 Hjälp med allt aldrig. Pippo, ju djur. Så det färst. Gjörs injur. Läjf. Det är 100 procent. Dependent om aldrig. Pippo. Alldeles. I det. I think. You know, because when you meet a baby, what happens? You start to connect. You smile. You get the smile back. So our need for relatedness, togetherness, relationships, is built in from start. And this is why work with inclusion is so important. And if we want to understand why inclusion is important and also why diversity is hard, we need to go back millions of years and actually understand how our brain works. So if we think about it for millions of years, we have been living in tribes. Protected by other people, fed by other people, fighting with other people, fighting against other people. And this has impacted our brain immensely. Because at that time it was super important to be able to understand if you were among friends or foals, if you were safe. And if there was anything changing in the patterns or you felt like, hmm, this is something different here. Then it was so important. That was like a basically a threat to your survival. At that time, if they were coming in like, you know, another tribe, they wanted to hunt in your area. They looked a bit hostile maybe. It's not like let's assume good intent. No. Then it's like really like fight for survival. This has impacted our brain. So in every moment at work, at home, in our communities, we need to see, to feel seen and to feel heard. And we really need to feel that we have, we are valued, we have an impact here. Actually, research shows that as quickly as lightning strikes, our brain decides if I'm safe in this room or not. If I'm safe in this group and if my brain feels, you're not completely safe here. Then I take a step back. There's like negative emotions, uncertainty and comfortables and comfortableness. Maybe I don't really like act as I would like to. Maybe I start to act a bit strange. Maybe I freeze and in neuroscience, this is a well-known concept called amygdala hijack. We get hijacked by the limbic part of our brain. We are all in our emotions. We can't think rationally. Actually, our whole brain shuts down. We are in our emotions. We don't have access to our creativity, analytic powers, strategic thinking or even rationality. We become un-rational. So when we enter a group, our brain starts to sense, am I safe here? And if I'm not safe, then I will not perform. If I feel safe though, I feel valued here, I feel seen here in this group, then I actually lean in. So there's like positive emotions, joy, curiosity, interest. My perspectives are widen. I'm more positive basically, and I get full access to my brain. Do we want our coworkers to have full access to their brain at work? I would say yes. But that's not what's going on. What's tricky here is that what helped us survive for millions of years is now putting sticks in our own wheels. So we, our brain, search for differences like different or like a difference in pattern is something negative. But we know that differences are positive for business. But our brain, not so much. So what we can do is to create awareness and to understand unconscious bias that we're all carrying and to work very proactively and intentionally with inclusion. And I'm going to tell you about how we did that at Mentimeter. Ultimately, this is about performance. We all want performing companies, high standards, and we want everyone to bring all what they got to the table. So I'm not here to talk about diversity for I do care about the planet, but I'm here to talk about diversity for our businesses. You know already my name is Anna. I'm 42 years old. I'm Chief People and Culture Officer at Mentimeter. I'm also a white woman in a very white Scandinavia. I identify as a woman in a in a society where, yeah. Or a country where half of the population does. I'm heterosexual in a country where most people are. So I should feel safe, yeah. I'm the norm. But I do not feel safe. Theoretically, I do. But I also see myself like see what's going on like I've been to a meeting for example. And then afterwards I wonder like why did I lose my confidence in that meeting or why didn't I say stop I don't believe in this or why didn't I add my knowledge when I had an opinion and knowledge that would benefit the group. There is something going on here. If I imagine that a white woman heterosexual in Scandinavia, then imagine what other people might feel and experience. Imagine how much performance and progress that's blocked in our companies because we don't work with inclusion. And also imagine how much performance and progress that's blocked because you you do not look all people in the eye when you enter a room. Or because you do not make everyone in the room feel valued, seen, heard. This is us, our behavior. That is what inclusion is about. And the question is that we need to ask ourselves who am I listening to at work? Who do I take input from? Maybe it is the person that look like me. Maybe it is the person that I feel safe with. Those are the ones I ask. And that goes for everyone in all groups, all people. And for me, I have the best job because I work at Mentimeter, Chief People and Culture Officer. And Mentimeter as a platform helps companies and organizations and higher education to build more inclusive and safe and engaging company cultures throughout the world. And we do that in three ways. So better meetings, meetings where we actually harness the collective intelligence of the group. That's the power of inclusion. We do that by better trainings, trainings, education, where people are included, it's interactive, it's engaging. We're actually co-creating, learning together. That's the power of inclusion. And also, we help leaders to become more modern leaders, leaders that are not only directing and giving answers, leaders that actually ask questions, leaders that are curious on what other people think. Maybe the group is smarter than I am myself. We have been working with the culture, with diversity intentionally from start. I'm super proud of where we are at today. But we wouldn't be here if it wouldn't be that our founders set this as a core value from the beginning. Nicholas and Johnny, our founders, from the beginning said, include everyone, that's one of our core values. We all need to believe in this and believe that it has a business impact. I'm also very proud of what type of culture we have created at Mentimeter. So I'm happy that Google put psychological safety on the agenda