Investing in Diverse Talent - A Conversation with Lauren Sato

Lauren Sato (she/her/hers) is the Chief Executive Officer of Ada Developers Academy, a non-profit, entirely cost-free coding school for women and gender-expansive adults. With ample experience scaling impactful ideas, Lauren is dedicated to changing the face of tech by creating market-driven solutions to our most intractable social problems.

Do you think it’s possible to change an established workplace culture? Why or why not?

I think it's really hard. I have seen it done. I've seen it change in both directions with a positive culture going down the drain and a negative culture turning around. Changing a negative culture is particularly difficult, because there have to be executive leaders in place who have the will to do it. There also needs to be fiscal investment into talented individuals, people leaders, and resources to drive the change. In my experience, it seems rare to find companies that are able and willing to do all of those things. There are so many externalities that can impact company culture, whether its business growth changing the workforce, mass resignation, or economic issues forcing cuts that are painful and hard. There's always going to be something that businesses have to actively adapt to, so I think it's inevitable for every company that's not actively investing in keeping a strong culture, to move towards a less effective culture.

When it comes to equity in the workplace what do you feel people aren’t thinking about? Is there an example you can share that illustrates this for you?

What we see in our work at Ada Developers Academy is that we're in an evolutionary process when it comes to equity in the workplace. Most companies we work with have started some kind of equity effort. Often, there's a centralized DEI team that facilitates trainings or brings in learnings for the entirety of the organization. My hope is to see a more nuanced approach by segments of an organization. For instance, we work particularly with engineering teams within technology companies and that's a really unique space. It uniquely lacks diversity and there are some equity challenges in that space that you only experience as an engineer, where as a marketer or in some other space within the organization, you wouldn't . Some alums really worked hard and advocated for removing master slave command language from the internal lexicon of the engineering teams for their organizations; it was previously a very common way of describing a set of commands and people didn't think twice about it. We've heard from CTO's that have said they didn't think about it until they were saying it to a Black engineers face. Then I had this “aha!'‘ moment – like, yeah, that's why this is important. This is not something that would ever be surfaced in an unconscious bias training for the whole organization.

What do you think is important to measure when it comes to equity in the workplace? For example, if you could reimagine an organization’s KPI’s (key performance indicators - targets that help you measure progress against your most strategic objectives) to be centered around equity and culture, what would some of them be and why?

I think the biggest umbrella indicator for equity in the workplace is ascension to leadership and whether an organization is achieving equitable ascension to leadership. This is an important indicator because it can be a gauge for many other aspects of an organization. It speaks to the talent that’s being brought in, retention of that talent, the ability of an organizations leadership to create pathways, and opportunities for growth within the organization. All of that will leave people feeling invested in. It’s a metric that for most organizations right now is terrible and not talked about much. Focusing on diverse representation at the leadership level can create a flywheel around equity leading to better decisions for the organization, better employee outcomes, and better products. I think if I were to try to pick one thing that would be it.

What do you think is changing in the workplace that companies need to start proactively thinking about?

I mean, there's so much changing now in this post COVID world, if that's what we're calling it. Some things companies might be proactive in strategizing around are:

• Employees willingness to move on from a job or organization. I've been at a number of companies that were completely closed to flexibility around where employees worked. Now they're seeing how flexibility in where employees are able to work can impact the talent they attract and retain. Are folks consistently asked to do more than is in their job description without recognition and compensation? Are they consistently put into positions that compromise family or personal wellness? If organizations are listening to why people are leaving they might be able to gather learnings for useful strategy.

• All of the women that left the workforce during COVID. This is the shift I'm most concerned about. These women left and don’t seem to be coming back. Many organizations are not making the adjustments and investments necessary to bring them back. Investments like pathways to better careers, reliable affordable childcare, and flexible remote work are being cut as employers and leaders look ahead to down economic cycles. That's going to be really bad for all of us. It's bad for the economy and bad for our communities. I think it will make it take longer for us to recover and progress on the gains in workplace equity that we were just starting to see before the pandemic.

What strategies, tactics, equity and culture solutions have you personally seen work, and why do you think they worked?

Organizations I've seen have the most success and effectiveness, utilized strategies that follow the entirety of the employee life cycle. I think we're in the midst of the evolution of talent acquisition strategies; while organizations are strategizing ways to attract and retain diverse talent, others are figuring out how to track their retention rates across different demographics to be more targeted in where they need to improve. Another thing I’ve seen is focus on developing clear pathways into management. Many frameworks around this were created 50+ years ago for white men because that was the workforce then and they may not apply to the larger workforce today.