Month: June 2020

Donating money and being vocal in calling out racism is important. But the most important thing that DTC startups can do to support black people and people of color, is to build more diverse and truly inclusive companies. Web Smith, founder of 2 pm Inc. tweeted this week that the most important thing companies can do right now is, “Hire the person or wire the investment.” And DTC startups are in a position to hire.

Companies typically fail to focus on recruiting and hiring a diverse set of employees until it’s too late. Startups are under a lot of pressure to grow very quickly, so often the first hires are people the founders know and trust, because they’ve worked with them before at another company or someone they know has worked with them. And if founders work at companies that have all been historically white, it increases the likelihood that their first five or ten hires are white.

If companies fail to further prioritize hiring diversely, they may grow to be a 500 person-plus workforce that’s 70% white. By then, it becomes much harder to quickly right the ship. We’ve seen this play out before in the tech industry at places like Google and Facebook, where a 0.5% increase in the number of black employees is considered progress. Or, they try to make progress by hiring a vice president of diversity, a role that often has little institutional power.

If you are a frequent contributor to DTC twitter you’ve probably heard of the e-commerce startup Elliot. You’ll also probably know that Elliot isn’t shy on sounding off on many topics, but one thing that the company’s founders have been consistently vocal over the past few months is their desire to build a diverse company from day one. And they’ve been succeeding at that. Elliot’s still a small company, but of its 17 staff, just three are white.

“We don’t do a lot of outbound recruiting in any way — what’s been helpful is that because we are visible founders of colors, we are able to have these conversations with people that are underrepresented” said co-founder and head of marketing Marco Marandiz. Two of Elliot’s three co-founders are people of color.

“Elliot specifically we are trying to be a global commerce platform,” Marandiz added. “We’re trying to serve people in Latin American, Africa, Southeast Asia, Eruope… so we are aware that we can’t just be a homogenous group of people.” He said that Elliot evaluates new hires based on the idea, “can this person bring a different perspective to what we’re doing?”

For other tips on improving hiring and recruiting, I turned to two sources. First, Chris Cantino, co-founder of early and seed stage investment firm Color, which invests in consumer-facing companies founded by women and people of color.  Color is also an investor in Eliot. “Being open to taking meetings or receiving applications is not enough,” Cantino said. “It is not on the Black community to initiate with you — it is the other way around. This literally looks like searching for professionals and actively networking with founders via Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack, and Google search.”

He also added that DTC companies should consider being more open to remote applicants — something that many DTC startups are starting to discuss because of the coronavirus.

“If you’re a Portland DTC brand, and hire only people who are able to commute to work, you are likely to wind up with an insular product and marketing that is not representative of pro-Blackness,” Cantino said.

Second, I spoke with Paradigm, a diversity and strategy inclusion firm that’s known for its work with tech companies like like Slack, Airbnb and Pinterest. I asked Berry Soltani, a senior consultant at Paradigm, about what are some of the most important steps are that startups can take to ensure they are recruiting candidates from a more diverse pool. But she said that recruiting is only part of the process.

“We find that most companies already have a candidate pool that is more diverse than their current workforce — and that gap is likely to only widen given Black and Hispanic/Latinx professionals are far more likely than White peers to have lost their jobs amid the pandemic,” she said.

She did say, however, that startups should review how they recruit candidates — referrals tend to be more homogenous — and seek out more places to post listings, like on job boards built for people from underrepresented groups.

Next, as startups are interviewing candidates, they should add more structure to the hiring process in order to weed out the potential of hiring based on unconscious bias. Interview rubrics can help startups ensure that they are evaluating candidates consistently.

Lastly, startups should track how candidates move through the hiring funnel. “We often find that white candidates are disproportionately hired,” Soltani said. “Analyzing these data will, one, hold you accountable for driving equitable outcomes and, two, show what strategies are and are not working so the company can iterate as needed,” and set more specific goals about how many candidates to interview from underrepresented backgrounds to interview for particular roles.

The direct-to-consumer startup community is still young, and many companies still have the opportunity to overhaul their hiring processes while their employee base is still small. But to do so, they need to take action now. Customers, as well as e-commerce talent, will remember more fondly the startups that did more than just post on Instagram.

For many, bringing your whole selves to work isn’t an option. And the realities of the current work-from-home brigade mean that many haven’t been given a choice: When work is literally in your home, how do you keep it at arm’s length?

The current conversation around racial inequalities make all this much harder to bear. Generally, issues of diversity have been focused on employee engagement. But with these protests and resulting frustrations, there’s much more to it. As one message floating around social media read: “There are black men and women in Zoom meetings maintaining ‘professionalism,’ biting their tongues, holding back tears and swallowing rage, while we endure attacks from a pandemic and police. Understand and be mindful.”

The idea of “bringing your whole self to work” was pioneered by academic William Kahn, who connected it to helping people be more engaged with their jobs and their job roles. The research was designed as a framework to understand how to combine the “self” with the job role, and Kahn’s point was that for many people, how much they identify with their “work persona” varied. But the more someone did identify with it, the better they performed — and the happier they were.

The theory is widely accepted, and even encouraged: There are 5,057 jobs on LinkedIn right now, all of which tout workplaces where you can, indeed, bring your whole self to work. They run the gamut: an ad for a business reporter at the Financial Times offers it as a perk; while one for an emerging capability catalyst position at Northwestern Mutual touts it as a requirement — you must be willing to do so. 

Mike Robbins is the author of “Bring Your Whole Self To work,” as well as, more recently, “We’re All In This Together.” As he pointed out, even when the first book came out in 2018, he started thinking about how it wasn’t that simple: “It’s OK to bring your whole self to work when you’re white. And cisgender. And male. And straight. Or whatever.” But add in some other changes and things suddenly change. “It’s easy to say bring your whole self to work, but you have to actually be OK when people do. And psychological safety is the highest component of performance. So create the space.”

Even before this week’s protests, work was entering the home at unprecedented rates. The coronavirus outbreak pulled millions out of offices and into their homes. There, the lines became even more blurred. Suddenly, your co-workers and your bosses couldn’t be kept at arm’s length. They were there, in your living room, judging your decor choices and meeting your pets. Some of it has been good: Boundaries have broken down. Managers have understood that people have families to take care of, kids to help. There’s been arguably more understanding of the “whole self” than ever before. 

Perhaps only to some extent though. One manager at an ad agency said it’s only up until a point that’s considered “OK.” “If my employers want me to bring my whole, black self to work, then they’re going to have to be OK with its attendant discomfort. Of course it’s not going to be comfortable.” At this ad agency, the CEO has sent a note about the protests, systemic racism and vowed to do better, along with a substantial donation. “And yet, there hasn’t been a discussion about this. And mostly, there needs to be action about this. If I’m going to be myself at work, there has to be room for it.”

Ella Washington, a professor of practice at Georgetown and CEO of Ellavate Solutions said that while younger generations are asking more for employers, boundaries have disappeared — especially more now. “There is no water cooler talk. So it becomes pictures in your home. Things in your background. You’re noticing and finding ways to navigate uncertainty and newness and there is discomfort for everyone.” 

For Kayla, working at home has certainly brought down boundaries. “There used to be certain things I didn’t talk about at work. Now there’s an open invitation. They see my home. They ask my rent. They find out about my student debt. Then they find out about my parents. My background implies many things,” she said. “The boundaries have broken.”