 Gwyddoi, hi. Hefyd, gyddo un cydwyr. Can I be adael ar y net? oil two waves? Ydw i fynd i! All right good. I have got the difficult lunchtime slot. So I appreciate you guys joining. So we're here to talk today about the differences that you may see in people that you work with. Or the Unirac with ffair e-mail get wherever that may be. Be. So, y little bit about who I am, that's me. I actually have that big belly in real life. I've got slightly greu y hair in my beard nowadays, but a little bit about me. I've spent the last 15 years, instead, 10 years in leadership, working with different types of people, predominantly technical people. Most of my accreditations you see there, CIPD, Scrum Insights, Belbyn, are about psychometric tools. They're kind of the HR people side of things. I am a non-tech that talks to technical people. That's kind of my background. I do this occasionally, not all the time, it's not my day job, but I do this, as well as work with people at a coaching level to fully understand them and try and talk to them as people. Currently, my main role is as an engineering people lead at Collabra. At Collabra, we are an open source consultancy. We work with different companies to help make open source code that they might not be able to develop in-house. There, I facilitate the role as an engineering people lead manager, so I have a team of people leads that look after software engineers. The side of me and the side that other people don't necessarily show is the more personal side of me. I've been married for 10 plus years. I say 10 plus because I don't have to remember it, and I don't get in trouble with the wife. I have two boys, and that's good. Laugh does good because you're wearing masks and I can't see faces online. I have two boys. I'm based in the UK if you can't tell by the accent. I'm a gamer. I like all that kind of geeky and nerdy stuff. Today's session, three real key aims. Understanding what we mean when we talk about diversity and the different types of diversity that you may encounter. Sharing some of what we've done at Collabra. Using some of our experiences and sharing that with you and taking that away. Looking at how we can link that to working with other people. I don't know how many of you here are working within businesses. At Collabra, one of the things that we want to do is try and work with the best of the best. I'll talk about how we do that. One of the reasons I got my big belly was not only from food or beer, but it's also because I'm lazy. When I talk, I'm going to ask you to participate a little bit. I'm sorry. My first question to the room and online if they want to play along is, what does diversity mean? A wide variety of people such as different backgrounds. What do we mean when we say different backgrounds? Oh my goodness, that's an answer. Online it was every single societal construct that we can think of on our existence. Have we got any advances on that one? This is a great one. When we talk about diversity, we've got one more. I would also say it's diversity of thought and viewpoint as well. It doesn't mean anything if you have a highly diverse ethnic group and everybody thinks the same. That's a great point and it's a great answer. When we talk about diversity, there are so many different things. I think sometimes we focus on the more prominent one that society puts our focus on, but there are a lot of different things. Probably the most common one that comes up is LGBTQIA+. Did you know that there are many letters in the acronym nowadays? Does anyone know what they stand for? There's enough of you to probably do a letter of each. What does the L stand for? That's good. We got to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer. That's an interesting one that in about 2005 the gay community started championing the use of that. That was being used as a slur and they really tried to claim that back. The Q is either queer or questioning. The I is a recent addition. When I was doing research for this, it was talked about in 2016 looking at intersex. How many people are born with that mix between male and female genitalia, and then A is asexual, and then the plus is to catch any other non-specified differences. When I was doing this, because we talk about how does this show up, and there's a little bit of feedback so I'll step away, so how does this show up? I wanted to talk about how you can recognise it. I found this, and if you couldn't tell by my personality by now, this resonated with me. The gender-bred person. How do we identify? What do we mean when we talk about identity? Is it being male? Is it being female? Little points here around expectations. Then there was the attraction. How are we attracted towards different genders? Then how do we express ourselves? Again, here, how do we show off our masculinity or femininity? Finally, our sex, which isn't just about the bottom and top parts, but actually it's kind of hair, body hair, face, et cetera. Obviously, June is Pride Month, and we have a wellbeing committee at Collabora. That wellbeing committee really formed and looked at how can we help people, and probably the pandemic really increased our involvement in that. One of the discussions that came up, because of June, was around how do we celebrate Pride. There's a big conversation within our wellbeing committee about should we do something, should we celebrate that, because actually some of the research that we were doing suggests that people still aren't comfortable, just general research, not within Collabora, but research papers are showing that people aren't still comfortable sharing their orientation, their sexuality, and being comfortable with that. A paper showed two in five people were comfortable, right? And so we didn't. This year we took a stance to not do anything within Collabora, but actually look at that research and plan ahead. Look at how we can make a culture that means next year we can go full out in force. Rather than do something half-hearted, we wanted to look at and help people within our company do that. We've got a person within Collabora who openly came out as gay and had some personal problems with that, and we facilitated a move and talked to how we can support him, because the environment that he then opened up in wasn't comfortable for him, right? So