Shaaron A Alvares

Welcome to my session, and welcome to my home in Seattle, Washington. I submitted three topics at DOES London, and I am thrilled that inclusion in technology got selected because it's an important and very relevant topic. We're going to talk about how we can accelerate our culture of innovation with teams' and managers' inclusive practices.

My name is Shaaron A Alvares, and I work as an Agile and DevOps transformation coach. I am also an editor at InfoQ and a DevOps ambassador at the DevOps Institute.

First, I want to look at the research data to understand the impact of diversity on teams and organizations. Then I want to describe teams' and managers' inclusive practices that you can leverage within your own organizations.

Based on the last 10 years' research, the benefits of diverse teams are absolutely irrefutable. We now know that teams that operate in an inclusive environment outperform their peers by a staggering 80%. Organizations where men and women are equal in numbers and inclusion earn 41% more revenue, and cultures that are racially and cognitively diverse outperform non-diverse ones by 35%.

There are various reasons for that. Cognitively diverse teams are more likely to generate unexpected and out-of-the-box ideas. They are able to empathize and develop a product tailored to a diverse or global customer base, so they greatly prevent bad product decisions. They also contribute to developing non-diverse teams because they challenge group thinking and the status quo. In turn, diverse workplaces attract high performers and foster greater engagement and retention.

The case for diverse teams is no longer up for debate. Yet, we know we don't have to explain that tech is not diverse enough.

DORA and Accelerate are probably the only research existing on DevOps diversity. They published global data in the last three years that shows that less than 25% of the DevOps workforce identifies as minority, and only 6% identifies as woman. The same data is presented in this great 2019 talk entitled, "A Crisis of Diversity and Inclusion in DevOps."

But great news, we have two major opportunities that we can seize now. The first one is the hiring horizon for the next decade, and the second is the millennials. We know that the technology skill gap is estimated to cost the US economy $2.5 trillion over the next decade. We also know that 2.4 million jobs will be unfilled over the next decade as well. So one way to meet this shortage and grow your talent pool is to actually hire and develop a diverse workforce.

On the DevOps front, based on the 2019 Enterprise DevOps Skill Report by the DevOps Institute, 37% of companies are currently actively hiring for DevOps skills, and 40% will be hiring in the next 12 months.

The second key opportunity is the millennials. Millennials are born between 1981 and 1996. They will represent 75% of the global workforce by 2025, which is just around the corner. They will be anything between 29 and 44 years old.

Millennials fully understand and support the relationship between cognitively diverse teams and innovation. Eighty-three percent of millennials are actively engaged when they believe their organization fosters an inclusive culture, and 47% of them are actively looking for diversity and inclusion when sizing up potential employers.

That's right. To attract millennials and diverse talent, we need to ensure that we have an inspirational, robust, and genuine diversity and inclusion strategy in place. Because 54% of women today research a company's diversity and inclusion policies before accepting an offer, and 61% of women specifically investigate a company's leadership team before accepting an offer.

There's no doubt diversity makes teams better, makes organizations better, wealthier, and more resilient. Diversity makes everyone smarter, and diversity benefits everybody. It's the right human and societal thing to do.

So why aren't companies more diverse and inclusive when the business case in favor of diversity and inclusion strengthens every year? We often say, and we hear, that diversity equals innovation and revenue. But does it really? Well, it actually doesn't work like that. Diversity in itself won't drive innovation. If you have a diverse workforce with no inclusion or equity strategy, it will not generate innovation or revenue.

The equation is actually a lot more complex than that. We need diverse teams, yes, plus we need team psychological safety, team inclusive collaboration, managers' inclusiveness, and managers' practice of equity, and that leads to innovation and revenue. We need all of these parameters to work together every day, and we can't remove any one of them. Teams need to feel included and safe before they can better collaborate and perform.

We can see that we have two critical opportunities that we don't exploit enough or well enough, at the team level and at the managers' level. At the team level, we are going to review a practice called the Team Inclusive Collaboration Self-Check. It's a practice that you can introduce in your own teams, and at the manager level, we look at team inclusive hiring practice. And these are practices that you can also introduce in your organization.

Collaboration is really important, but in order to get the benefits of diversity, collaboration needs to be inclusive. Collaboration, by the way, is the number one hard skill mentioned in the 2019 Enterprise DevOps Skill Report. And it's the number two skill mentioned after agility in the big nine organization values identified by MIT and Glassdoor.

So what is the Team Inclusive Collaboration Self-Check? Let's take a look at it.

The objective of this game is to identify what it means for a team to be an inclusive team and develop a team personal roadmap to get there. The activity is composed of three steps: gather data, generate insights, and decide what to do.

In gather data, the team asks themself what it means for them to be an inclusive, collaborative team. They collect this information on stickies or on an online board. It's really important to identify tactics and actionable behaviors that they can apply every day in their day-to-day work and interaction, not values. I recommend to stay away from value or vague behaviors such as "we matter" or "we listen."

"We listen" is great, but who do we listen to? How do we listen? And what does that look like? For example, some of the best actionable behaviors I've seen and that you can see on this board are: don't interrupt when someone is speaking during a meeting; let them finish; ensure that they are understood by validating what they say; and then share your opinion.

In step two, generate insights, the team reviews the tactics collected, discusses and clarifies these, and combines them when they are duplicates. It's not an easy exercise to do, and just that practice itself requires a lot of inclusive discussions, collaboration, and decision-making.

Then, because we're trying to develop a roadmap to becoming more inclusive, the team votes on the tactics they lack or/and they want to prioritize. Here, I use the Ideas Board, an online tool that allows you to run this activity fully online from anywhere and to sort the stickies by vote.

Your teams, like teams in general, can't reasonably work and improve on 10, 15, or 30 inclusive behaviors at a time. So we ask them to pick the top five they want to work on and focus on.

