Creating a tech pipeline aligned with the public interest
TOPICAL CONVERSATION: Creating a tech pipeline aligned with the public interest
Laura McGee, CEO of Diversio
Azhar Janjua, Head of Communitech Outposts
Vivian Chong, Yale MBA
Moderator: Ayca Ariyoruk, Director of Global Partnerships and Communication at Soliya
Topical Conversation from our Responsible Tech Summit: Improving Digital Spaces held at the Consulate General of Canada in New York on May 20th. Find the full event overview here.
Speaker Bios
Laura McGee is the co-founder and CEO of Diversio, a technology startup that uses data analytics to help companies and investors unlock diversity for improved performance. Diversio works with clients in 30 countries across the world, and has been featured at global events like the G20 and Davos. Through partnerships including UN Women, the Canadian Venture Capital Association, and the Human Resources Professionals Association, Laura leads industry-level change in DEI practices.
Laura is a serial founder of social movements such as #GoSponsorHer, #HackInclusion, and Summit Leaders. She was named a Top 25 Women of Influence in 2017 and currently serves as Co-Chair of Canada’s Expert Panel on Women Entrepreneurs. Her board positions include ArcTern Ventures, Global Citizen, University of Waterloo, as well as the Ted Rogers School of Management. She is a C100 Fellow and David Rockefeller Fellow with the Trilateral Commission.
Vivian Chong is a MBA candidate at the Yale School of Management and co-creator of A Business Student’s Guide to Tech Ethics (BSGTE), a curriculum targeted towards MBAs interested in getting involved in the responsible tech movement. She decided to pursue an MBA because she believes that tech business executives have a unique role in addressing the industry’s current harms and can help push the overall industry towards more responsible business practices. Vivian was inspired to co-create BSGTE after going through her own MBA recruiting journey and realizing there were few resources for MBAs interested in the responsible tech field. She hopes to spread BSGTE to other MBA programs and empower the next generation of business leaders to push for change within the tech industry. Prior to her MBA, she was a HR Transformation Consultant at IBM, where she used HR technologies to facilitate healthier workplace communities for her clients. She hopes to build a career focused on building safe and trustworthy communities of belonging on social platforms.
Azhar Janjua heads up Communitech Outposts at Communitech, an employer of record service which helps Canadian Founders compliantly hire, manage, retain and pay top talent in 160 countries. He is also Communitech’s principal advisor for immigration assistance and intellectual property programming.
Prior to joining Communitech, Azhar spent time in the Bay Area where he experienced the rapid life of a startup. Attended law school in London, where globalization is key. It is a small world after all! Worked on Bay Street helping multinationals steer their big ships safely. And eventually took a senior role at an Ontario based software company in hypergrowth, where he built out the international legal and operational foundations and infrastructure required to build a remote workforce of over 1,000 humans.
Ayca Ariyoruk is the Director of Global Partnerships and Communication at Soliya. Soliya is an international non-profit organization and a pioneering Virtual Exchange provider in higher education connecting young people online from the Middle East, North Africa, North America, Europe and Southeast Asia for cross culture understanding to prevent ideological polarization; providing skill and empathy building, and conflict resolution at scale.
In her role, Ayca identifies and cultivates new relationships with public and private stakeholders, primarily with universities and colleges to increase access to Soliya’s programs, and to scale technology enabled cross-border social dialogues. Previously, at the United Nations Association of the USA (now the UN Foundation), she devised policy research and advocacy campaigns in favor of reform and US leadership, and covered issues before the UN Security Council. Ayca’s commentary appeared on Pie News and Thrive Global among other media including the Financial Times, the New York Times, BBC News, Toronto Star, the Independent Uganda, China Daily, Xinhua Net, Business Channel Turkey, the Christian Science Monitor, and Radio France.
Key Takeaways
The strongest driver of macroeconomic growth will come from human beings in the economy becoming more productive, particularly underrepresented groups that have not been getting opportunities to advance within organizations. Companies typically do not have quality data on what the composition of their workforce looks like – what different demographic groups are represented and where they are being given opportunities.
When candidates are looking to identify a company aligned with public interest during a job search, look at how the company actually operationalizes inclusion in everyday practices rather than just donating money to various causes. Are they actually implementing inclusion into their everyday teams? How are people of color being treated?