with their Aristotle project that showed that the high-performing teams were also the team that had the highest psychological safety. And we're of course measuring psychological safety at Mentimeter. This is from our latest survey. Exakt same numbers for women and men. I'm going to invite you to a 16-minute party here. So let's think about this as when you're planning a party. So diversity, to put it very simple, is who is at the party basically. Do we have a diverse set of people at our party? Inclusion, that's about, okay, I'm at this party, I'm standing in the corner like when you were 12 years old and very shy. But like, I'm not really with the cool kids, I'm not really included here. So inclusion is about, who's on the dance floor? Belonging, I would put like, okay, I'm on the dance floor, I'm dancing. But do I dare to, you know, do the quirky dance? Or am I just like standing there? Can I just dance and like get lost in the music without feeling like embarrassed, embarrassed or judged? That's belonging for me. Is it only the cool kids who are dancing or are everyone cool kids? And then equity, the hardest part and the most important part, who is on the planning committee of this party, who is actually setting the processes, the standards and who is getting a share of the revenue. The party was a success, who is sharing the money. But then of course we need to ask ourselves the question, should everyone dance? What's the point? What's the point of having everyone at the dance floor? So for me it's very obvious and this is also very supported by research, so it's like a no brainer. But we know that the most high performing teams are safe teams. If you want high performance, you need to create safety, inclusion. We also know that diverse teams show a higher degree of innovation and creativity. Also if you are a global company, diversity will help you to understand your customers. There's been a lot of talk here today about customer obsession. This will help you to understand your customers all around the globe. And of course you get a bigger pool to recruit from, great stuff. The world becomes a better place if you do the job and it's also much more fun. All in all, it's very clear that the diverse company is a more performing company. And actually the other week, does this work? Yes, the other week in financial times, there was this big study that was revealed that actually showed the numbers. So gender balanced companies outperforms peers. We all want to be there. Okay, what's hard then? Is it the hardest part to get people to the party or to make them stay and dance? What's hardest? I would say that building a diverse team is the easy part in one way. Because you just need to put the effort in. It takes time, but it's in a way easy. There are best practices, you just do them. You need to build the diverse pipe because when you come to the recruitment moment when you're supposed to choose this candidate or this candidate, then of course you need to go for competence. Who is the best fit for this role? You don't want to end up in gender discussion at that point. That needs to be taken care of when you're building the pipe. At Mentimeter we use tests, logicability tests, personality tests before you come and meet the hiring team. The reason here is to avoid as many unconscious bias as possible to find the right candidate. Because, for example, a recruiter looks at a CV maybe 20 seconds. I promise you that the ones that have design skills and made a beautiful CV, they will get higher ranked than the ones that did not design their CV. Design skills only matters for design positions. In all other positions, design skills does not say anything about people's performance, promise. So if we can use ability tests, personality tests to really understand who is the best fit and then we can just take away all the other type of biases in the process. Then putting together a diverse hiring team, super important because we are depending on who we are, our experience, our culture, whatever we actually will read candidates differently. At Mentimeter we have five people in all the recruiting processes. And then train your hiring managers in interview techniques in understanding unconscious biases. So they are not only recruiting people that they feel safe with that looks like themselves. Also anonymous scoring, super important. Once all the five people met with the candidate, you score anonymously. No one talks with anyone before to see who is the best fit. And then there is a lot of good best practices around how you can gender code or gender decode your job ads to make sure that they are attracting both genders in the same way. A few tips and tricks for each stage in your company. So Mentimeter today we are 350 people in Toronto, in Stockholm and in Sydney. But when I started as VP people three years ago we were only 60. First step if you are a founder, maybe you are a founder, you have a team of five, six people. You really need to do some soul searching here. Do you believe in inclusion and diversity for real? This is not something that HR works with. You need to believe in this. Otherwise I think if you don't believe in it, don't pretend. Skip it. So that's first step. Then invest time in building relationships and making everyone at the company feel safe. And specifically when people are onboarding. Remember your first job. Remember when you were 23 and you were the first week at the new company. How nervous you were. Let's put the time and effort into making people feel safe their first weeks at work. Search for colleagues outside of your network. Learn how to interview for competence and also personal values. When you are getting a bit bigger, I think like if you succeeded with the first stage then you can start also to make a stand as a workplace. And it's super important here that you integrate the values that you have in all your people processes. I'm not here to set your core values but if you believe that inclusion is important, I do believe that some of your values should be about collaboration or inclusion or the group is smarter than the individual. Something that has to do with this. Because otherwise it would be very hard for you to push for this in the business. So integrate with people processes. With that I mean that when people like your employer brand, how your employer marketing, how is the recruitment or the candidate experience? How is the interview process? Do you interview for the values that you