we will still do stuff to support it, but we think there's a lot more work we can do around that, and that's a message across businesses. But there's different types of diversity, so we talk about cultural diversity. My shaved head is not a choice, that's just nature, right? Amen. But I was on a call with one of my team, and he's based in India, and he speaks to a bit of culture and religion, but he joined the call and shaved his head, and I said, yes, that's amazing, I love it. Great, both brothers. And it was actually to do with the fact that it had a death in the family, and it was part of... I mean, I'm British, if anyone's seen the British office, it was like the most awkward, cringy moment, you could believe, because I was so excited about this guy shaving his head and being like me. But it's a learning, and I think what Calabra gives people the opportunity to do is learn about different cultures, and I think we need to do more around facilitating that discussion, and I'll talk about one of the ways that we do that. There's racial diversity, there's religious diversity, so one of the things that we do every couple of years at Calabra is a meet-up. All of you have come in this room to the conference face-to-face, and we are a global company that operates in 35 different countries, but a lot of it is online, right? And so we do a meet-up every two years to try and get people together, to try and have that interaction, to try and create more meaningful relationships. But when we talk about religion, what we need to think about is multi-use prayer rooms and things like that. We need to consider who we are catering events and things for. Age is a big thing. Luckily in tech, we're probably on the younger side of things, but that is always kind of moving on. One of the things that we do within Calabra is an intern programme. So we look at getting kind of college students. Again, I talked about being global. We get college students to work on some projects over the summer. We have like a 98% retention rate, so normally if someone starts with us as an intern, they will likely end up being a collaborator and joining us. So we look at trying to get people in young, as well as supporting older people. Gender is a big thing. Recently one of my peers kind of got a promotion and went into a business operations manager role. She was very proud of being a woman in tech, a female manager in tech. That was one of her career aspirations. We promote that again. We try and champion that as much as possible at Calabra. Sexual orientation I've already talked about. In disability, it's an interesting one. What do you guys think when I say disability? For the people online, it was around COVID and people that aren't able-bodied. But it's also about mental disability, and that's a big thing. So when we talk about technical people, some of them are highly introverted people. When I'm talking to a room or talking to people online now, and I'm saying, hey, play along with me and participate and you're like, oh my God, can I leave this room? I am a very introverted person. So connecting with introverted people, that's my role, is how do you do that? How can you make them feel comfortable? It's a huge learning curve, I think, and it's something that we've got to be active in. The spectrum isn't the right word to use and you shouldn't necessarily say, hey, you're on the spectrum or that person is on the spectrum. It is somebody with autism. That creates different ways of dealing with people. An example of a collaborator is that we have someone who is super, super good at their job, but they don't want that face-to-face interaction. So my people lead team are focused on supporting the wellbeing of our engineers. They don't do any of the technical work. They are there for the people to just listen, chat. But one of our guys doesn't want to join a video call. Not because he doesn't like his people lead, actually he really likes his people lead, but he doesn't want that social interaction. So we've adapted to that. We do that through Matamaste and we have the conversation and it's real-time and we're talking and we're still getting benefit from having that regular meeting, but we're meeting him at his level. I think that's the super thing. When we talk about diversity, it's about adapting to people's needs. It was called, yes, there are differences, but we're all human. It's about adapting to that person, understanding who they are as a human being. Which is the most important thing. I talked about mental health or at least mental disability here. When we talk about mental health, we talked about the pandemic, it is a big thing. So we do offer different things to help our people at Collabra. So one of the things we offer is an app. So if I set the scene with you at Collabra, we have employees and we have contractors. So the employees at Collabra are based in one of our two office locations and then contractors are based anywhere else in the world. Everyone has access to this app and this app allows people online coaching and therapy sessions that they can talk to someone about anything. Again, it's all confidential. Collabra don't hear that. Sometimes they see usage stats, but again, you don't know who. It's just how many people are using this app that we pay for. We have private medical for employees, but then when we look at assigning rates for contractors, we bump up their rate based on if they could buy private medical if that makes sense. So we give it to them in their salary. And then we have mental health awareness training for managers. And there's a conversation right now because Collabra is going through a huge amount of growth around how we can increase this to anyone that wants it right. It shouldn't just be for managers. That's the starting point because they are interacting with people, but actually what it is about is who wants this, who wants to be made aware. I don't know if anyone was in the keynote sessions this morning when we were talking about suicide when there was a conversation about leadership. One of the most impactful training sessions I've ever had was suicide awareness training. I can't say it's the best one because it's super impactful. Luckily at Collabra I can say we've not experienced that, but in my last employment we had someone complete