 It was DevOps for front-end developers who can't back-end code good and want to learn how to do other stuff good, too There are a lot of Zoolander references And then everyone was tweeting me and my husband's like, why do people keep asking if you're building Drupal for ants? I don't understand this and then we got to watch Zoolander together that's Yep, I'm gonna chill Well, there are a lot of people. I was so worried that there were not gonna be a lot of people And simultaneously, I was like, I'm very tired. Hopefully everyone else is tired No, I forgot Noah. Can you hear me? No, it's okay. Maybe I'll go outside. I Don't remember if it's recording right now or not It's okay. This is my first in-person Drupal con where I'm presenting slides Where I'm doing a presentation. It was a big goal of mine. So this is very exciting for me So thank y'all for coming. I called my dad and he kind of forgot what Drupal con was. He was like, I'm very excited for you All right, my husband gets Drupal and react mixed up sometimes So it's like those yeah Everyone's generally supportive All right Cool. Okay, the clicker works Good morning y'all Welcome to my talk on Inequity and isolation inclusive practices for remote teams My name is Taryn Elmond Darius. I almost said Glover. That was my old name My pronouns are she her I am the current lead of the Drupal diversity and inclusion initiative in Drupal I am also a developer advocate at Pantheon My Drupal.org username is nine lives black cat No one told me my first Drupal con that they were going to print that on my badge It was my gamer tag. So I'm very thrilled to have y'all here and we're just gonna go get started Also, I can tell y'all more about the Drupal diversity inclusion initiative We meet every other Thursday, not this Thursday and the Drupal Slack and the diversity and inclusion channel We support marginalized and underrepresented people in Drupal as well as people that are trying to support them Because diversity and inclusion and equity are hard and nobody should have to do it by themselves so This talk comes about because the old workplace model that we had before was dead If I can ask folks show of hands how many people Had ever been told well, hey, I understand you want to work remotely, but that's just not a thing that we can do It happened to me when I was working in local government and then I left and then the pandemic showed up and all of a sudden Everybody was able to work remotely And even as things are getting better employees are still eager to continue working remotely or hybrid Some people do want to go back to the office There's a survey by flex jobs About 58% of the respondents Do want to be full-time remote employees after the pandemic is over 39% of people want a hybrid work environment So 97% of people that are working want to continue to do remote work It's pretty nice get to hang out with my dogs at lunch without having to drive really far, right? So So how's that for remote work? It's great. It's fun. Get to see our dogs These are some stats From sh RM org I tend to stat drop a lot, but I'm gonna give some context here Apologies to those Who are looking at this slide and the colors are not very different. This is Directly from them. I will give some context here Sorry Women and men agreed on sorry this shows women and men's responses It is binary I we understand that gender is non-binary, but that's how they collected their data They do generally agree that when they are working remotely that they're more productive They do tend to work more hours women actually report being more productive in men and Female remote workers say that their biggest concern is about working longer hours Having fewer opportunities network and form relationships and men more so than women think that managers Will view them negatively if they work from home So sometimes men want to go back in the office because they don't want to be seen as somebody that's not working There's a stigma that work that is done in the home is not actual work society patriarchy Those are things that we are navigating as we are going into this new context of work as Work comes into our homes. We have to break down a lot of these myths Just some more data here But in addition to There being a differentiation between how people think about the work environment based on gender There's also different perceptions when we are looking at race in this Black workers who are in so-called knowledge jobs like tech They have actually felt as if Working from home working remotely is much better for them. Would anyone like to guess why if you were at the nonprofit summit? I actually spoiled this answer part of it is because there are less micro aggressions that you have to deal with You can focus on the work that you have at hand Opposed that 39% of folks who identify as Asian or Asian-American and our women feel that remote work will actually hinder their Ability to perform and succeed in a workplace This is in large part because they feel like there will be fewer networking opportunities for them For white women and people of mixed ethnicities only 25% of folks felt like they would have those opportunities Capturing them 14% of black women and 12% of Hispanic and Latino women also shared the sentiment that it'd be okay to work from home sometimes so as we can see Many groups do benefit from home arrangements Work from home arrangements and lots of people feel like there's some stigma associated with it In particular folks who are disabled have more opportunities to be present in the workplace to be able to