When hiring, instead of focusing on how to avoid doing something wrong, such as avoiding bias in recruiting, companies should completely rethink merit-based hiring to consider the whole team instead of the individual role. Even if one candidate doesn’t meet all of the requirements for the individual role, companies should be proactively hiring to complement the entire team in order to achieve better outcomes.
Quotes
Laura: “If you kind of have the quadrant of performance — if you are diverse and inclusive, you are the best performing team, company, organization. If you are not diverse and not inclusive, you are underperforming. But if you are diverse and not inclusive, actually you're even worse.”
Vivian: “Previous to my MBA, I was an HR consultant, so I have a lot of org design background, so I view companies when I'm recruiting in terms of, where are they placing their jobs? Where are they placing their resources? Are they giving autonomy and agency to the teams that are actually building responsible tech, that are advocating for people not typically in the room and voices in the room?”
Azhar: “What do you want to be when you’re 40? Find that person on LinkedIn and figure out how they got there. I think if we can we all get calls from kids like that saying, “how did you get here, and what's the path?” and you can tell them, “Well this is what went right and these are the 20 things that went wrong.”
Q&A | Transcript
Ayca: Hi everyone. I'm Ayca Ariyoruk. I'm going to be moderating this discussion. We're going to try to tackle some of the questions that sit at the intersection of tech talent, education, workforce, and public interest, and we have the perfect panel, with us joined by Vivian Chong, Laura McGee, and Azhar Janjua. I think one of the greatest perks about living in a democracy – and I say this as someone who doesn't take democracy for granted; I'm from Turkey – is the power of people and our ability to bring about change. I think today's event and All Tech Is Human as a fast growing all-inclusive grassroots movement is a case in point. And early on it was already mentioned that advertisers once were so – they wouldn't have it other ways that they wanted to see engagement – now don't want to be associated with platforms that are stirring up hate, violence. And why is that? Because we the people and the consumers are demanding products that align with our values, and also we want to work for companies that reflect our values. According to – I have an interesting statistic here – according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, a recent report: 88 percent of the millennials, young people, want to work for companies that reflect their values, and 75 of the future workforce are going to be made up by millennials. So this is a trend that is here to stay. So that's why my first question goes to Vivian – you have recently created a tech ethics guideline targeting specifically MBA students, business students, called the tech ethics guide for business students. Can you tell us the motivation, the inspiration, behind this tech guide?
Vivan: Yeah, so I personally decided to go back to school and get an MBA because I wanted to align my career with my values and what I wanted to do in the world and make a positive impact on society and specifically within the tech industry. And when, just in my own recruiting journey specifically focused on responsible tech and trust and safety, I didn't really find a lot of resources focused on business skills and business students, and even when conversing with a lot of industry people in trust and safety, a lot of them said “oh a lot of the trainings that we're doing are still being developed” and a lot of the jobs that are available out there are very policy focused, and so that's kind of where the idea of the guide came about.
Ayca: Laura, you have founded a company, Diversio, which aims to build inclusive diverse workforce. Can you tell us a little bit about what diversity means to you? How do you decide who needs to be included and why diversity is such a big deal in tech?
Laura: That's a lot of questions! Diversio is a software platform that helps organizations collect employee feedback on their experience, combined with demographic data, identify pockets of bias, harassment, exclusion, and then we use predictive analytics to help companies solve problems. So we can detect for example if women are reporting harassment at the mid-level in the technology department, for example, or if people with a mental health condition are saying that they're not getting the mentorship that they need maybe in the human resources department. And all of that is through free text analytics that we use NLP algorithms to analyze, so that's a whole different: how do we develop those algorithms? Actually you know building on the last panel, I think it's a really important discussion. But on the application, the kind of genesis behind the company is actually starting work that I did at Mckinsey with the Canadian government on macroeconomic growth and recognizing that the single biggest driver of growth will have to come from human beings in the economy becoming more productive and, in particular, underrepresented groups who were not getting the opportunities to advance within organizations which in turn was holding back revenue creation. As we all know, diversity addresses performance; you capture bigger markets et cetera and then working at the company level, so the micro level: realizing that companies typically have no data or no quality data on what the composition of their workforce looks like and what the experience of underrepresented groups is, and so basic idea to start with was “let's help organizations collect that data, set the baseline, understand what different demographic groups are represented, where they are, are they being in corpus speak maximized and in human speak given opportunities, and if not what can they do to start to move the needle? So diversity for us is extremely broad. We had to start somewhere, so we started by measuring gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, mental health, and then in different regions – in the UK for example we also look at socio-economic background; in the U.S. we look at veteran status. We recognize that's not you know all-encompassing but that's that's where we've begun.
