 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Monica Bailey and August Goldman. Monica is the Chief People Officer at GoDaddy and August is the Senior Vice President of Customer Care. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you, it's great to be here. So let's start out with the numbers, because you're a big number crunchy company and you are collecting data and you're also sharing some data. So talk a little bit about what you have found. Yeah, well for the last few years we've been tracking how we pay men versus women because we really care about making sure we're paying all of our employees really fairly. And so we're happy this year to be able to say that for every dollar a man makes the company, a woman in a similar job also makes a dollar. So that's great, that's the goal. The goal is fairness for all of our folks. So we're really excited about that. So how long did it take you to get there? Well this is when you really started that journey. So we started it three years ago with our CEO Blake Irving on stage here at the Grace Hopper Conference which was in Houston at the time in front of 12,000 folks and we showed the numbers. We showed pay parity and it wasn't parity at that point. So we've always- And was it close? What were we talking about? It was 96 cents. Okay, all right. 96 cents for the dollar. So it was close but it wasn't parity. Right. Here's what's interesting. We need to be comfortable with uncomfortable data, right? I think we've talked about that before on this stage. And even if the data is not what you want it to be, boy expose it, dig into it. What we've done together is we've found out what's wrong. Okay, so how did you go about finding out what was wrong and then also fixing it? Yeah, well we looked at a few things. So first of all, we looked at different populations. So we'd look at how are our technical employees paid? How are our non-technical employees paid? How are our leaders paid? And so we definitely see things when we look into those groups of employees. But we also just took like, let's take the slice of our biggest set of jobs, our engineers, right? And pretty applicable for this audience here today. So we took a look at our engineers and said, how are our entry level developers paid? Men versus women. And we're also this year looking at our minorities as well. It's really important to not just stop at gender and look at how all your employees are paid. So yeah, we definitely have made great progress on that. I don't know if you want to speak to it. So here's what's interesting. When we dug into this data that Monica's talking about, we actually found that software development engineers, one and two, women were paid more. More in those roles. So we said, oh, well that's fantastic. Well guess what? The population size by percent of three, four, five and six, the women dropped off, fell off. And then he said, wait a sec, what might be happening here? And all of a sudden, something came up in the data that we were just, we wouldn't have known unless we dug into it. Women stayed longer in those roles. They didn't ask for promotion. They were- Well they stayed longer in the ones and twos. The ones and twos, and guess what? If you stay longer in role, every year you get a little merit increase, every year you make more. Eventually you'll make more versus someone who is clipping through the levels at a good pace. So because of that, Monica put in something that you want to talk about, promotion flagging. Yeah, we tried an experiment two summers ago and we took a look at this phenomenon of women and also some introverts, it's not just women, right? But it tends to be women aren't pounding their fists on the table for a promotion, right? So as a result, their promotion rates are lower. So we went in and said, let's try a little experiment called promotion flagging. Let's just say, hey, a good performing SDE, software dev engineer, they are normally in role about 12 months or 18 months of good one before they get promoted, right? Sometimes longer, good ones too, but that's just on average. When is the first time a good performing person will get promoted? And we said, that'll be our flag to managers, just to say, hey, you're going through a review, don't forget, all of these folks have been in love with a certain amount of time because some folks aren't begging you and demanding a promotion. So let's consider everyone equally. And the goal wasn't really to promote more people. You know, the goal was, let's just not forget anyone in the process because that happens unconsciously, people just, they're forgetting folks across the industry. So they did that and it was amazing. The result was amazing. Our also, I should say though, our goal was to make sure everybody got really actionable feedback to grow their skills and their impact at the company and their likelihood of a promotion down the road. Which is exactly what we're going for because that makes your company better, right? So we love that. But the cool news is, because we've been following this data really closely because we're very nervous because I also don't want to suddenly treat one of my populations not as well as they were being treated before. So we're really excited that men's promotion rates stayed