 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper 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. We're joined by Aubrey Blanche. She is the head of diversity at Atlassian. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Well, thank you for coming on the program. Absolutely, it's great to be here. So tell me a little bit more about what you do as the head of diversity at Atlassian. Yeah, so I always tell people that my job is to make people really happy and to give them an equal opportunity to succeed. But what that actually means day to day is that I spend a lot of time looking at the data that tells me, are we hiring the right people? Are we hiring people equitably? Do they love coming to work? And are they having an impact? So that means sometimes designing programs, sometimes doing focus groups, but always trying to think about how do we make sure that everyone has the thing that they need to be really successful at Atlassian and to sort of fulfill our company mission, which is to help unleash the potential of every team. And for us, we unleash the potential in every team and we know that every team is diverse. And so we know that it's just an imperative for us to look like the customers that we're serving because it means that we understand them and it means that we can help them do better work. And I know that you are really dedicated to the idea of including empirical science in what you do. Talk to me about some of the most powerful studies, the most powerful research that you try to bring to your thought process in terms of hiring. Absolutely, so I'm a recovering social scientist by training, so I get really excited about the idea that you can use research to make little tweaks to the way that you do things that changes outcomes in really big ways. So one example, we know that women on average, when they have the same contributions as their male colleagues, actually tend to rate themselves lower, right? Same work. And then they say, no, that's not quite as good. And so last year we made a change to our performance review process that helps get rid of problems that might be introduced by that. So if you're a manager and you're reading two people's work and one person has given themselves a three and one's given them a four, that might affect your rating. So we actually changed it so that now managers write their review without seeing their direct reports review. Turns out it removes bias. It shortens the process and it helps identify whether people have an agreement about what people's work is. And we found that that meant that everyone was getting a more equitable set of ratings. And we could say, hey, we removed bias and it made it easier for the business. And it meant that people were getting rewarded for the value that they were creating. And you're also big on data. Yes. And so you first of all have to collect the data. So what kinds of, how are you collecting data and polling employees about whether or not they are happy? Absolutely. So first you have to collect data about who people are and how they identify. So things like gender, race, disability status. We collect that data. And then we survey people, right? Asking them not, are you happy but have you grown in the last six months? You know, does your manager support you in doing those things? And you can sort of triangulate what a person's experience looks like that way. But you also look at bigger things. You look at things like promotion velocity or what is your attrition and retention rates? And those tell you a lot of things. You dig into exit surveys and you say, what's the number one reason that people are leaving? Let's fix it. And the other piece of data that I get really excited about and something that sort of Atlassian's thing, I guess, is that we actually report on the diversity of our workforce at the team level. So you can check it out. It's Atlassian.com slash diversity. But in addition to those corporate level statistics, we really think that the diversity on your teams matters because your teams are who you're engaging with day to day and you get the value out of diversity because two different people come together. And so it doesn't actually matter if you have 30% women in your company, if all the women are in HR and marketing and all the men are in engineering, what matters is each of those teams is diverse because it helps them build better. And so we think it's important to measure it that way. That is such a great point because I think that a lot of companies can bolster their diversity numbers. And with women in the more traditionally female oriented parts of the company. Absolutely. But that cut of data also helps drive bigger impacts. So I'll give you an example. When we cut our data at the team level, what we saw, and this was about a year ago, that about 13 and a half percent of our technical employees were women. But when we looked at all of our teams that were developing software, two thirds of them had a woman team member. And so from that insight, we were able to say, well, those women are probably isolated on their teams. And so they're likely lacking a sense of community and belonging. And so instead of just investing in recruiting, we created a variety of programs that helped women collaborate across their teams. So things as simple as a coffee dates program where women opt in and are assigned to another woman in their office to have coffee with every other week. Or something more structured like a peer mentoring ring that's cross functional. And what we found is that that actually helped drive retention for women in those roles. So while we're investing in recruiting, we're also making sure that we're keeping and growing the women that are already on our teams. So this is incredible, these small tweaks, as you started off saying, that are really changing the way you do business. Absolutely. What is your best advice to the rest of the tech industry where Atlassian feels like you figured out something here? Yeah, I think it's trust the data and know that there are no best practices or silver bullets. So we've made incredible progress over the last few years. And you publish your number. Yes, we do. Yeah, every year we've improved our hiring of women in technical roles by 80% over the last two years. And it's, we've honestly just adopted the same approach that our software teams use, which is we test something, we see whether it works and then we iterate and improve it. Agile, right. And so it's not about one training or one program, it's about rethinking about how you engage with your people and how you respond to their experiences because they'll tell you what they want to need and it's about providing that. And I always tell people best practices are a starting point, but they may or may not work for you. So you need to be open minded to the idea that the first thing you try just might not work because your culture might be different or something like that. For us, we also like to think about diversity in a really broad way. So my other piece of advice is think intersectionally, right? So when we say- What does that mean? So it's a big complicated word, but it just means that we all have layers. So I, for example, identify as a woman, but I also identify as American and Hispanic and five feet tall and an HR person and all of us carry all of those identities around. And what you, so you need to understand that women is a diverse group. But when you do that, when you start talking about axes of diversity that are past gender, it turns out it turns what could be at us versus them conversation into something that's about we. Because maybe someone says, well, I don't identify as female, but this is the unique thing that I bring in. And suddenly you've created it where everyone has an incentive and has skin in the game to create inclusion and you will get greater gender equity out of that. So it's a little bit counterintuitive to start backwards in a way or start complex and work towards simple. But that's something that we found has been incredibly helpful in galvanizing people to get involved and really changing the culture in a way that it's not a top-down initiative or a bottom-up initiative, it's everyone moving in the same direction. Well, Aubrey, it sounds so commonsensical, but of course, yes. But it's only obvious after you say it and after you've tried it and tested it and iterated on it. So that would be my thing is whatever diversity matters to you, because at Atlassian, for example, we're an Australian company and so international diversity is incredibly important. Where you come from, I always joke, you're more likely to hear three languages walking across the office than anything else and that's a really cool place to be, but it means we've already gotten used to working in a diverse environment and now it's how do we just add additional aspects of diversity to our culture and to our teams? Right, and let's not fight that. Absolutely. Because it's working. Right, and the other thing that I've found which is really exciting is as I've seen teams start to change their composition, you don't just hear really great things from those folks who come from underrepresented groups. People from those majority groups say, wow, it's actually improving my experience at work because they have access to more perspectives and people who have different experiences. So it's firing different parts of their brains to. It's just more interesting to do a job that way. So that's the other thing that's really important is this is a win-win-win solution. It's not a zero sum game. Great, well Aubrey, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a lot of fun talking to you. Absolutely, thank you so much for having me. We will have more from theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference just after this.