How Orgs Can Intentionally Embrace Diversity with Annette Alexander | Austin Startup Week 2020

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I am so happy to be here. I just want to make sure everyone can hear me okay, see me okay? Okay, good. So, my name is Annette Alexander, and I am the Chief People Officer at WP Engine. I have been with the company for three and a half years, and I have had an amazing journey there. Today, I intend to talk to you about how organizations can intentionally embrace diversity. Essentially, I feel that this is what we have done for the last few years, and I would love to share with you what we've done. We are not perfect, but we work on it every single day. And I thought it might be practical to learn about some of those things that we've been doing, and maybe there are a couple of things that you can take away. I would love that. So that's my intention today. I would, you know, love some questions and comments at the end and learn from you as well. So with that, I'm just going to get started. So first off, just a little bit about WP Engine. So who are we really as a company? We are the world's leading WordPress hosting and digital platform company, and so we really, really help our customers win online, and that can be SMB, enterprise, and agencies. And you see here on the slide that we have a ton of customers, 130,000. We power over a million websites, and we are in 150 countries. Our business has grown really fast, so we are a 10-year-old company, and we're over a thousand employees today across seven countries. We're in Europe and the U.S., and we're in Australia, so definitely a global company. We have grown through organic growth and through acquisition, and we are headquartered in Austin. We're on Lavaca Street, but we have not been back since March. We went virtual first overnight, like I'm sure a lot of you all did as well, and we're still in virtual first mode across all our seven offices globally. So it's definitely been...

Hello? Okay, can everyone hear me okay? Somehow something went really wrong, so I'm going to share my screen again. So let me just do that. Something went really weird. Just hold on. Just hang on for a second. Okay. Okay, I'm going to keep going. Something weird happened, so it kicked me off my track. Okay, so back to sort of, you know, who we are. And I mentioned that, you know, essentially we've been virtual since COVID started in March, and here we are going strong. We've been growing really, really fast as a company, and that has continued through COVID, so that's been great.

Okay, so let me just sort of keep going here. One of the questions that I get a lot is, in a global company in lots of different time zones and during COVID, how do you maintain your culture? What's kind of your secret, and how do you ensure inclusive culture where everyone can be a leader? So the answer for that would be our values. And you're probably like, oh my god, your values, that's so lame. Like the values are just something kind of on the wall behind you. And I kind of thought maybe something a little bit similar when I first joined the company. But what I will say is our values are really our culture in practice. It is really, despite the growth, despite everything that's going on, it's the one thing that's been constant in our business. And we follow this framework for everything that we do, absolutely everything we do, from how we hire, we base that on our values, based on how we promote and how we reward and how we recognize, how we treat each other each and every day, and how we treat our customers. And it's really sort of our ground rules for how we live each and every day. And when in doubt, you always go to your values. So our values are our culture in action, and they're very sacred. And every year we sign them. We have a renewal ceremony, and it's special. And we sign them, and they hang in every office. And they're not particularly fancy looking, but they hang everywhere, and it's really, really, really special, and it's meaningful. And what I would say here is, if you don't have values today, kind of depending on where you are in your journey, I would say, you know, create some with support of your teams. You'll be amazed the power of them. And if your values are just something that hangs on the wall behind you and you don't think they're particularly helpful, inspiring, or used, I would say, you know, revamp them, relaunch them, do whatever it takes, because I found that this has really, really, really helped us and helped our culture, and it's really the essence of who we are. So I thought I wanted to share that as part of our culture.

So let's move into sort of what does diversity actually look like at WP Engine. So first off, I would say we are probably not your typical looking tech company in the sense that we are female-led. Our CEO is a female, Heather Brunner. I would say that she is the Chief Diversity Officer for our company. She's amazing, and we believe that diversity fuels diversity. We believe that diversity is every person's job in the company. I've shared here what our numbers are, and these are really, really fresh. We share them with our employees. They're North America only, and although we are incredibly proud of the strides that we have made as a company, I look at this and I say, we want to do more, we want to do better, we want to keep going. This is not the end. This is just a start, right? And with that, I've been doing personally a lot of thinking and talking a lot to Heather, our CEO, and the executive team. And it feels that although everyone cares about diversity and contributes to that, there's not perhaps one person that wakes up and thinks about diversity all day long, like as their sole job, right? And so with that, I decided to hire a Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I know it was just posted this week. You can see it on our website, you can see it on LinkedIn, and we're looking for a senior leader to come and help us take this to the next level, and we could not be more excited about that. So this will be my only plug: if you yourself are interested or know someone who is interested, please get in touch, because we're looking for an extraordinary leader. So just wanted to say that.

