We’re reflecting on one year of formalizing Inclusion & Diversity, and we invite you to get started too!
By: Shannon Myricks
Our product is amazing today because we worked with and supported diverse communities from the start. From mapping flood waters in The Congo to ensuring fairness in the Afghan elections — we built our product to meet the diverse needs of the world. We believe our teams should reflect the broad use cases and customers we serve. And — we’ll keep exploring.
We value transparency and open source, so to that end, we are sharing our progress so far by launching our Diversity & Inclusion page and open-sourcing a toolkit so you can get started too.
Mapbox has a beautiful complexity. We strive to empower everyone to be a leader, and we’re committed to building our team the same way we developed our product. Without people, there is no product. The community we serve inspires the products we build. We aspire to continue growing Mapbox to be representative of the world around us. Openness drives diverse perspectives to help influence and improve our product. Unique backgrounds contribute significantly to the creativity that drives our competitive product and allows us to be a leader in our space.
There are so many things to unpack and take on, but as a nimble company, moving in many different directions at the speed of light — you must decide on a number of manageable goals and focus areas, especially given that heads will spin if you add in every single dimension of Diversity & Inclusion in your first year! For 2018, we focused on studying, understanding, and improving the experience of Gender and Race/Ethnic minorities at Mapbox. We increased the percent of gender and race/ethnic minority leaders across the workforce by hiring over a dozen women and Under Represented Minorities(URM)/People of Color managers, heads, and VPs.
First, we added more opportunities for folks to learn and combat Unconscious Bias by doubling the amount of Managing Unconscious Bias in the Workplace workshops we offered each year. We also listened to feedback from workshop attendees and added an Allyship Skills course, currently in the pilot phase, so that folks can level up throughout the year.
Next, we looked at the employee experience and started building initiatives that speak to belonging and retention. Our Gender Minority ERG led the charge, having started in 2017. And as of last month, we launched Intersections, our People of Color Employee Resource Group. Throughout the year, we hosted events to celebrate the contributions of Women and educate our workforce on the gender pay gap, celebrated our LGBTQIAA folks by hosting internal panels, and hosted a Black History Month celebration with a jam session engagement event.
We also made sure to extend our culture of inclusion to our first user conference, Locate. We brought over 1,100 map and data visualization enthusiasts together to explore the edges and practice inclusion, with details that included a mobile nursing room, pronoun stickers for conference attendee badges, and making sure we did not have any “manels.”
We are working to embed Diversity & Inclusion across our workforce because it is on all of us to ensure we build the strongest teams and maintain an inclusive environment. I partner with the Talent Acquisition team to meet with hiring teams each quarter to celebrate our wins and focus on areas of improvement using statistics and data on recruiting, hiring, and most recently, retention. We do this to raise accountability across hiring teams and to keep diversity hiring and inclusion strategies top of mind and a regular part of our workflow.
Many of our Mapboxers are internal champions and we believe that all have the capacity to lead this charge. To harness this talent and potential, we formed a Diversity & Inclusion Task Force of individuals from across Mapbox, who sprinted each quarter, to debate, decide and commit to launching initiatives and programming across the workforce. This allowed for multiple points of engagement from folks who really want to use their unique skillset — whether it be as a designer, cartography engineer, recruiter or technical writer — to support Diversity & Inclusion at Mapbox.
Our People Operations and HR team is hard at work rethinking our benefits package from an inclusive and forward-thinking lens. As of 2019, our U.S. Benefits package will now include access to a mental healthcare platform, new parent support, and fertility & adoption reimbursement.
And we’re not done yet. We already have initiatives in play for next year. We look forward to setting strong WIGs (Wildly Important Goals) and sharing our journey with you at various checkpoints in 2019. Keep up-to-date by visiting our new Diversity & Inclusion page and following @lifeatmapbox.
Diversity & Inclusion at Mapbox was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.