans — to better understand and support them with events, referrals, and other recruiting support,” Slack said in its diversity report.
Conversations surrounding inclusion causes us to think deeper about what diversity really means and how organizations implement diverse thoughts into its practice. After all, people of color, women and queer people are more than just tokens. We have voices and ideas to contribute.
In February 2016, Slack sent four black women engineers to accept an award at TechCrunch’s annual tech awards show. Those women, Megan Anctil, Erica Baker, Kiné Camara, and Duretti Hirpa, contributed to the brilliance of Slack which allowed it to be the “fastest growing tech startup.”
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Slack wins Fastest Rising Startup at the <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/Crunchies?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#Crunchies</a> <a href=”https://t.co/il5dirl9c4″>https://t.co/il5dirl9c4</a></p>— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) <a href=”https://twitter.com/TechCrunch/status/696913394448752641?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>February 9, 2016</a></blockquote>
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Their faces help reshape the narrative of what engineers should look like, expanding the faces in the tech industry overall. Organizations who use Slack and applaud the service for its efficiency will now have something else to learn from the platform.
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