15Five’s Ongoing Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

David Hassell, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of 15Five

At 15Five, we value diversity in inherent and acquired traits that contribute to people’s unique identities. However, we also recognize that diversity alone will not be impactful if it is not met with a radical focus on refining a sense of trust, safety, and respect.

Our focus on human thriving will allow us to create an accessible, ethical, and impactful platform and provide meaningful opportunities and resources to better support our current and future team members, customers, and community.

Holding People Ops to a Higher Standard

15Five is relentlessly committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the more our culture comes to life, and the better we can fulfill our purpose of helping people achieve their true potential at work.

Across the United States, civil injustice and systemic racism are finally being acknowledged. The workforce, the nation, and the world are waiting for much-needed change. The time to do better, be better, and take action is now — for some of us, it’s long overdue.

As employees are struggling and searching for justice, HR professionals and leaders can no longer deprioritize diversity, equity, & inclusion (DEI).

15Five’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion report

At 15five, we’re working to understand how we can further integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion into the fabric of our organization.

DEI is an intentional focus, not a standalone initiative. We’re committed to building and supporting an inclusive team of diverse individuals — and we’re using data from our own employee survey and insights from engagement data to learn how.

In our first annual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion report, we outlined our ongoing commitments, employee demographic data, survey and engagement results, and areas of focus.

The report covers:

Employee tenure across demographics
Salary equity
The racial diversity of our team and leadership positions
Engagement by demographic criteria

We’ve used this data to address the hard truth that while we prize diversity in the workplace, we still have a lot of work to do. We’re committed to sharing comprehensive data so long as this does not compromise the trust and safety of the communities and identities within 15Five.

We’re committed to publishing our report on an annual basis to hold ourselves internally and publicly accountable for our progress and impact.

Read the latest report >

Actions we’re taking

The 15Five People Ops team created a list of actions that will help us do better, be better, and become a more diverse, inclusive organization.

We pledge to take the actions below and share this pledge with our team so they can hold leadership accountable. We’ll share progress and learnings along the way, but we would love to hear what you’re doing in your organization to make changes.

At 15five, we’ve committed to pursuing diversity in the following ways:

Professional Development

We will host at least two DEI workshops annually, provided by a diverse roster of subject matter experts.
As we build our first 15five Leadership Development Academy, inclusive leadership will be a competency in our development program.
We’ll train our leaders on providing constructive feedback and avoiding microaggressions (small, even unconscious, statements and actions that act as discrimination).
We’ll train our leaders to inspire a shared vision among team members to promote belonging and inclusive practices, helping them support and build a diverse team.

Talent Acquisition

Diverse teams are stronger teams. We’ve committed to improving the diversity of candidates who progress through our talent acquisition funnels through:

Expanding our recruitment sources
Using structured interviews
Training interviewers on implicit bias
Bi-weekly review of candidate data to better understand progression through our process. (If minority candidates aren’t progressing, we will seek to understand why and execute any change necessary to ensure fairness and equity.)

Policy

We’ve adopted an inclusion promise instead of a policy — policies tell you what not to do, and we want to focus on what we can and will do. We include this in our handbook, on all job posts, and anywhere we can share it:

Our Inclusion Promise: 15five embraces diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are relentlessly committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the more our culture comes to life, and the better we can fulfill our purpose of helping people achieve their true potential at work.

We’ve adjusted our self-managed paid time off policy to ensure our employees know they are encouraged to take time for causes they care about, including peaceful protests.

Culture

Our culture club hosted a book club and discussion group called Let’s Talk About Race, welcoming candid conversations.
We held a fundraising initiative in which 15Five matched donations of up to $2500 for employees donating to Black Lives Matter or other racial justice organizations.
We’ve partnered with a diverse cast of speakers & coaches for several of our upcoming chats.
We support Black-owned businesses with everyday purchases, including gifts for our employees at major life events.

People Ops Metrics

We’ll increase the transparency of our internal metrics so our team can continue to hold leadership accountable.
We’ll share internal DEI data with our team, including average tenure per gender, engagement per age demographic, the average demographics of our candidate pools, etc.
We’ve committed to more than just the actions on this list. We’ve created an entire DEI action plan and will provide updates along the way and encourage questions from our team.

Our entire company has also gotten behind building a free diversity and inclusion assessment to help other organizations get the data they need to inform their DEI strategy. We’re so proud of our team for contributing time and resources to the creation of this tool.

15Five’s Diversity and Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

The following is our organization’s official Diversity and Equal Employment Opportunity Statement, outlining the expansive nature of our commitments to both diversity and equal opportunity employment:

We view our differences as strengths and are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants. Further to this commitment, we strictly prohibit all forms of unlawful discrimination and harassment, which includes discrimination and harassment on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, pregnancy (including breastfeeding and related medical conditions), national origin, citizenship status, uniformed service member status, age, genetic information, disability, ancestry, marital status, protected medical condition, any other protected status in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and local laws, and many other inherent and acquired traits that contribute to our unique identities.

15Five is also committed to complying with the laws protecting qualified individuals with disabilities, as well as employees’ religious beliefs and observances. 15Five will provide a reasonable accommodation for any known physical or mental disability of a qualified individual with a disability and/or employees’ religious beliefs and observances to the extent required by law, provided the requested accommodation does not create an undue hardship for 15Five and/or does not pose a direct threat to the health or safety of others in the workplace and/or to the individual.

Join our team

Interested in joining the 15Five team? Check out our careers page to see open positions and learn more. If you need to request a disability accommodation to complete the hiring process, please reach out to [email protected].

Today we have published 15Five’s first annual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion report, which outlines our ongoing commitments, employee demographic data, survey and engagement results, and areas of focus.

While we value diversity in inherent and acquired traits that contribute to people’s unique identities, we also recognize that diversity alone will not be impactful if it is not met with a radical focus on refining the sense of trust, safety, and respect that current and future team members, customers, and communities feel when interacting with us.

We are committed to publishing our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) report on an annual basis. The intention for this annual report is to hold ourselves internally and publicly accountable to our progress and impact.
We are committed to sharing comprehensive data, so long as this does not compromise the trust and safety of the communities and identities that exist within 15Five.

You can learn more about our company values, commitment to DEI, and download the annual report here.