 Hi everyone and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Tech, International Women's Day 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Nicole Parafita joins me next. Head of Communications, People, and Culture at AWS Latin America. Nicole, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Tell me a little bit about your role as head of communications, people, and culture. Super. So my role is very, very new. I've started in this role like two months ago, so really, really new. And as you said, I lead the communications, people, and culture team, which is dedicated to understanding people's needs, fostering leadership development, increasing diversity and inclusion, enabling employee recognition, and of course, mitigating burnout, which is something we're seeing all across the world due to working from home and out of that. So it's a huge, huge task. And of course, it is aligned to Amazon's 15 leadership principle, which is striving to be a best employer. So huge challenge. So tell me a little bit about it. So this is a brand new role, as you said, just a couple of months. Was the pandemic a factor? And you mentioned burnout. I mean, that's one of the things that I think we've all been struggling with. Was that an influence in creating the role that you're in? So there are many, many things that led to creating this organization. I think that the first one is this new leadership principle, which is striving to be a best employer. People is our top priority. And we want to work with them and for them so that we generate engaging content, training materials, and we work on enabling them. So the first one is striving to be a best employer and that alignment. The second is the priority that our VP in Latin America gives its people. It's the key differentiator that we have at AWS, our culture, and its people, and how our people lead the culture. And the third thing would be the fact that we're growing. We're growing so fast. We're hiring so many people in the last year or so. And we need to make sure we keep this day one culture alive and strong. So yes, we need to make sure that all these people that were hired since March 2020 and never set foot in a physical office, leave the leadership principles, understand them deeply, and can apply all these mechanisms from our culture in their day-to-day basis. Those are the key three things that led to the creation of this org. So you mentioned the leadership principles striving to be Earth's best employer. How is that connected to International Women's Day and what you're doing in terms of really bringing diversity and equality and inclusion into AWS Light Ham? I love this question. I think, as I said before, culture and people is our top priority. We're learning a lot. This new leadership principle which is striving to be Earth's best employer acknowledges that we're not the best, but that we're working very hard to become Earth's best employer. And all the efforts that we're doing are related to feedback, right? We're listening a lot to what our employees are saying and what the market is saying to build the best employee experience we can for everybody. And first of all, I'd say that our culture and our mission is to become or to be the most customer-centric company in the world. And for that, we need to be super diverse and inclusive. We need to get as many backgrounds and life experiences we can so that we can invent in the name of our customers. So building this diverse team really helps our business, but also, as Jeff Bezos says, it's the right thing to do. It's what we need to do. So what do we mean when we talk about inclusion, diversity and equity? I think it's good to define these three things, these key pillars of our culture. The first one is inclusion, which is about belonging, right? It's about giving the psychological safety to people so that they feel represented. This is super important for us. How do we make people feel comfortable where they work at? And some examples of this that I wanted to share with you. First of all, there's a mechanism that we use internally at AWS that it's called connections. Connections is a daily live feedback tool. So at AWS, we don't believe in having an annual survey for listening to employees or to what employees have to say. We believe in having real-time feedback. And this tool is that, exactly that. So every day, I would turn on my computer and I would see a question from this connection system. And one of the things that we're tracking is the team I'm on helps me feel included at work. So we would say, yes, no, or different options that we give the employees. And we would track how they feel. And according to that data, we would implement different initiatives. So we're working on real-time feedback from the team so that we can act fast and help the team feel better, right? The other thing that I would say about belonging is that in AWS, we have 13 affinity groups. We have 90,000 Amazonians across hundreds of chapters around the world who work towards different initiatives. One of them, for example, is Women at Amazon. Women at Amazon is a huge organization within Amazon with more than 80 chapters worldwide. And the objective of this affinity group is attracting, developing, and retaining women in both tech and non-tech roles across all Amazon business. As an example of the kind of initiative that they drive, we can talk about Break the Bias. I'm not sure if you heard about this, but it's a huge initiative. It's a webinar that we will be hosting in Latin America on International Women's Day on the 8th of March. And we will have women sharing amazing stories. We will have, for example, Marta Forero. Marta Forero is the founder of a startup, a Colombian startup called Ubix, which is the Netflix of corporate training, in her own words, among others. And we will also have recruiting specialists that will give advice on how to give and accept in our careers. So those are the kind of initiatives that we're trying to do to attract and retain and develop talent. This is more like an attracting talent thing because it's an open webinar that we have. So that's about inclusion, which is belonging, and how do we make people belong to certain groups within Amazon. The second thing is about diversity, which is about feeling represented, right? And it's not about only gender. It can be about race. It can be about ethnicity, sexual orientation, age. We want everyone to feel represented. But if we're talking about International Women's Day, let me talk a little bit about female representation. And I am very proud to share that we finished 2021 with 18% of female representation in the leadership team, in the Latin leadership team, which means people reporting to the Latin VP, the Vice President, and we started 2022 with 35% female representation, which is a huge improvement from one year to the other. So that is, that are the numbers, right? But it's not just about numbers. It's the fact that these women that are now part of the leadership team have been given very important tasks. And as my boss always says, don't tell me about your