do their work To take the breaks that they need to without being forced into like a constant eight to five workplace I Just remember that I can take off my mask while I am speaking It's hard to breathe through it and I've been doing that at the pantheon booth all week um One thing that we do need to keep in mind is that with the COVID-19 pandemic and the after effects that are happening There will be a lot more disabled persons in our society In 2021 1.2 million more people were identified as having a disability than there were in 2020 So it's important that we make adjustments to our workplaces to our environments and to our expectations In order to accommodate Everyone along these spectrums This was actually pretty neat from the uh, non the research that I did for the non-profit summit Women make up the majority of the non-profit workforce That industry was hit particularly hard by the pandemic But with being able to have more people working remotely you're no longer Tied down to oh well this person has to live in my immediate locality in order to help us out In order to make a difference in this Women are usually the folks that are mothers And there were a lot of hardships faced by those groups During the pandemic with there being schooling via zoom as well as work via zoom Um, and to attract top-notch employees employers are having to consider these things, but The point of this talk is that access Telling people you can work from home is not the same as inclusion or equity. So how do we do better? um, so This will be like the last statistic that I put in here is that While people were given more opportunities to work from home only about 20 of folks in general could work from home the nature of their jobs For folks that were of hispanic origin only one in six of those folks could Work from home and only one in five black workers were able to this is compared to one in four white workers and two in five Asian-american-pacific islander workers. So there's a lot of work that we've got to do to make sure that there's equitable access and equivalent accesses And also for the groups that were most impacted by the pandemic Not being able to social distance and work from home kind of had devastating effects So we're going to look at three challenges today and how we can tackle them Uh, what the sources of these challenges are the impact on people and the mitigations that workplaces can put in place To help everybody or at least more people be able to work from home So challenge number one Somebody might have a home work environment. That's not exactly suited for work from home My first work from home job. I was working at lullabot loved it was so excited. Like I said, I got to work with my dogs I am a person that is neurodivergent. I have an attention deficit disorder and The lack of structure that resulted from like, okay, I go to the office. I do the things at the office I have my eight to five This is fine. I go home that wreck havoc on my brain. I wasn't sure what to do Thankfully I had mentors that helped me with it, right? I see snaps. Cool. Thanks for that feedback. It's helpful Um Thankfully, I had mentors that helped me to go through it and adjust throughout the way. I had a coworker Sorry, I had a work environment of folks that had done this for several years, right? But if you are in a situation where you're an employer where this is brand new for you Everybody's trying to figure it out together. Um, and sometimes we end up failing Some other considerations aside from the structure would be internet connections lots of people were doing their intensive internet browsing At work and the internet that they had at home if they had it at home was subpar compare in comparison People do feel less connected as well as human beings I think we talked about this already And you've got people that are less technologically savvy that are suddenly sent to laptop and told hey work For me I have my husband who is much much much much deeper knowledgeable about computers. I know about computers My husband breeze computers. I have an it guy that's down the hall from me when you're not in a work environment anymore You can't just go down and be like hey stan What's up with my laptop? I don't understand it um So some of the folks that are impacted in these groups Include low-income workers and workers in rural areas, right? If we are putting cat videos into the company slack that autoplay Maybe betsy out in the country is not going to be able to do her work with that The impacts of this is that folks have poor meeting quality if you've been in a zoom meeting where all of the sudden And then that's what usually happens Um And with this happening you have folks that are Either they feel that they're unable to work remotely, right? That's going to impact how they feel about their work or the employers can be like well It's just not working out because you don't have the Just how some folks were limited from being able to be employed because they didn't have adequate Transportation through the way our society is structured transportation on the internet Also, sometimes precludes people from being able to pursue work Lots of folks that wanted to be able to get into a job where they could work remotely We're not able to because they didn't have the infrastructure, but thankfully there are ways that we can mitigate this We employers can mitigate this one thing that I believe is One of the strongest ways to do this is by providing text stipends to workers These are going to be things like paying for the internet access for someone paying