Ayca: Thank you. Azhar, Communitech is one of Canada's leading innovation hubs helping Canadian founders accelerate their growth. How does a diversity play into the hiring methodology and can you tell us sort of one of the top two skills, attitudes, or knowledge quality that the founders are seeking these days?
Azhar: So yeah, Communitech – we're working with you know about 1,600 amazing founders in the Kitchener, Waterloo, and Toronto tech corridor. It's growing so fast! We're also working with 28 innovation hubs across the country, and the one thing founders tell us – the top three problems they have are talent, talent, and talent. The short answer to your question is Canadian founders are looking for the best and the brightest, regardless of gender, race, identity, religion, or even nationality or even location. We've established today that this community is trying to solve so many complex problems, whether it be ethical AI, whether it be food scarcity, water scarcity; we need to build robots that don't kill humans. And in order to do that you need a diverse workforce. You need to have people that are – we're already remote, we're already working remote, so it's important to have boots on the ground in the reasons that are affected by these sorts of issues so they can give you the feedback and help drive that conversation but also bring people in to the country in order to lead that charge and lead those teams, to be able to contribute. Canada is, you know the Canadian government, I mean I've been very lucky to have traveled the world and New York is great, London I think is a great hub, global hub, but I've never known of a country that's so passionate about being multicultural and diverse as Canada. It's just so important to us, and you know the federal government has these great programs – the global talent stream, the dedicated service channel to be able to fast track the opportunities for the best and the brightest of the world to come to Canada and work for innovative companies and just create cool stuff. So for me this resonates a lot. Like for me, my dad was a political refugee in Uganda and he was about 30-something at the time, and he had a law practice, had some assets at the time, and then at one point he got a notice and said you gotta go, you gotta leave. And that resonates to me now because I've got some friends here from TikTok and I'm in people's living rooms watching them flee, and you never saw that before. And so for me, luckily, there was a seat on a plane to Canada. He got on that plane, got there – there was a ton of snow – but a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of opportunity, and i don't think he would have thought when he sat in the plane that 50 years ago I'd be sitting here in Manhattan hanging out with all you guys, right. So in any case, there's a bus outside if anybody needs a ride, and we look forward to working with you.
Ayca: So I want to focus a little bit on education. I work for Soliya. It's a not-for-profit education platform, and we teach young people how to communicate across difference by bringing them together through video conferencing in small groups, but they all come from different countries around the world and you're preparing a workforce for the future. It's a diverse workforce; we're preparing for a diverse workforce. What are some of the non-traditional skills? I mean when we're preparing for the future we're always focusing on, there's a lot of focus obviously on STEM and technical skills – what are the kind of skills you think the people need in order to be able to work, innovate, collaborate, communicate across different ones? You bring all these different groups together from different races, religions, gender, countries – what kind of skills do they need so they can work together? Laura, would you like to go first?
Laura: Yeah I think where you're speaking to one of the core skills is inclusion – how to be an inclusive colleague and inclusive leader. And I think my favorite stat is – if you kind of have the quadrant of performance, if you are diverse and inclusive, you are the best performing team, company, organization. If you are not diverse and not inclusive, you are underperforming. But if you are diverse and not inclusive, actually you're even worse. So that ability to manage a team and interact with a diverse team in an inclusive way is critical to unlocking the performance benefits and the kind of collaborative nature of growth. When i think about the interns that we bring on board for example, what we're teaching them is how to be empathetic, how to communicate, how to learn about one another's cultural backgrounds and identities, again in an empathetic way in order to understand what are their preferences for working together. Communicating your own preferences, one small thing is cognitive diversity is really important for us. We know that different employees work better at different times of the day and so we have in our signature line – I know that my working hours are not necessarily your working hours, so there's no expectation for an immediate response. And kind of setting that dynamic and engaging with that dynamic helps people be more comfortable interacting, not feeling like they have to fit a mold. I would say the technical skills – like we have undergraduates and even we've had high school students labeling data and learning about AI and how it works and how the algorithms are trained – I think those skills can be built once the critical thinking is in place.
