Notable wins include 43% greater employee engagement
Diversity and inclusion are values we really believe in at Intent HQ, so we were thrilled to be recognised for our efforts with a ‘Best Tech Employer’ award shortlisting from Women in Tech. Intent are finalists in the ‘scale up’ category, which recognises employers with 51 – 149 employees who have demonstrated an outstanding effort over the past 18 months to attract and retain women in their IT and technology teams. That’s us!
In the last year and a half, we’ve invested a lot into developing a world class ‘People Vision’; this is a journey but the results to date speak volumes. We have prioritised diversity & inclusion and ensured that everyone in the company shares our way of thinking, because it enhances our company culture and also makes sound business sense. Intent HQ is currently a team of circa 90 people and to get where we want to be means increasing our workforce and ensuring it truly represents the diversity of both immediate customers and our customers’ customers. How else can we properly understand their business needs?
How we did it
Kicking off the initiative, in 2020 we created a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion team to develop a DE&I strategy and implement various initiatives to support this. Over the past 18 months this team of passionate volunteers has grown from 4 to 8 members – 4 women and 4 men.
To measure our diversity and inclusion starting point, we started by reviewing our demographics and surveyed everyone in the company. This allows us to filter out any unconscious bias, measure progress and acknowledge where improvements are needed.
Key diversity changes implemented
The results of this survey highlighted an immediate need to work on diversity and attract more women, so we reviewed our attraction and recruitment strategies, implementing these changes:
- Filtering out gender biased language in job adverts using gender decoder tools
- Using diverse interview panels when recruiting teams to reduce bias and make the selection process fairer
- Briefing recruiters to supply a more diverse range of candidates including more females
- Using anonymised candidate data to avoid unconscious bias
- Partnering with ‘Women in Tech UK’ to attract more female job applicants
- Giving all our hiring managers Unconscious Bias training.
Attracting and retaining more women
Other things we have done to support the attraction and retention of women in the past 18 months include:
Engaging DE&I experts to speak at company events, educating employees on hiring best practises, and the importance of creating an inclusive and diverse workplace. These sessions helped us to raise awareness and reduce unconscious discrimination throughout our hiring process and within the workplace. They also highlighted the importance of an inclusive environment for talent retention.
Appointing women into key leadership roles, like Data Science Director, Digital Marketing Director, and promotion to Product Director.
Offering flexible and hybrid working models, because employees have personal lives and commitments that we strive to accommodate as an inclusive employer.
Improving our training offerings to address topics like Microaggressions, Allyship and Privilege.
Creating an Equal Opportunities statement, policy and DE&I Roadmap.
Creating a knowledge base for employees to access DE&I resources.
What have we achieved over this timeframe?
We’re incredibly proud of the improvements to diversity and inclusion we have made so far at Intent HQ.
In 2020, 25% of hires were female, rising to 31% in 2021 and now in 2022 YTD, 44% of hires are women
These changes have boosted morale and engagement. Our employee feedback results also show significant improvements with our diversity reporting measure increasing from -34 in 2020 to +20 in 2021, with a corresponding increase to employees’ sense of inclusiveness at work. Our measure of ‘feeling valued’ has increased by 43%, from 20 in 2020 to 35 in 2021.
Looking ahead, we see this programme as an ongoing journey, with many upcoming projects on the horizon for 2022. These include:
- Creating a DE&I page on our website to share news about our inclusive practises and attract even more women and people from diverse backgrounds.
- Designing a Wellbeing strategy to support and nurture all employees.
- Re-launching our Mentoring scheme to encourage employees to develop both professionally and personally, with an emphasis on promoting internally to retain our diverse team and support an inclusive work environment.
- Lastly, we’re super excited that one of our female leaders, Sharifah Amirah has been nominated to speak at the 2022 WomenTech Global Conference from June 7-10th, on ‘Weaving DE&I into the organisational fabric’!
The Women in Tech Awards night is on 26th May in London. Keep an eye out for news about the final winners and fingers crossed!
Image credit: Christina @wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