for a mobile hot spot If the high speed internet is not available in the home I live in a nice area of dallas texas now where I have fiber internet I stream all the cat videos and the video games at the same time But I have neighbors down the street that don't have the same access to that internet rate You can also do Some employers do choose to pay for the phones for their employees if they need that right Who among us has a landline at home? Lots of my relatives use prepaid phones and that's not really a thing for That's suited for office environments Another cool way that employers can help with this is by having Equipment stipends as well as having Equipment standards that you articulate to someone right like I said, I know about computers, but like I don't know about computers When pantheon sent me over my macbook to work on I was like all right. It's a mac. I'm a windows user I don't understand this and my husband's like these aren't you a macbook whatever it is Sorry matt that I don't know what it is, but I was like, oh, okay cool I guess this works So if I a person that is employed in tech full-time don't know these tasks like don't make your workers Go out and do the research and have to have their own opinions about it. Do that research for them help them out in those ways There's also the fact that Right now, you know The pandemic is winding down But giving a stipend or allowance for folks to have remote offices If they're a person that you know needs that structure needs that separateness Or a stipend Maybe Not just technical equipment, but like a desk that would help out, right? Whether that's sitting standing anything like that Fortunately employers a lot of these things are tax deductible. So by you helping someone else get to equity That also helps you The next challenge that we'll talk about is onboarding and cultural norm setting Now a lot of the causes for this not a lot of opportunities to just run into people in the hallways Usually I am just tripping over my dogs in the hallway because when they hear me get on the zoom call They're like, oh, it's time for petting. It's time to get on zoom I can't really network with my dogs. They're not very good referrals on linkedin. I tried Another thing is that um employers Sometimes when we are doing remote work, right? Folks get focused on the work. It's like, all right We got a task. We got to do the task and we forget about all of the things that help a task work Maybe like we're just sitting and talking and I just happened to go in the coffee room and you're like, hey How are you doing today? I'm like, I'm good. How are you? And you're like, well I'm working on this thing with a website and I'm not exactly sure how this is working and I can be like, hey I actually have had that problem. Let me come over to your cube and help you out with that if we're not Those things happened organically, but we have to work on intentionally replicating that and not get focused on Productivity productivity is important But productivity is often a byproduct of all these beautiful Organic human things that we do we can't strip humanity out of our processes at work It just doesn't work out. It also makes people leave because they feel discouraged If this is uh, especially troublesome for people from marginalized backgrounds as we discuss to everyone has like a different perception of it, right? but you know a lot of I was fortunate to grow up middle class. I am college educated Um, there were a lot of things that I knew but There were a lot of things that I realized that I didn't know and just having co-workers that came by Saw that I was working on something I was able to grow and learn from that. Um, you don't know what you don't know. Uh, I have cousins that you know I was going to go into a personal anecdote there. I'll shove it in the box and thank you for being understanding about it um The impact here is that it will impact folks getting promoted. It will impact Employee retention The ways that we can mitigate this in remote working environments is through the creation of mentorship and networking programs I know especially in the Drupal community That is a thing that is hard. That is a thing that I've seen lots of folks working on How do we make sure that we're getting these high quality websites out, especially if you're at an agency, right? And it's like Do we have time to onboard somebody into this whole Drupal way of doing things with Drupal 7, 8, 9, 10 While still hitting these deadlines You have to make it important You have to understand that it is going to impact your product in the long term If you don't make room to train In both the technical And personal aspects Someone asked a very great question in the nonprofit summit and they said Well, I know that sometimes employers are concerned with well What if I spent all this time training this person and they leave and someone else responded with a Henry Ford quote that said The worst the thing that is worse than having an employee that is well trained And leaves is having an employee that's not trained at all that stays was I yeah so Having these mentorship and networking programs is going to ensure that the quality of your workers Is going to go up and those workers remembering how they were treated how other folks help them out That builds a culture where the next person in we're helping them to learn and grow Um, I haven't my notes. It says mandatory programs. Um, and I put it that way because Sometimes we say As in employers and workplaces. Hey, we highly we we think that this is an important thing