Before we get sort of into the meat, some of the things that I want to talk about, I wanted to ask you a question. Think about the last time you took a risk on a new hire, right? So that could have been, you know, maybe someone who didn't fit the mold, maybe someone who essentially didn't come from the industry you wanted to hire from, or maybe someone who didn't have a college degree, or maybe someone who's been out of the workforce for a while because perhaps they cared for children. So just think about that, and then think about, you know, do you do that on a regular basis or not? I would say for us as a company, we are extremely intentional about how we embrace diversity and how we do justice. How do we take a risk on someone who might not fit all the criteria? How do we do that, and how do we open the doors wider? And with that, I would like to share with you sort of three tracks that essentially we hold ourselves to. So it's open the doors wider, how do we continue to do that, invest on the inside, and diversity of ideas. So sort of those are tracks and how we intentionally embrace diversity. And I would like to talk to you a little bit about some practical things that kind of sit under each bucket. And as I mentioned earlier, I would love if you would be able to take something away from our learnings. So open the doors wider. So first off, I think it starts with hiring, right? Let me just fill that out. Removing hiring barriers. And what I mean by that is, first off, removing college requirements where it's not needed. So to me, it's the first company that I've worked at where it hasn't been sort of a hardcore, like, you need a college degree, you need this or you need that. But we decided to remove it, and today, one-third of our company does not have a college degree. And what we found is that when we removed that, the world opened up. We were able to attract so many more different and really valuable candidates to hire. It was amazing how it attracted so many more. And we looked really hard at all our jobs and said, you know, there are obviously some jobs that you need a degree. Am I going to hire the General Counsel without a law degree? No, I'm not going to do that. That's probably not smart. But do all our sales and support jobs, for instance, need a degree? No, they don't. We care about you having the right aptitude and living our values and wanting to come and join us, and then we can train you. We can really, really, really train you. And we have so many examples of people who have been incredibly successful, started out somewhere and moved up, moved around, and have become cultural beacons. With one-third of our teams not having a degree, so I would say that is something that we're going to continue to do. It's been very successful, and if you can, I would look at that.

The second thing is rethinking the hiring process. So we've made sure that our teams are incredibly skilled in what they're doing. So the last thing you want is someone kind of going in for an interview, not being prepped, not interviewing for values or competencies. That all needs to be prepped beforehand, because if you don't, then you get into the situation where someone kind of doing the pint test, as we call it, where, oh, I would like to have a pint down the street with that person pre-COVID, I guess, yes or no, and you just hire someone like you. And we spent a lot of time with the hiring managers and also the teams who hire that this is not a place that we want to be. And so we spend a lot of time on that, so everyone is super prepped beforehand, right? The second thing is make sure you have written feedback for all interviews. Because of that, you really get a much more objective view of how the interview went and how suited the candidate essentially is for the role. If you just sit in a room and say, okay, who liked the candidate, yes or no, then you get group think, right? And it's fine to do a roundtable, but after you've received the written feedback, so you leading those roundtables already know kind of where the room is, but you're just trying to tease out a little bit more feedback. So that's been a couple of things that we've done that's really helped us, and they seem probably silly or too easy or whatever, but it's certainly helped. The third thing is we have introduced assessments. An assessment in the sense of, you know, more aptitude assessments, not technical, but an assessment you take before you get to the first interview, right? So do we think you have what it takes to be successful in selling or successful in helping our customers, right? So we've put them through that, and then if you pass it, then essentially you get your first phone screen. And that has given us so many more candidates from a much wider pool. It's amazing. It's like double that, and it's made us hire from very different industries than we hired from before, and it's just been fantastic. So I recommend sort of, and they're equally as successful, by the way, because we're here now, so there's no difference, as long as we train you on the job. So I would just say, you know, something to absolutely look at.

