How Smartsheet Fosters Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) in the Workplace

This post was originally published on this site.

In June, Smartsheet sponsored Hired’s Breaking Through Bias event to help jobseekers understand the state of DEI and advance their careers despite systemic bias in hiring. Today, Smartsheet joins us to share how and why they are actively working to embed DEIB in their organization.

1. What tech team roles are you actively hiring for, and what differentiates a good candidate from a great one?

Currently, we’re looking for a Senior Product Designer, Senior Machine Learning Engineers, a Software Engineer II, a Security Engineer, and both a Senior Manager and Manager of Engineering.

The candidates who really stand out from a recruiting perspective are those who have taken the time to research our company and the job description before the call. When a candidate tells us they are really excited about a specific aspect of our company and the position that relates to their experience, it helps us understand where their interests lie and whether that’s a good match for the role.

When we present their resume to the hiring manager, we now have a case built for why they could potentially be an excellent team member at Smartsheet and on the team.

2. What are your company’s values, and how do these show up day-to-day?

Our mission is to empower anyone to drive meaningful change for themselves, their businesses, and the world. To accomplish this mission, we are collectively committed to our strongly held values to change the way that work gets done. These values are:

Seizing opportunity
Winning with integrity
Prioritizing “we” before “me”
Pursuing progress

They are not just ideas, but driving forces behind our actions.

Our commitment to these values can be seen in various aspects of our daily operations:

Interview processes and performance management guidelines
Pursuit of AI resources and solutions
Transparency during All Team Meetings
Customer-focused annual conference, ENGAGE

As individuals and as a company, we hold ourselves accountable to these values, they define our culture and guide us toward achieving our mission. With these values, known to employees as “The Smartsheet Way,” we have set a course to transform how work is approached and achieved.

3. DEIB recognizes that feelings of belonging in the workplace improve an employee’s happiness and security at work, and is an essential part of a DEI strategy. What does DEIB mean to Smartsheet?

At Smartsheet, we believe our business is only successful if we’re helping create a world where anyone can thrive. One key way to drive that meaningful change is through diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Pursuing social progress anchors our business in a greater purpose and holds us accountable to action.

To do that, our organization’s goal is to fully incorporate different perspectives and ideas brought by people from diverse identities. From employee engagement to product innovation, the data is clear: companies with more diversity perform better. In order to make actual progress, teams need an approach that incorporates DEI more deeply into their organizational structure, business model, and culture.

Our focus on DEI enables us to attract, develop, and retain top talent from all walks of life, and to build a robust company culture that inspires all kinds of people to do their best work. We need diverse ideas and perspectives to solve our most challenging problems and succeed in a complex world.

4. How do you foster an open, communicative environment for your employees, particularly about DEIB?

We believe in rooting our organizational goals in a culture of DEI. This means it is even more important that all employees understand our DEI objectives, how to participate in and support them, and that our managers enable those opportunities and actively encourage that dialogue.

Here are a few examples:

We have invested in a robust suite of DEI content that is being deployed across our leadership teams and is open to any Smartsheet employee. Improving our acumen in DEI as a team is ongiong and allows us to build the muscle we need to create an inclusive culture.
We have launched several employee-led DEI committees with programmatic support from our centralized DEI team, including our Global DEI Committee, comprised of employees across a number of our regions.
We developed and launched 7 Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) in partnership with our People & Culture team to support employees on a variety of DEI topics and inform our employee engagement approach and strategic priorities.

5. What initiatives and goals does the company have around DEIB, and how do you measure their success?

A percentage of our annual bonus compensation for our senior leaders ties to our DEI hiring objectives. Those objectives support our overall yearly representation goals. We update that data quarterly and it is available to view at any time by any employee.

We recently published our first Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Impact Report. It outlines a number of key initiatives and achievements over the past year, with a look at our objectives over the coming years as well.

6. How does your company ensure diversity and inclusion in the hiring process?

There are a lot of different ways we work to ensure diversity and inclusion in our hiring process. We post our job descriptions to a variety of job boards including Out in Tech, Latinas in Tech, SquadJobs, and on Handshake to connect with HBCUs. We also work with many of these organizations by participating in their hosted events to directly connect with candidates.

At Smartsheet, we conduct all of our recruiter screens over a phone call – not a video call. This helps eliminate unconscious biases, and we offer diverse interview loops. We also take the time to look for candidates from underrepresented groups and communities. We do so through proactive sourcing and by working with companies like Hired and Blavity, which have tools in place to help recruiters diversify their pipelines.

7. How does your company’s commitment to DEIB extend beyond the internal organization and into the community?

At Smartsheet, we believe our values only matter when we put them into action. Guided by our DEI Mission and the voices of our employees, we support our communities by corporate donations to employee-recommended organizations, enabling our employees to give back through volunteerism and giving our product and platform to nonprofit organizations doing meaningful work. To learn more about our CSR commitments, check out our CSR Impact Report.

About Smartsheet

Smartsheet is an enterprise work management platform seeking to empower everyone everywhere to change the way the world works. Founded in 2005, Smartsheet has 1,501-5,000 employees and is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington.

Tech stack

Java, JavaScript, AWS, React, Node.JS, TypeScript, Microservices, Kotlin