But without telling a person Hey matt This five hours of your week You need to go and you're going to mentor these new people that came in if it's optional And it's not something that's specifically targeted toward these productivity goals that we are putting people toward they're like Well, do I spend five hours helping taren learn how to use her macbook? Or did I put that five hours on getting this project over the line? The way that capitalism has structured our society Most people are going to make that choice To excel and hit their goals And leave the other person behind not because people are malicious But because everybody is just trying to make it right especially right now Um But yeah, this is why it's important and critical to organizational culture um with onboarding We don't send people handbooks notebooks and sometimes the uh Related to the previous one The knowledge that's in our heads that we can organically just share with folks if we don't have that documented And also listed where it's documented how people can access it even a training path for it People are lost they show up and they're like well, here's your task that you've got to do It's like but we're if somebody asks you to build a shed And they're like well, here's the instructions for the shed if they don't tell you where the toolbox is Or where the instructions are I mean you can wander around looking for the toolbox, but that's also going to hurt your productivity for your workers. So Um, especially in remote environments. That's the thing that we've got to be intentional about The last challenge that I'll talk with you all about today is access to the mentorship and growth opportunities um I believe that I ended up talking about this earlier, but um Just being able to Do things like employee resource groups, right where people are coming together talking about their similarities and differences um Having we had some really great speakers that came in in the month of february for example at pantheon And part of it was for like history month, but a lot of it was around just People coming in to talk to you not necessarily people that were within your employment group But trainings that folks could have access to right you don't have to have it where your employees who are burdened with um Doing the work of their work have to also be the trainers Higher people to come in this is another thing that is tax deductible How someone come in do the trainings give the opportunities it will help everyone to be able to flourish um And it's just a way it's a great way to show folks that you care about investing in them. So I was trying really hard to not like have a very long data driven talk So it looks like I'm 21 minutes into this and I suppose I will open it up for questions If folks have questions I'm usually going over time. So now I'm like, oh, what do I do? Sorry? Yes Yes, so for the recording the question was on this slide I have access to mentorship and growth opportunities But previously I said access is not equal to growth and equity for a person. Um with this It's more discussing the fact that So sorry for the first slide with access like saying yes, you can work remotely like That ability to do a thing is not Guaranteeing that a person will be able to do it well with this one We have trainings That This is providing access to trainings the mentorship and the growth opportunities as a whole, right? Like having that even be available on the table. So I believe that it would dovetail into Providing the access and making sure that people understand that it is important that it becomes part of our Either a person's job responsibilities Our organizational culture. Does that kind of explain the differentiation? Yeah, I actually had like a Image that had people like stair stepping and I was like, they're gonna think that's cheesy. I'm not gonna put this in here So yes, definitely Like giving people the path to grow from right like you could go walking like in the texas woods, right? I talk about texas because that's my thing But if somebody's carved out a path, maybe you're less likely to step on a rattlesnake that could poison you, right? Um, yeah that metaphor. Yes Yes, uh for the recording the question is and I'm going to summarize it might get that's okay Um that the asker has an organization where it's Overwhelmingly white and male and so being able to do these steps for including folks and just to remind you, you know There are other groups outside of minorities, which I know that, you know, um, I'm a minority I'm a woman. I'm heavily invested in making sure that people have marginalized Races ethnicities and genders get in but also there's folks that have neuro divergencies just putting that out there awkwardly How do we even start? Before we can even give access. How do we do outreach? That is not the Focus of what I am saying here and I say that because I went to a really dope talk By Frederick Mitchell who was one of my old bosses, but he's also legs super smart where it talks about It was how math science and star trek explained the value of diversity It's great and one of the things that he discusses in there Is um that in order to break this pipeline we have to break The idea that We are trying to solve the diversity problem You have to flip this concept upside down you look at A person that is applied and instead of saying well, do they hit the marks? You say well, this person has applied How does this person help me to achieve the goals of my organization? um I heavily encourage like watching that talk because he puts it like so