suicide and before then in my previous organisation to that we had two people complete suicide. So it's a real thing. So we really need to focus on wellbeing. Collabra is super, super focused on wellbeing of our staff. I'm really proud to talk about that and talk very openly because I think that's where the conversation needs to happen and start. I talked about the wellbeing committee. We have Matamose Channel's events. We do newsletters. Because we are a global company, we like overcommunicate. I don't think there's ever such a thing as overcommunication if you think communication is difficult, then do it. If you think you're doing it well, probably double that and then you might be there. So I think it's about having that conversation. So I've talked about Collabra and how we deal with things. I think one of the best ways to discuss it is around the culture manifesto. So this is our kind of code of conduct if you will if you were thinking back to if you were in here for the last session. It's a way of us dealing with people and trying to help. So the first one is trust. So we implicitly trust our people. There is no kind of micromanagement. There is no what are you doing on a daily basis or anything like that. We trust people to work the way they will work best for them. Then there's be true be you. I'm probably a good example of this. Me being my ex-relate self and showing me my big belly and all of that jazz and talking to you about my children and them giving me grey hair in my beard. But we really, really want people at Collabra to be themselves because then they're going to work best. And I think that's why we've got the people in role because that person, that leader, is literally there to just encourage them to just talk to them as a human being. We have business strategy leads. They're focused on kind of the technical discussion. We have technical leads for projects that they can go to if they've got a problem upstreaming something or a problem with a merge request or whatever. But then we have the people lead that can be there to have that real life discussion. Flexibilities, super important. I told you I had two children. So at Collabra, one of the things we look at is saying, look, if you need to go and do the school drop-off or if you need to go to the dentist, then you can do that. If you want to have a siesta at lunchtime, you can do that as well. But it's about the flexibility of working. And again, it's understanding that different people around the world have different ways of working. It's not a one-size-fits-all. And again, that's a message I want to try and put across today is we need to adapt. We need to meet people differently as though they are individuals. As I said, we are global. So we cover 35 countries at Collabra in terms of the people that we hire. And so we promote that. We shout about that. We try and incorporate that into our working practices, holidays, celebrations, again, discussion. We are diversive and inclusive. We don't discriminate against anyone. We don't say we can't hire into that country. There's a very fine line, isn't there, about positive discrimination. And how do you deal with that? At the moment, we're just saying, hey, come join Collabra, it's amazing. And it is, right? I can swear by that. But we want people to feel comfortable and feel like they are working with a group of people they enjoy working with. It's okay to make mistakes. Super important, not really around diversity, but I'm talking to you about it as it's part of our culture manifesto. And it's just a learn by doing, right? So it's being non-judgmental and I think there's a link there when we talk about diversity. So it's okay to make mistakes in brackets as long as you learn from them, I think. I think everyone kind of agrees with that. Our real goal is about free and open source software. So that's kind of what the humanity, social purpose and community ties into. That's why we do what we do. That's what Collabra was formed about. And in a couple of other little things, right? So transparency is about being very open in who we are, what we do, what we work on. No information is hidden unless it is legally or like HR. Tell us that we have to, right? So all information within Collabra is open for people to look at. And then everyone is able to have a voice. And so we have calls where we're discussing sales or new projects or customers. Anyone can join, right? So our CEO is on it, but one of our junior developers can join it. It's about them feeling like they're part of that journey. So a quick example then of how we can kind of start getting to know individuals a bit better. Let's talk about cluster calls. Does anyone know either of those characters? No. Two-fairy. All right. So that's a two-fairy. So in the UK, the two-fairy, obviously, a two falls out of a child. They put it under a pillow. Two-fairy comes along, gives them money, okay? And I thought that was like a thing. I thought that was just everyone in the world. Like, in the US, what do we have in the US as an equivalent? Anything? You have the two-fairy, right? Okay. Right? Like The Rock. He was in a film called The Two-fairy, I think. But other cultures don't have that. So in Argentina, this guy is rat on Perez. It's like giant rat, basically. And he goes and takes teeth from children and leaves them gifts. Now, I guess it was kind of scary thinking about a little fairy taking things. What's she doing with all those teeth? But having a giant rat come into my bedroom and take my teeth, even though they're leaving me a present, I still think that's slightly scary. But that's Argentina. France also have a rat. But again, what we realized was there was these differences that came from what we call a cluster call. So I talked about one of the roles of the people that you'd have in those one-to-one conversations with our engineers. Another thing we do is just group a bunch of engineers together each month to have a call. Right? About anything you want. Now, if I say to technical people, hey, come on a call and we'll just discuss anything. Like, that's not technical. People won't come on that, right? And so I joined the business eight months ago, and there was some conversation, you know, how are they working? We had about 60% of people attending cluster calls, maybe a