In decide what to do, the team decides how they want to work on these identified behaviors. A practice I've implemented with a few teams is to add the top five behaviors in a table and review it at the end of each sprint. During the retrospectives, the team discusses how they're doing, and they vote with a thumbs up, side, or down. They collaboratively decide which behaviors they do well and which one they need to focus on and improve.

It's important to practice every day, and that's why it's really good to review that progress during the retrospective at the end of each sprint. And it's also really important to hold everyone accountable because inclusion is not a one-time thing and once-a-year thing. It's a behavior that needs to be lived every day throughout daily interactions.

Sometimes the team wants to be more real and more impactful. They want to identify actions they can do to exemplify the behaviors they identified. So here is an example of one of the behaviors they selected: when we have strong reactions to someone, we check our assumptions and ask ourselves why. So how do we do this? To do that, the team decided to identify three to five questions to ask themselves when they are in a similar situation.

And some of those questions they identified are: Could I be wrong in my perception of the situation? What do I know about myself that may have triggered this reaction? And in what other ways could I have responded to this person or situation?

Here's another version of this exercise that consists of developing a team inclusive agreement. This exercise is more based on values than tactics. The team here identified their core inclusive values on an easel sheet and put the poster on their team site. You can see that these values are less tactical. We matter to the team, and our work is appreciated by the team. One of them is we all belong, and we all share our team values.

Some of the best practices I want to share with you when you run this exercise: first, allow your team to define the game and the inclusive behaviors they want to display. They need to own it. Inclusive collaboration happens every day during every interaction. Then finally, managers need to support the team's inclusive investments and dedicate time for it. This game can also be customized to help managers foster greater inclusiveness within their organization and their teams, their managers' teams.

The activity generated great noticeable outcomes, probably because teams in a speak-up culture are 3.5 times more likely to contribute their full innovative potential. It created the understanding that inclusive collaboration and belonging is the responsibility of everyone on the team, not their managers or not just HR. It improved the trust level equally among the entire team, and it drove quicker and better decisions.

Now let's look at a manager inclusive practice, which is including their team in the hiring decision process. With great power comes great delegation. So let's see how we can inclusively delegate that power.

This is a real situation I was part of a few years ago. Two directors and a senior manager, all Caucasian, interviewed several scrum masters for a product and DevOps team. They landed on two candidates, but they were not sure about their decision. One candidate was a Caucasian male, David, and one was a woman from a diverse background, Sangeeta. They had a clear preference for David. When asked, they said that they liked him by roughly 65% and Sangeeta by 35%.

So they asked me to interview both candidates because, at that time, I was overseeing a scrum masters training and development. Instead of me, I asked to involve the DevOps team itself and allow them to facilitate a real-life meeting or ceremony with the candidates. I helped the team, but they designed the event on their own. We chose backlog refinement because we wanted to include the product owner as well. The team identified the features and the user stories they wanted to refine with the candidates, and they ran the ceremony.

The result was a success and eye-opening for the team and for the managers. You are certainly familiar with the saying, "We recruit in our own image." So right after they interviewed both candidates, 100% of the team unanimously agreed that Sangeeta performed way better than David. There was no doubt among the team, especially in terms of hard skills. They just spent an hour and a half with each candidate, but they felt that Sangeeta had always been on the team.

This experience was a great success. Everyone on the team felt valued, trusted, and empowered to make an important decision that impacted them. Everyone bought into the hiring decision, and the result was so impactful that the directors decided to roll out more team inclusive interview practices.

There are many other opportunities for managers to include teams in hiring processes where they can help remove hiring biases. Managers can include the teams in reviewing resumes or even in drafting job descriptions. One of the practices is for managers to partner with other managers within their group and to design an inclusive bar raiser program. Amazon has a bar raiser program, but not specifically dedicated to inclusion.

A bar raiser is an outside-of-the-team interviewer who is brought into the hiring process as an objective third party. By bringing in somebody from the company, but who is not associated with the team, we ensure that we hire for culture add and innovation, and not for culture fit within the team. And we are therefore more likely to make objective, inclusive, and better long-term hiring decisions.

As a conclusion and key takeaways, inclusive collaboration is critical to drive safety, innovation, and a better culture. We have two very important opportunities to practice at the team and managers level. Understanding and actualizing inclusion and belonging at the workplace is everybody's responsibility. Managers need to model the behaviors.

Know each person on your team equally. Include your team in important decisions that impact them. Invest harder in people that are different from you.

I will be back at DOES Las Vegas in November, and I will be really happy to share additional practices.

In the meantime, this is how you can help. DevOps needs inclusive managers more than ever. So test these practices with your teams. Together, design and implement everyday inclusive practices. Make safe and inclusive collaboration not a priority, but the priority on your teams. Prioritize and embed inclusion in your hiring plans for the next five years. And spread the word. Talk about inclusion and safety at work, because it's really important.

One more thing, talk about inclusion and belonging at conferences. When you run a search on YouTube for diversity and inclusion talks, you will see that 99.99% of them, and mostly are TED Talks, are delivered by women and minorities. That's not very diverse, is it?

Very little to no diversity talks are delivered by Caucasian male and managers. So please, make inclusion a priority and come back next year at DOES to talk about your inclusive practices. All of you, not just women and minorities.

The vast majority of technology people managers we know are actually men and Caucasian, yet very few to zero of them talk about inclusion at conferences. So here, I wanted to share three talks, probably the only ones available that I highly recommend. John Skeet's talk is titled "Listen, Amplify, Make Space, Learn, and Act in Collaboration." Beautiful.

We can win at this noble cause if women and diversity no longer are the only ones to talk about it.

Thank you, London. I hope to see you next year and in person this time. Stay safe and stay healthy.