And then re-evaluate job descriptions. So we know that women in general want to meet 100 percent of the requirements of the job description before they apply, versus men only say, you know, it feels like 60, I'm going to go ahead and apply, right? So with that, you know, with us knowing that, how do we think about it? What do we do with our job descriptions? Well, first off, I think let's make sure that they are descriptions talking more about the job versus a hard set of requirements, because then people do like that checklist. So I think really talking about the job itself is better. The second thing that we do is we run it through Textio, which is essentially a tool that tells us whether or not our job description is gender neutral or not, right? And that's kind of where you want it to be, because you don't want to bias it one way or the other, like, oh, it's only men or only women that apply. And that's been great too. And kind of a personal story there, I had an experience with this the other day because I posted the leader of DEI, and the recruiter that I'm working with said, hey, you know, listen, I need to run it by Textio. And I was like, yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, and then let's post it. And I never expected him to come back to me and say, you know, your job description is bad. And then he said, I'm sorry, you failed Textio. Textio failed you. And I was like, what do you mean? It's the head of DEI. And he said, well, too much corporate speak and you're overly feminine in how you wrote the job description. And so I was like, oh, okay, interesting. And so essentially what happened is that I had to rewrite it, take out all the corporate stuff that I put in there that I didn't even realize, and then make it more gender neutral, and I passed the second time around. But that's kind of a little bit of a humiliating experience. It happened, and I thought I write good job descriptions, and I learned that I don't. So those are just a couple of things for everyone to kind of be aware of and to, I would really say, evaluate them for your business. If you haven't already done that, I would like for you to hear from Tom, who is an employee that started without a degree and who's been incredibly successful, and I'll let him share his story.

Awesome, thank you so much for listening to that. I hope that was helpful to sort of hear some of his experience. So let me move on to how we are opening the doors wider. Practice open book management, right? Which is really, really, really key for us. So it means opening the doors to the corner office and giving our employees understanding essentially of the business, what is happening at all times, the good and the bad, letting everyone have access to the same information. Some of you might be like, oh my god, that feels really scary. At the end of the day, we treat it as the family table. Everyone is around the family table, we talk about what's happening, what's going on, everyone is privy to the same information, and we trust that it stays within the family. And so far, our employees have been awesome. So that's a really important part for us. Being transparent, we're doing that in a few different ways. First off, we meet once a week, and you hear from the CEO, you hear from the executive team, you hear from employees about what's happening in the business. So everyone has a pulse on what's happening. You also know the numbers at all times, every month, full transparency about it, and we ensure that there is financial training for everyone. So everyone sort of starts at the same level, meaning that we don't want someone sitting there listening and just saying, I don't really understand, some red, some green, don't really understand what it means. We spend the time making sure everyone gets what it is. So when we're updating every week, everyone is at the same level. So those have become really important ways for us to be transparent and give everyone the same information so everyone can make the right decisions for their teams, for their customers, and be a shareholder essentially. And then we keep giving updates in Slack, our virtual communications channels, throughout the week on what's happening. And then we get everyone together twice a year where we go even deeper. We used to fly everyone in, now it's all virtual, but hopefully soon everyone will be back together. So this has been really, really, really awesome.

So we talked about opening the doors wider. Then we also want to invest on the inside. We want to grow our teams. We want to grow future leaders on the inside. How do we actually do that? Well, we have invested a lot in learning and development. And I know that's maybe rare for some that might have like one L&D person or maybe someone else in HR does L&D. We actually have a big team of trainers, and also some of them function as coaches, because we believe it starts with investing in our people. We don't believe in a sink-or-swim mentality, and we believe in continuous learning. So first of all, you can be successful from the day you start, right? And that's particularly important if someone doesn't have the background in our business, you know, they don't know the tech industry or haven't worked in it before, or they might not have the skill set to do the job. Well, we'll train you on that. So very, very important. And you see that here that we do new employee onboarding, we do technical and sales trainings for weeks before we put someone on the floor, and then we believe in continuous training, soft skill training, and for everyone to keep their skills set up, and also technical training to continue to learn and evolve so we can continue to innovate for everyone to get better and continue to grow, and leadership training. So we know that being a manager is so important. People leave their manager, not companies, right? So being the best manager you can possibly be, it's huge. So we invest a lot there. So in essence, this has been something that definitely sets us apart here.