Vivian: Yeah just to add on to that – I definitely want to echo everything Laura's saying. Being able to challenge the status quo, I think a lot of practices that we see today whether they're within tech companies whether they're within policy and government, there are reasons why we're all trying to make a change and being able to be that voice and within your own specific skill set and function is critical in order to make any sort of tangible change, and believing that you have the agency to be able to do that in your very specific way.
Azhar: Yeah then I'd actually kind of speak on the corporate side – I think the corporations need to do a better job of creating this environment for different voices and different people. I'll tell a story about a great company where we work with called The Playboard. It's a great company, three brothers that were international students that came to Canada and found that that international student landscape is just so complicated. There's access to education but it's hard to kind of link that access, so what they did is they built a company that connects universities with global students with brokers and just increases the accessibility to education for thousands and thousands of people. What they've done is they're in 20 countries; they've got 500 people from 20 countries with about 30 nationalities who speak 40 different languages. So it's on them to create that environment and let everyone's voices be heard, and what they've told us is that they've had a great success. In a lot of the team meetings, people will speak in their own language in certain team meetings if that's appropriate, but also sometimes they'll just say hello in their own language in a group meeting and celebrate that environment. So that's been a really cool story that I've heard.
Ayca: I think we've got to talk a little bit about values if we're going to we're talking about public interest. What are some of the values that you either see in the founders, the companies that you advise and train, the companies that you want to work for, sort of represent key values one or two things that are most important – is social justice, is it something else?
Vivian: Yeah I can start us off. I think, speaking from a candidate's perspective and as someone in school who came back to school to be more centered on values, just evaluating these companies and seeing when they're faced with a hard decision and when there's something on the bottom line, are they focusing on profit or are they focusing on their employees and how all their stakeholders are impacted by their product. I think it's especially critical nowadays especially when technology is interfacing all our parts of our lives that we just have a critical lens in every decision that they're making out in the public. Just seeing, okay are they making the hard decision or are they not hard decisions?
Laura: I mean I think there's three things that matter and really in my view set apart the really great leaders and one in particular is Dominic Barton who's kind of a bit of a Canadian icon. He used to lead Mckenzie and he was my mentor, and I think he's the epitome of great leadership and what he embodied that I've seen a few times but not many is he's got humility, he's got empathy, but he's got conviction so he's extremely open to new ideas, he knows his strengths, knows his weaknesses, knows that he does not hold all the information; he's very empathetic in how he interacts and really empowers people who report to him so they feel like he works for them – servant leader mentality, but when he makes a decision he makes a decision and he goes forward and he says I've had the information. I know I've gone out and collected it and I do trust my judgment and I'm gonna go for it. And I've seen I think when you've missed that last piece, I have seen some leaders who flail a bit trying to please everybody and and then end up getting stuck and pleasing no one.
Azhar: Let's just be nice to each other, right? Like you know really 90% of our values are all very shared; there's a lot of stuff that we agree on, there's a lot of stuff. We all want to have a good life for our families, we all want to do well by our children. You're not taking anything with you when you go so at the end of the day, just take advantage of the shared values that we have and not really fight about the small ones we don't have.
Ayca: I think we have five more minutes – what advice would you give if you have anyone in the audience here online whether they're looking to hire in terms of that one trick that they should focus on to make sure that they are, if they have any biases for instance, to make sure what can they do to hire and attract diverse talent, and what advice would you give candidates looking for a job with career or they want to switch and work for a company that is aligned with public interest in terms of identifying those companies? For instance, with you, do you have any red lines? Is there a company that you say, if this company has this in this i wouldn't or this is my check boxes that i want to see in the company that i want to work for? I put you on the spot, you don't have to name the companies, but generally in terms of i think you said a little bit about your values to that extent?