much better that I can right now um another thing That I have seen employers do and that we encourage in the diversity inclusion initiative Is reaching out to groups that you know might have Sorry, there are networking groups on like meet-up Um, there's even facebook groups. I'm in a couple of facebook groups that are specifically for black women in tech But putting your job postings there um Obvious I can pick on you like just doing like organic talking with folks. Um, I Sometimes go and I talked to different folks that are running Drupal camps to help them figure out How do we get more people from diverse backgrounds? So if you're in Drupal, you can come and talk to folks in the Drupal diversity and inclusion initiative But there are people that want to help you to be able to do those things. So job boards Uh, special interest groups meet-up groups networking activities that are for those folks Don't none of them saying this don't just post there, right go and build the relationships And I say that explicitly because sometimes we think all right I did the thing I posted the thing on the wall If I post it they will apply There's a everybody cites this but A woman will feel like she has to have a hundred percent of the qualifications on something In order to apply and a guy will be like, I don't know how to do three of those things This is cool And I've had to tell myself that it's okay for me to not know everything I have a really hard time with not knowing everything But now that I've done that and had more confidence It's very helpful, but I had to have a lot of mentorship to get to that point Yes So for the recording, um The sentiment is that if you have an employee referral program And people are like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna get that sweet $10,000. That would be really cool If like we all get $10,000 for hiring our friends, right? It's like, I know that my friend is going to apply and they're going to make it through and I'm going to get $10,000 And maybe I'll give them a thousand dollars. I don't know, right, but that perpetuates Same-ness you're not getting the diversity that you could have and you have a homogenized group That's incentivized through $10,000 bonuses Thank you Yes So for the recording the question is as a person of a marginalized background, how do you advocate for these things? And you're not Increasing the burden like it's like I would like to continue working remotely What I will say before I address your question Is that the burden should not just be on the marginalized folks alone To advocate for themselves There's another quote that says it's one thing To get an invite to the party. It's a whole other thing for somebody to bring you along I think that it is Very important for people that are in Adequately represented majority groups to roll up our sleeves and do the labor on this because It's not like other people don't have things that they are dealing with right, but One thing that I have said in some situations Is that when I go into the workplace? I'm not trying to be black at work And that's in part because I don't want to put a target on my back I don't want people to be like, ah It's not always that I feel like this Matt sent you and not I'm not just saying this either because y'all are in here, but it's just like Nobody wants to be the person that's making the fuss Causing the problem because it's like, ah, well, they told us to hire, you know people of Underrepresented groups and not to hire the same people but every time we hire them. They're causing trouble. They're asking for things. So So sorry Don't put folks in a position where they have to advocate for themselves alone For folks that are in underrepresented and marginalized identities I think that it's important for us to be able to identify and find Champions and allies in our working environments And part of that is related to, you know, this access to mentorship Access to networking opportunities and that being a part of intentional practices So do what you can I totally understand like, you know Wanting to preserve your rights in the workplace to be able to work remotely But also remember that you don't have to do it alone and for employers that might be listening to this Don't make people do this alone. Nobody can solve any of these problems by themselves People that are allies or people that are marginalized Yes Yes, sorry I believe that part of that kind of Sorry, so how do we identify ways to Advocate for these programs and the mentorship and onboarding to be improved Um I think that as people feel comfortable to use their voices, they should Don't be afraid find ways to say things as suggestions And not necessarily criticisms, which is the thing that I've had to work on right um at the same time employers being able to Being open to giving outlets of feedback to their employees putting that as part of their practices is vital When I worked at lullabot, for example I was automatically assigned a lullabuddy when I came in and that was somebody that was dedicated to teaching me the Organizational culture showing me how things worked if y'all are in the Drupal community My lullabuddy was my cursor. So he's pretty cool But I Y'all kind of see my nature and I was like, oh, no, that's the one guy at lullabot that wears a suit But he's not like that at all But yeah, like just being able to talk about, you know, even I had a bias right of my perception of who might might be But that that grows trust in camaraderie. So I hope that answers your question. I knew I went off a little bit. Yes Thought