And then creating other pathways for growth. So we call it where the best gets better. You know, what are other things that we need to do? And so we're providing the training, etc., so you can continue to learn, continue to evolve. That's awesome. But then we also need to create feedback loops, right? A few years ago, I met with all employees across the company, and what I learned from them is the thing that they care the most about is how to move their career forward at WP Engine, how to successfully do that, how they can be better, how they can continue to grow. And what I realized then is we need a better feedback culture. And just sort of meeting once a year for some kind of annual review just isn't good enough, that everyone dreads anyways, because sometimes you don't know what's going to be said, right? So we need to have an ongoing culture of giving each other feedback. So we implemented that, put a tool in called 15Five, where you check in every two weeks, you give feedback to your manager, your manager gives feedback to you. You know, what are you working on, what's going on, how are you feeling? And it's brilliant. It is so great. And it just keeps you in sync, and you're getting feedback along the way. You can also get feedback from peers. Then when we do the annual review, which we call growth conversations, you know, there's no ratings, there's no talk about, oh yeah, you didn't do that project, you didn't do well on this or that. At that point, if something didn't go well, we will have covered it in our bi-weekly check-ins. And so those conversations become about your growth in the company. How are you feeling about it? How is your career going? How can we help and support you? What are your thoughts? They become about your career much more and how we can help you grow. So that's been awesome.

The second thing is that we have made competencies available to everyone, so you can see not only what it takes to go and work in a certain department, but also between different levels. So I'm a manager, I want to get to director. What is the difference from a manager to a director, and what are the expectations? So that's really helped. And mentorship, so across the business. So I work in customer support, and I want to get into R&D. Well, let's get someone in R&D to mentor you. And then lastly, we're doing something called manager forums, where in essence we bring all managers together once a month, because what we learned is that some of this communication that we did up here in town halls and all hands and all of that, managers still didn't always feel equipped to continue to have that conversation with their team, and didn't always feel they might have had enough information to reinforce, to do Q&A, these types of things. So every month we get the managers together, and we talk about what's on their mind, topics we share, they tell us what they want to hear about in advance, or there might be things happening in the business. We have the CEO, Owen, or other execs, different people on, and we talk about it, and there's Q&A. So they are feeling really, really adequately prepped so they can manage really, really well and keep the information flow going with their team and help their teams do really well in their jobs, which is essentially the goal here. So those are just a couple of things that has really worked.

Okay, I will keep going a little bit. So in essence, to be truly intentional about diversity, you have to create a space for employees to be themselves. We always say we want to be the place where you bring your whole self to work. We don't want you to be a person at home and a person when you log on to work. So essentially, our values support individuals' freedom to decide and act. That's why we put so much emphasis on the values upfront. We really, really want to hear different viewpoints, and we are okay for employees to speak up and let us know if you disagree. It's okay. We encourage a healthy debate. And also, we want to make sure our employees are heard and they get their answers. So once a month, we get together and we do Slido, where anyone can ask questions, you know, anonymously if you want, and we get the executive up and we answer the questions. And if we don't have the answer, we follow up. And essentially, it's been awesome. Sometimes we prep, sometimes we don't, so we're sometimes on the spot just answering questions live. And it creates a transparency and a trust, even if employees don't like the answer. We might not always have all the answers, but that we are working together and they know what's happening. Because when they know what's happening, they just do so much better, and it empowers everyone in the organization.

And then lastly, I think, you know, treat your team like equals. This is like basic but super duper important. So first of all, equal pay for equal work. That's a basic one, right? And we don't ever ask anyone what they're making currently, right? And so we ask what their expectations are, but at the end of the day, we bring everyone in at the market for what that job is. That's just how we do it. Equal pay for equal work, super important. I mentioned everyone should bring their true selves to work. We don't want you to be anyone but who you are. And then again, share the good news and the bad news. Don't ever try to hide anything. If there's something bad to share, let's just talk about it and let's overcome that together and work on it together. Because I'm amazed how well our employees do if they know about something bad and we explain to them why it's bad, versus like we hide behind it and then they share it and then they're like, we should have known about this beforehand. And so I think that's absolutely key.