Vivian: Yeah so previous to my MBA, I was a HR consultant so have a lot of org design backgrounds, so I view companies when I'm recruiting in terms of where are they placing their jobs? where are they placing their resources and are they giving autonomy and agency to the teams that are actually building responsible tech, that are advocating for people not typically in the room and voices in the room? and so just seeing like what kind of jobs do they have out there, asking critical questions like how do you actually operationalize inclusion in your everyday practices? how are you moving past just donating a bunch of money to all of these causes but actually implementing it in your everyday teams? How are your people of color being treated? That's definitely an aspect that I just have as a personal check box whenever I'm assessing companies.
laura: Yeah, I think from a hiring perspective I'm a bit untraditional. I think a lot of companies think through like how do I avoid doing something wrong? How do I avoid having bias? how do i avoid– and in my view we need to completely rethink merit-based hiring, because there's very few companies where people work individually, alone, independently, and it's only their work that only affects, like that's all that affects the outcome. and so the way i think about it is it's building a company or an organization is like baking a pie, and you can have all of the best apples in the world but if all you have are apples, it's not a very good pie. and so i think you need to think through proactively, we need to hire all these different ingredients and even if what on their own they maybe don't seem like 10 out of 10 on the criteria, together we create a better outcome. so i think it's not just avoid bias; it's proactively constructed to your org design point an organization that is designed to elicit those better outcomes.
Azhar: Advice I'd give to younger people – so I tell my son, he's 12 years old, and he says okay what should I do when I grow up? And I you know I'm like, if I listed every single job I've ever even heard of, I'm only going to give you a sliver of the opportunity that's out there. There's such a huge runway, there's so many things you could do. I think I learned about 50 new jobs just today right, and that's the amazing thing. So you want to encourage kids to really grow and learn. You really see what's out there, because the world really is their oyster, especially in this digital age. Another thing that I tell people – I don't think they listen to me, but I always ask them what do you want to do when you're 40? And that's in my room here now but for them it's in the future. I said what do you want to be there 40, and I said, find that person on Linkedin and figure out how they got there – and I think if we can we all get calls from kids like that saying “how did you get here and what's the path?” And you can tell them, well this is what went right and these are the 20 things that went wrong, and that could really help everybody.
Laura: Also update your linkedin!
Ayca: What's your feeling generally – I mean this obviously group is an exceptional group because of All Tech Is Human’s mission is to bring diverse backgrounds together, but do you think that it's harder for people from social science backgrounds to break into the tech field? Is there a stigma or is it like, this is a technical issue, you don't know what i'm talking about? and a lot of it is a challenge – if we don't understand the problem, we cannot hold our policy makers accountable and we cannot be part of the discussion on explainable AI. You know these things can be intimidating. Do you have a message for people who have social science backgrounds to get more interested in tech and people who have technical backgrounds to care more about society?
Laura: I have no technical background or training. I'm only social sciences and I learned about tech as an opportunity way too late. It was like after I became a lawyer and was like, not for me, and then a consultant for a few years, and then I was like oh I'm gonna start a startup and I don't even know why I thought I was like at all positioned to do that. But like, not to diminish, it's not that hard – like no one in a company does every role, so I would love to see more non-technical founders and business leaders being extremely open about that and hopefully inspiring people young people with a social side, like “I could do that; I don't need to be necessarily trained and an expert.”
Ahzan: Yeah I came from a social science background. It was my cousin that convinced me later saying you got to go into IT. I was like okay, I don't have an engineering degree, but we'll figure it out. And so no I think I'm just, like she was saying, you need different ingredients in the pie – there are so many business functions within a tech company or non-tech company that need to be done and need to be learned, and you'd be surprised how many people with non-science backgrounds are in tech companies doing all kinds of work in in data analytics and even IT and infrastructure and cloud computing and all kinds of great things.
Vivian: And I would say for business people in the room and watching, especially if you're a student, I'm just being open to different perspectives that you might not already know. So for example, even in this conference we hear a lot of perspectives from the policy and academia space, and that is so wonderful and you have to be in tune with these spaces to then better inform your business decisions, and so not being scared of meeting people on the other side of the table, not being scared of all the technical jargon, and just being able to communicate that to business stakeholders and executives to make the most informed decisions.
Ayca: That was actually my last question and you answered it. I was just gonna ask, do we need any special skills to be able to talk with technical people and do they need any skills to talk with us? And then you kind of answered it, and I think it kind of came out in the theme that we need empathy, critical thinking, being open to different perspectives, and just get along as you said right. Well thank you thank you everyone, thank you.