unchanged, women's promotion rates, and we're jumped by a third. So just by merely saying, don't forget all your folks please and give them good feedback. We saw that women got promoted, 30% higher rate than they had been in years prior. And so that's pretty cool for us. Two very specific questions. One is their low hanging fruit that somebody else watching this can see where there was the big disparity that was the easiest to fix. And two, keep talking about reviews, right? There's a whole lot of conversation about the annual review process and how broken that is. You mentioned 18 months. Have you changed your, or maybe you changed it before, but has this forced you to look at kind of the typical annual review process and reevaluate? All right, so I'll take the first if you want to grab the second. Okay, cool. So on the, because the first one's easier. So I'm just going to take the first one because you can do the hard one. That's why she's the head of HR now. Absolutely. I'm talking about my job, brother. All right, so. I wasn't going to ask that. You weren't going to ask that? How could you not ask that? Keep going, keep going. They were the easy questions. Okay, the first one is, exactly what Monica was just talking about, that is actually flag folks in role after a period of time and say, you know what, both men and women flag them and say, review them for promotion. Review for promotion. It's very simple. It's very easy after a year of level one, maybe 18 months of level two, just say, hey, have a look. Is this person ready? And if they're not ready, what should they do to get ready? And that's the actionable feedback. That's right. And here's what's interesting. Here are the stats, which is really cool. So two years ago, we had 6% of our software development two were women. Last year was 15%. This year, 31%. 31% of software development two are women. And our software development one is now up to 41%. So you see, we're building our pipeline. So we're getting them in. Now the question is, once they're within the company, how do we develop and grow them and promote over time? It begs the question, what are the threes? Oh, it's 13%. So you can see it's dropped off. So no, but give us a year or two. We'll be back on stage. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's about it. And then the goal is then 30, 40%. So, you know, give us a few years. It's a great little actionable item though. Make sure that you're paying attention to the people and aren't paying attention to for themselves. And they did it as an experiment. And are you going to now scale that to the rest of the company? We have scaled it to level twos and level threes. And this year we'll probably scale it to level four. So each time we add another level, we look at the data and see how it works. At some point, like folks are allowed to also just like, do an awesome job and the jobs are in. So we're not an upper out kind of company. Some places are like that. So at some point we'll probably stop saying, like, should you promote this person to be like leader of the universe? You know, because like they're pretty great. But Jeff, you asked a great question about performance reviews and I'm super passionate about this topic. So we were selected by Stanford's Playman Institute as their partner a few years ago to basically conduct experiments with. They choose one company a year to say, hey, are you open minded enough to try some crazy stuff with us and see if there might be a result that we can share with the industry afterwards. And so we just felt so happy they chose us. And we shared tons of our data with them. They saw our employee survey. They saw redacted performance reviews. They got to sit in on our most senior talent review which is a calibration session to hear how are we talking about all of our employees. And the Playman Institute, you know, they care about the advancement of women in leadership. But when I, my first meeting with them, I'm like, look, I super care about the women in my company. But I kind of care about all my employees in my company. So like, how are we going to, like I need to make sure we're being really fair to everybody and they're like, that's what we care about too. I'm like, okay, whew, first hurdle we passed. Anyway, they're stunning foot partners. And what they, after doing tons of this analysis, what they said was tackle what almost no company has tackled. Tackle unconscious bias that lives within the people processes specifically around career advancement. So again, that's promotion that we talked about. It's also performance review. So we're like, that's us at GoDaddy. We're like, let's try it. Who knows what's going to happen, let's see. So we jumped right in and basically what they found is so at GoDaddy we care about what you do and how you do it. So those are kind of that. So what is sort of like career ladder levels like you hear companies talk about and here's a general expectation and how do you do against your goals? Great. And how you do it is sort of how we collectively work together to get good stuff done at our company, right? And it sort of lives within our values. Our values don't live on a big poster that are shiny and people kind of walk by and go, that's not what it's like here. Like we