I saw another hand. Yes and then so for the recording um part of that process of getting more folks in and making sure that they're supported is Looking at the Job position postings that we have in the first place and hr being like, do we really need somebody with a master's degree to make our Drupal seven site? That's not exactly what you said, but like paraphrasing for it. Um being intentional about We know that folks are going to be like, oh, well, I don't have everything here And if we know that it's not all needed why post it? Um for Another place that I worked I helped with starting our inclusion and equity group is the way that we decided to name ourselves And part of what we did was that when new job postings went up That group went and we examined and there were times where it's like, well I see that this says that we need a bachelor's degree Is this absolutely necessary or are we introducing a hurdle and the most important thing is that we had a Executive buy-in because the president of the org was a part of that group And so we were able to have those conversations and it didn't just feel like Also addressing the question from earlier. It didn't just feel like a bunch of employees belly aching, right? We knew that there was somebody In a c-suite that was going to be there and supportive and be able to give us feedback. So Thank you Yes, so just paraphrase it For the recording the question is well, yes, we're trying to do these inclusionary things I'll send over the job description to hr But then we have a person that's charged with diversity and inclusion And they'll change some of the wording and I get more people I get all these diverse people and then I've got to filter through what is now a large queue of folks And a lot of these people don't meet the expectations that we need for the job How do I deal with this so? Number one, I think that part of the problem there is a communication thing I don't think it's fair to just change somebody's job posting and not have a conversation with them about hey When we when we gave the feedback about the bachelor's degree For the inclusion and equity group, right? We didn't just change it and post it out there This goes back to the intentionality thing We have to be having conversations with each other where we're vulnerable and allowed to be vulnerable in discussions where Everybody has needs Whether that's as a human being or as a person working if you need a druple seven developer Sorry, I love druple seven. So that's why I keep using it in my examples Um, and then I go and change and I'm like run this love. Guess what? I put in here that if they have experience with jumlah, it's good And you're like now I have like 200 jumlah developers and this is not what I needed Like that's not helping you. That's causing more stress for you That's causing more stress for the applicants that were jumlah developers That it's not a good fit for them, right? Um, I think the most important thing here Is that inclusion for the sake of including people is not really inclusive It's posturing it's setting people up to fail and we should be actually Trying to provide more opportunities For people who are able to succeed Whether that's on the face or have given like some more support to be able to be engaged It it's about stopping exclusion of people For what might be superficial reasons rather than just saying hey everybody come in So for example, I don't let everybody come to my house, right? And it's not because I don't love all of my friends because It's just because one of my friends does not understand that I have a dog that likes to eat plastic If she is left by herself I do not know why my dog does it. She just eats a lot of plastic And so it's like if she is out It's because I'm out and I'm able to monitor her, right? But my friend is constantly like oh, well, why don't you let her out? Like she shouldn't be in her crate. Sorry the this is I'm not going to apologize This is a personal example to say, you know I don't have that friend over as much anymore because It's not a good match for me or her and there's nothing wrong with that We can still go out and hang out and be friends, but it's just a weird situation. So Don't feel pressured to Be inclusive just to say that you did a thing because people can also feel when that happens Um, I have been a person that was a diversity hire And it feels like shit So, yeah Yes, go ahead Oh, sorry cool Okay So what it sounds like an apology is I am that hopefully the way that I'm phrasing this is going to summarize it So what it sounds like is that you are in a time crunch And that might be something where y'all need to examine your hiring processes and timelines Um, and that is definitely a thing. I am open to talking to you about offline Just because I think that that is a very complicated problem with a complicated solution But what I would suggest is like the organization Looking at the processes and timelines because it might just be like you have the cvs And it might be that you have like the uh, what is it like a soft interview where they're first coming in and How do we build that in while still meeting our goals and still honoring these people's commitments? Thank you for the clarification and grace when I misunderstood that Um, and it is currently 9 15 so I believe that we are at time, but I am super down to talk to folks afterward Thank you so much for coming and all your intentional questions Uh, not good luck, but I am here the inclusion initiative is here to be a partner with you And have a great rest of your triple con