bit less, maybe 55. And there was no structure to it. It was literally, hey, come on this call. And so what I did was I put a structure in place that kind of had an agenda, right? So again, people could see what we were going to talk about. And it started with technical stuff, right? Because if you can get people that are technically minded to start talking technically, then they'll start to feel more comfortable opening up to you as a person. And that's a secret source, right? So we saw it now spike up to 70% participation. And people are still kind of now talking about it in a positive sense. So what we do is we say, hey, like what project are you working on at the moment because some of these people may be working on different projects. What have you done since we last got together? And then is there anything else you want to discuss? And that's when stuff like Tooth Fairy and School Inn in India and all of that kind of stuff comes up in conversation. But another thing to consider is that English isn't everyone's first language. And that's a big thing, you know. So the cluster calls is a great way of actually encouraging participation for people to start hearing English being spoken and learning their English skills. And one of the things that we've recently identified through this and through our growth where we're going into numerous different countries within Europe specifically is we're offering English lessons to people, right? We're not mandating it, we're not saying you have to come, but again, we're offering it out. And we're paying for that, right? Collabora is saying we'll pay for that and we'll pay for the time that you're going to go on that lesson and it will be like two hours every two weeks. But it's again, it's about making people feel comfortable, right? And helping people feel comfortable talking to their peers. And I talk about that and that English barrier because when you're on cluster calls you might have someone like me that's getting really excited about the difference between Tooth Fairy and a rat and someone might not be able to process that because when they're speaking to people technically there's a kind of common language within the English vocab but when they're then having to talk about feelings or other stuff that isn't technical related work they have to adapt slightly. And so, you know, I had this slide because I've probably said it about three or four times already you need to adapt to people, that is the key, right? So, one-to-ones with people will be different. Talking to people will be different. One of the things we were looking at as we grew and grew to people lead team was how do we conduct a one-to-one, right? Because we had a team of 10, 15 engineers and now we've got a team of 100 engineers are they still getting that same experience? So, what are our people leads asking? And one of the kind of, you know, directions that I gave or advised on was just starting with a question how have you been since we last spoke, right? Because then that will dictate what direction conversation goes. It's up to the person that you're talking to, it's up to the engineer. Are they going to talk technically? Okay, that's fine, right? Or are they going to talk personally? Or are they going to drive that and hopefully get both of those elements? You know, I gave in the example about tailing the conversation from a dialpad meeting, a kind of webcam meeting to a MacMost chat. There were lots of different ways to adapt. One of the biggest things is around tone and pace of a conversation. One of the things that we've just done within Collaborate has launched a leadership development programme. We have some of our highly skilled engineers and looking at teaching them some leadership qualities, right? So, time management, delegation, feedback, but communication. And one of the things that we did was look at what's called Insights Discovery, which is a tool that uses Carl Jung's psychology theory that says people have a colour energy preference in how they are. So they are either sunshine yellow, or go in and people-focused. Firey red, which is extroverted, but task-focused. Cool blue, which is introverted and task-focused. Or earth green, which is introverted and people-focused. And we've given them that understanding and training so they can look at how can they then change their style with their teams. So, you know, I said I would talk or touch on the part about recruiting talent. So, you know, 35 different countries all around the world. You know, what's going on in Ukraine and Russia? Super difficult. Okay? We've got people in both those countries. We need to know how we can support them. Right? So we were constantly reaching out to our guide that lives in Kiev when it all kicked off. It got to a point where, you know, he doesn't want to talk about it, right? Like, he's got so many people asking him so often he just wants to live his life, right? He just wants to get on. He would actually rather just do some work. You know, we've got people in Russia and it's like, how do we pay this guy? Right? Like, cos they're closing all the banks. Like, what are we doing? And then you've got people that are in, you know, there's a lot of our engineers in Poland looking at how they can support all of the refugees that are coming in to the country. And again, you know, Collabra gave time. We went out actively to people that we knew were in those neighbouring countries and said, hey, are you supporting? Are you involved? Okay, well, look, because they're contractors, right? So they're billing us their time. But let's give them some time to do that. Let's make sure that we're supporting that effort as much as possible. You know, we don't want to say, oh, you were going and helping on the border. So, you know, you're 10 hours short on your invoice. No, no, no, let's give them that. Let's actively try to support that. But then again, you know, to the communication point, let's communicate this on what we're doing because you've got people in other countries that are asking, how are those people? Because there's a sense of team at Collabra. And that's one of the huge things is, you know, we do feel like a team. We're not a company, right? We are much more like a family than a corporate. And and so they want to know how people are doing in