literally pay people to live our values and to demonstrate that. We think it makes us better as a company and more impactful. So anyway, so we took a look at these values and I'll be honest, like I had created with the best of intentions, basically some competencies, too many, that lived under these values and when you have way too many things for people to keep track of, it's almost like having nothing at all. Which a lot of companies have also done. Blow it up, put it in the hands of managers. Let's assume they'll all do the right thing consistently which doesn't happen. So what we did with the Clayman Institute is we interviewed about 20 of our leaders and we did some focus groups and we said, look, these are the six behaviors that line up against three of our values central to performance. These behaviors are critical for all of us. It's stuff like, do you share information with other teams or do you look for ways to integrate your work across your team or across multiple teams, depending on the scope of your job. Do you work fearlessly? Do you include others in conversation so you're driving innovative solutions and working fearlessly for your folks? And you know what is not? Your style, how do you approach others? Are you bossy? Are you, nothing about that. Nothing but approach. You can be an introvert, an extrovert, all different styles. These are actionable behaviors around how we're going to get stuff done and be distinctive in our company. So what is your advice to other tech companies when they are writing their values and thinking about how they want their employees to live out these values? Well, it's interesting. Number one, it has to result in business results, right? So it's really easy to have a really fun time writing these, but they have to make a difference in your company and mean something. Otherwise, why would you want to reward them, right? They're just nice, otherwise. Two, they really collectively should drive the culture of your company. So when you look at it in mass, if you see if I get everyone doing these things, is that the culture that drives my company? Is that the way I want, is that going to attract and retain people and drive again the business result we want? So to me, those are super, super important, but the Clayman team will take you to camp and help you with all this stuff, but really also, is your language equally accessible to men and women, to introverts and extroverts, to all of your employees, to minorities, to different employee populations? Because some things like aggressive driver gets things done. Now, I know a lot of women, by the way, who are very aggressive drivers and get a lot of things done, but certain language is just sort of unconsciously attributed to men more than women. And so if you have one role model for what success looks like, and it happens to be subconsciously a man that you think about, women are disadvantaged. So they really, we went so deep with them. So my main advice really is, if you can, frankly, I just joined, become a member of the Clayman Institute's fan club, and try to get some consulting help from them. But there are great folks out there that do this kind of work for a living who are really helpful. Because it's really hard to take a look at yourself, objectively. Well, Ashley, I was just going to mention that. So what Monica mentioned, we had monitors sitting in our most senior review of the top 150 people. When we calibrated them together, a group of 30 of the next 150, we actually had two monitors sitting and right, when are we talking about style? When are we being inconsistent between one VP and another VP? And we actually, the first year, we didn't get an A. Like the first week that we did not get an A by any shot of the imagination. It makes me feel better to say, probably most companies wouldn't, right? But we did not, and we were brave. You get comfortable with that, comfortable date. If you don't mess with it, you can't make a change. That's right. That's right. On a couple of times on theCUBE. I mean, the Clayman Institute does fantastic work. Well, Gloria was the one who guided us, right? They're amazing. And you know, I think it was interesting. We're all well-intended, wonderful executives. I mean, we are well-intended, wonderful people. We look around the room going, we don't have bias. Like, we're great. We're going to get an A. Yeah, bring monitors in. Bring them all in. Like, this is going to be great. At the first year, like, no, look, look how many inconsistencies you did over the day. And they showed us a data, and we just sat there. Did they record it? Because they don't lie. They did not record it, but I tell you, they typed faster than I could. They were typing. A lot of data, a lot of data. They came the next year. So we took a hard look at ourselves. We talked about doing it differently. They came in the same two people the next year. Real different. That's real different. And by the way, we will continue to have them every single year. The reflection back. Every single year. Well, August, Monica, thank you so much for being on the show. It's always so much fun. Thank you. Go Daddy, here on theCUBE. Thank you. Always be here. Great. We will have more from Grace Hopper in Orlando, Florida, just after this.