And then sort of in conclusion, I would say we work really, really hard to intentionally embrace diversity. I think we worked hard to open the doors wider and so essentially make sure that we are looking at incredibly diverse talent pools and thinking hard about how to do that and putting in place so we can get to talk to as many people as possible. And it's awesome to do that. We invest in people on the inside to grow them each and every day and to really help everyone become leaders of tomorrow. We believe that everyone is a leader. You don't need a title to be a leader at WP Engine. And then encourage diversity of ideas. We want to hear from you. We know you have a lot on your mind, a lot to say, and we want to hear from you. Again, we don't care the level where you sit in the organization, your voice matters so much. And this is how we do it. And also, we have put ERGs together, employee resource groups, and that's also really, really, really helped bring a diverse set of thoughts, opinions to the table, and that's been incredibly helpful to create different communities, to bring new and different voices, and that's continuing to grow, and that's been super healthy and helpful for everyone and the organization to have more communities to belong in. So with that, those were some of the things I wanted to share. We believe where there's focus, there's progress. We're not about being perfect, but keep working on something, keep being intentional about it, and then you'll be better every day. And so we're going to keep our focus on this, and we know that we're going to keep making progress. So with that, thank you for listening, and I am happy to answer any questions. I can't see y'all. Hi there, hi.

Yeah, just go on Google, 15Five.

No, no, we don't have any in-house tools for this. And it's awesome. It's super agile, super easy, super cool team.

Where are companies failing? Yeah. So I think where we are failing today, and we call it failing, where we can better, is what I opened with. I don't think we have anyone thinking about diversity every day, like that is your sole purpose and how to make that better, although we say it's everyone's job. And I don't spend every hour of my day thinking about that. And we can integrate diversity into absolutely everything we can do. It couldn't just be like an HR program or something. And I think I wish we had put someone in place sooner. I think we would have had more progress and been able to do more faster. And my advice would be, if you can, I would invest in someone sooner, because I've been able to see what others have been able to do faster.

Yes. There's an app called Slido, and essentially, we send it out to the company. We'd be like, oh, our monthly Q&A is coming up. Please ask any questions that you have, and then the whole company can see it, and then you can upvote or downvote questions. So I can ask, you know, how is it going on hiring the DEI leader? Okay. And then people can vote it up or down if they want to have an update for me on that or not. And a lot of the times you get tough questions, really direct. And it's been awesome. Sometimes we've done it on the fly, we launched it even in a meeting, and people can be on their phones right there and then. Yeah, those are a little harder to do because it just takes a little bit longer. So we normally give a few days, and then we hit it hard. And it can be tricky sometimes because you don't have all the answers.

Yeah. So we just acquired a company last year called Flywheel, really awesome company. And we have been integrating Flywheel into WP Engine over the last few months. And with integrations, you know, I think a lot of people have sort of the impression with integrations they're going to be layoffs or people are going to lose their jobs. And that was never our intention. And so we just hadn't said anything about it because that wasn't how we were integrating the teams. So we would get a lot of questions about, you know, are we going to lose our jobs? And so that was one thing, and the answer was no. The second thing we got a lot was during COVID, and that's when we really started it, and employees were like, are you expecting there to be layoffs as part of us being in a pandemic? Does the company have to do that, and should I be planning for that? And so those are hard questions because the answer is no. We are, you know, the company's doing great. We have moved into a virtual first environment very well. We have no plans to do that. But at the same time, as a company, can you ever really make that guarantee, right? So those are, that's tricky, right? And you want...

It's a fine line. And so these are some of the really direct questions that we're getting, and I think they're healthy. And employees are obviously worrying about it, and it's important to address it because we want employees to be able to sleep at night.

Yeah, yeah, I do. So kind of depending on the size of your function, but I think, you know, do Slido also if your team is big, but it's not always company-wide. Do Slido with your team as well, right? Because sometimes, I don't know, if you have 50 people in your function, they're still kind of worried about asking questions in front of everyone. It just kind of feels weird sometimes, so they just don't do it. So I learned that you Slido with your teams over a certain size. If it's smaller, then you can probably just kind of do it on the fly. The second thing is after every sort of like town hall event, get your team together. Make sure, you know, did those messages resonate? What did the CEO just talk about, or what did such and such talk about? Is it making sense? What does it mean for you and your work and for our team? How do we react to this? And so while it's fresh, just kind of go for it. Do that. It's really important. And this is where leaders need to do. And then I think the last thing I would say is open door policy. And our CEO, I mean, now we don't have offices, but so now it's just like a Zoom call, that anyone is available to anyone at any time. It doesn't matter your role, your level, it doesn't matter. We're all in this together. Everyone matters. So the ability to set up some time for a chat with anyone and making yourself available to do that is so important. And leadership communicating that access, access leaders for everyone. Not everyone is going to take you up on that, but many people will, and those meetings are also so helpful for leaders because the feedback you get is feedback you wouldn't otherwise get.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I hope the rest of the day goes really well.