care about? And also later on performance management like performance reviews. Do you make sure to include inclusion, collaboration, communication skills in how you evaluate people? You can also start to use your employees. So they are active in relevant communities to get a diverse pipe. And you really need to work with your onboarding and you also here need to start to build your people and culture team and make sure that that is a diverse team. I just realized I missed one thing for the forming stage that in the beginning when you're hiring your first HR person and if that person, the first thing they are saying in the interview is starting to talk about diversity and inclusion, I actually think it's the wrong person because you want someone in HR or people and culture that cares about business results and performance and asks questions about what kind of culture are we supposed to build together to create the best business impact. That is the kind of HR person you want but you also want them of course to understand and have a lot of knowledge about diversity, inclusion, group development, psychology, how the brain works but that should not be their first question. Their first question should be about the business. Okay, last one, scaling. So when you're at this stage then you just need to start to systemize and scale whatever you built up. The onboarding and all those things. How you work with team development. How you work with your leaders. At this stage you will also have more employees that can help you with the work and they will, if you support it, start to start like employee resource groups with more knowledge than you have about minorities and such. Then at this stage you also need to measure and follow up much more and for the equity part you really need to put the gender glasses on and the minority group glasses on. When you look at salaries, when you look at your option programs to make sure that they are equal and that there has not been unconscious biases in those processes. And we all in the startup world knows that what is measured gets done. This also goes for this area. Put goals in, follow up, follow through, have it on the agenda. Otherwise it will not happen. So diversity is about getting people to the party and now inclusion is about making people feel safe. And as I already said, for me inclusion is for everyone. We're all different and our brain do not like that we are different because it's perceived as a threat. So inclusion is really about what we do as leaders and as colleagues in each and every meeting. How do we treat each other? And a good model that I would recommend you to look in to is the SCARF model. So it's SCARF. Status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness. From the Neural Leadership Institute in New York. They have paired leadership research with neuroscience to understand like how our brain works and how then we need to build and design culture and leadership. This is what people need. It's very simple. I want to feel important. Status. I want to have certainty, understand what's going on. What will happen? I want autonomy. I want to be able to make a choice and impact what will happen. I have this strong need for relatedness because we are humans, we are social animals. We've been living in tribes for millions of years. We need each other and we need to build a culture that is actually helping us with that. And also fairness is actually hardwired the need for fairness is hardwired in our brains. Because during all these years in tribes it was very important that things were fair. Fair distribution of resources, weapons where people were living and people who were good at navigating this actually survived better, had more kids so people who are good at fairness sensing we also had an evolutionary impact. At Mentimeter we put a lot of effort into togetherness and relatedness because we believe that that is the fundament for everything. If we don't have that and the safety then we will not get the full capacity of each person. So we invest in our people we actually go abroad the whole company one month every year to another city and live together for four weeks. We've been to Madrid, Vienna, Barcelona we're going to Manchester in February. So that's an investment we do. But I also want to say that working with inclusion you can do it with small resources because it's mostly about how you interact. It's not about throwing money on things. We also have a lot of fun. Fun is important for inclusion. So here on our last Menti days we had this competition with our founders we asked questions and then the audience could vote. So most likely to accidentally start a PR incident this is Johny or Niklas. So it's like I mean have some fun during this intense building of your company. Having fun is also and happiness also correlates with high performance. Pay attention to your meetings, your all hands your retrospectives every time someone meets. So of course at Mentimeter we use our own product a lot. So what we do is to make sure that the meetings we are having that people are activated. They are present. We co-create together, we involve, we engage. We get input on decisions, important decisions for the company. We also let people be anonymous in our all hands so asking questions anonymous, upvoting questions because you can never be 100% safe in a 350 people all hands. And then people ask spicy questions and they ask questions that they really are important for them. And then we stand as leaders on the stage answering those questions, no preparation. And to be able to do that we need to be very like grounded in our first principles. Give space for complex questions. Let people in to the conversation and have fun. And we also work in a very structured way to create high performing teams. We know that teams goes through different stages. We support them through the different stages. A team in a conflict stage is 15% productive. A team in stage 4 is 80% productive. Of course we want to help our leaders and teams to get there. It's by having conflicts you reach trust. It's not by avoiding conflict. Start small, start early. Short summary. The longer you wait with diversity inclusion the harder it gets. Diversity in hiring is quite simple but you need to put in the effort. And you need to focus on the small teams and build safety there. In every moment you can think about this. How do I make the person sitting next to me feel safe, seen, valued. That was it. Let's dance.