those countries. So again, it talks to that point about how they communicate. So when we have our our adverts out, we don't advertise rates, right? So, you know, we have vacancies on our website. We don't say how much cost how much this role is going to earn you. And that's because we don't have a global rate. So, we want people to earn a comfortable living based on their geography because if we put a global rate out at Collabra, some people in certain countries would be living like kings while other countries or queens, let's be inclusive. Some people would be very well off compared to others. So we make it based on the geography in the country taking into some of our office locations as a basis point for our research on those numbers. When we look at recruiting people, again we open that up to anywhere in the world. We were remote before remote was a thing like Collabra has always been a remote company. One of the conversation points is like how do we stay ahead of it now everyone else's remote like what makes us stand out now. One of the ideas was virtual reality headsets so we could do meetings in VR. I'm not sure how that's going to go. But then when we look at the recruitment pipeline what we do and the process is we don't really ask technical specific things. Again, we trust that people can do that. We might talk through a CV but we don't do any technical tests. We don't test your coding as part of that process. Instead you have a screening interview where we just talk through your CV and then you get to meet some of our team and talk to them and it's about fit and it's about understanding culture and it's about understanding our mission and our purpose. That's what we hope you take away from it and what we'll take away is a little bit about you. How do you fit in? What are your aims? Is this the right thing for you? Let's close out. Diversity isn't just the LGBTQIA+. Now you've learnt some new letters today. Or gender or race. We also talked about age, disability religion and much more. It's about being proactive. It's about being aware. I will often preach about the starting point is self-awareness but awareness is key. However you decide to operate whether it's personally or as a leader in an organisation it's about small steps to see what works. Also adapt, get feedback. I haven't talked about feedback but how do people feel by what we're doing? I touched on the whole should we do something for pride discussion. The feedback from the committee was this research shows that maybe we're not there yet. That's okay to listen to feedback. Be proactive, take small steps you don't have to change the world overnight. Adapt. We are all unique. Everyone in this room, everyone watching online. Everyone is different so you just need to be aware of that. The question won the back. I was the last person or in the last session who said I may time to formulate this in my head as I'm saying it but I guess one of the things I'm curious about is when you're interviewing someone and this is more so around identifying hiring candidates who may have a mental disability or something how do you implement methods to allow them to interview well when we're coming from a basis of romanticizing start-up culture where some of these directors and CEOs think everyone should be mingling and interacting and stuff like that because sometimes I've found that there are people where they have these amazing CVs and it looks good but then when it gets to that traditional peer interview stage or similar to what you're saying meet the team and see the culture or there's one of those stages where it's like meet with the director of engineering or CEO they completely there's this idea that they aren't all like you know what I mean so it's a great question the people that we meet I'd say the majority of the team are like that you know our team are very diverse and I think we're very understanding I think how we deal with that is by increasing our understanding so we don't have like tests but we don't write people off based on their personality we don't write people off if they appear to be autistic or appear to have some kind of learning we look for passion we look for true people that want to be involved in FOS like it goes back to our culture manifesto we still operate slightly like a startup company so we've been going for 15 years and while we've seen huge growth and have projected growth we still like that feeling like the meet up that I talked about the last one was in 2019 it was much easier to get 80 people together now we're talking about 150 people all getting together right but it's about understanding and acceptance and looking for passion in candidates perfect thank you so much hi so I'm a technical writer and a lot of what my daily work consists of is creating communication approaches between individuals that might not necessarily have a technical background and individuals that do have a technical background so engineers, developers, QAs but one thing that I find that is over encompassing between both of those groups unconscious bias especially when it comes to workplaces that have a very diverse work culture and also peers, collaborators etc when they didn't necessarily come from a background like that so one thing that I wanted to ask you since you seem very knowledgeable on the topic is how would you or what tips would you provide somebody like me who wants to help inform these people to become comfortable with individuals that might not necessarily be like them individuals that they've never really interacted with before on a one-on-one interpersonal basis great question I think it's about creating advocates right going to someone that is technical and saying how does this read getting a bit of feedback when you're creating that communication going to the different audiences so I talked about my incident with the man with the shaved head so he's based in India I know I can go to him and ask pretty much any question that he wouldn't judge me on and be a point of source for that demographic of people right so I think it's about similar to I have someone that's very technical minded and yeah I better wrap up I know you've got a question we'll catch up after thanks for your time I'll hang around if you've got another question if you want to chat alright thanks