strategy. Tell me about where you're putting your resources. And I'll tell you what your strategy is. And I love the fact that he picked very amazing women to lead very important missions within Latin. For example, let me just give you an example. Carolina Piña, who joined us from the public sector team, is leading this massive training organization. And like the name implies, this organization focuses on generating talent at a huge scale. And this is, I don't know, one of the most long term oriented tasks that we have. And it has a huge impact on Latin America, not on AWS business, but on Latin America. It's focused on really transforming our region into something different so that people can have a better quality of life. So those are the things that really amaze me. We've been given very important tasks like this one to really move forward in terms of cloud transformation and the transformation of the countries we operate in, which is amazing, I think. And the last... Go ahead. The last topic, I'm speaking too much, but just too close. The last thing that I want to say is equity, which is one of the key things that we have in our culture. And equity is about fairness. It's about generating or giving the same amount of opportunities to everybody. The fact that we're massively training people in Latin America is about fairness, about generating the skills. And the other thing that we're doing that is super important is that we're changing our interview process so that we make sure we have a diverse set of interviewers participating in the process. So that people feel represented from the moment they start their journey with AWS, with the first phone screen. So those things for me are really transformative and talk about what we're trying to do. And of course, it has an impact on gender, but it also has an impact on a broader scale from a diversity equity and inclusion perspective, which I think talks about the humanity of AWS. It's not just about the technologies, it's about transforming people's lives and helping Latin America or the countries we operate into to be better, right? For the good. Right. And that's a great focus. Is that kind of a shift in AWS's culture in terms of really focusing on diversity? Or is that something that's really kind of been there from the beginning? So I think it's been here from the beginning, but now, for example, in Latin America, we're growing a lot. So we have more resources that we can allocate to really focus on this initiative. So aligned to this new leadership principle that was launched in July or published in July, we always were very committed to diversity equity and inclusion. But now we have more resources so that we can double down on this huge bit. And I feel very proud about that. Tell me a little bit about, in the few remaining minutes that we have, I'm curious about your background. Were you always interested in tech or STEM? Was that something that you gravitated towards from when you were young or was it something that you got into a little bit later? So my background is communications. I studied advertising. So no, I'm not a science or engineer, focused person, but from at early age, I started working in tech companies. So I learned a lot. I had the chance to live in different countries like Mexico or the UK or the US, where I always had the chance to interact with many amazing men and women that were focused on technology. So no, I'm not a technology expert, but I've always been related to people who know a lot about this. And I learned a lot in that process. And you know, I've always seen like this, I don't know how to explain that this initiative or this will to make everyone still comfortable where they work. I've seen this at AWS. And as I said before we started the interview, I'm eight months pregnant at this point. I'm about to take a five monthly, which is a lot more than what the law gives me in Argentina, for example, where I'm located. So those are the kind of things that really make me feel comfortable where I work with and really proud of what I work with. And I want everybody to have the chance to get this type of job so that they can feel the way I feel, right. And I'm talking about men, women, people with disabilities and many other type of affinity people, right? Right. It's so important to be able to have that comfort because your productivity is better, your performance is better. And ultimately the company benefits as those employees feel comfortable in the environment in which they're working and that they have the freedoms to be curious. Talk to me a little bit about some of the things you mentioned, the stat of 2020 to 2021, excuse me, to 2022, almost doubling the number of women. Talk to me about some of the things that you're looking forward to as 2022 progresses. Well, I'm the, you know, every time we have like a performance review at AWS, you get asked this question, what are you most excited about, right? And this year I was excited about so many things that the least, I mean, I didn't have enough characters to write about that. I think we are, we're always trying to disconfirm our beliefs at AWS. And this is what I like the most about working here. AWS or Amazon really values people who are curious are always learning and always trying to listen to other opinions. And this is key for our culture. I'm very excited about the fact that we're putting, we're turning on mechanisms to have even more feedback than we used to have, not just from customers and partners, but also from our employees. So the fact that we're having real time feedback will really make it better as an organization and always with this day one culture in mind, which is very fast, right? We're making decisions very fast. We're very dynamic. We're learning on the go. We fail sometimes. We fail, but we learn very fast. We fail fast. We used to say that we learn, we fail fast. And failure is part of our culture of innovation. So we're learning, we're failing at some point, we're implementing changes. And it's like a very interesting flywheel, right? Of rows. And it's very fast. So my job is very dynamic. And I'm very excited about this. I'm hiring a team. I have a team of four people. I already hired two people and I need one more. So I'm very excited about that. And I'm very excited to see what our employees are capable of. I mean, they're always inventing on behalf of our customers and partners. And it's always amazing to see the results from the year end, right? You get to tell stories from customers and partners that you never imagined you were going to tell. So I'm very excited about all those things. Excellent. Well, good luck with the baby. Thank you so much for sharing what your role is doing and how it's really helping to drive that diversity and inclusion and equity within Amazon. It's such an important cultural element and it's exciting to hear the strategic focus that AWS has. Nicole, we appreciate your time. Thank you very much, Lisa, for having me. My pleasure. For Nicole Parafita, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching Women in Tech International Women's Day 2022.