Inclusive Culture, Minimum Culture

Our startup has a very progressive culture…as long as you’re white, childless, in your twenties, politically liberal, and love craft beer, hackathons, and indie rock.

My own personal experience working for a big, boring, multi-national company matches what Rich Armstrong recounts in his great article on Hacker Noon about inclusive company cultures:

As I said, to this day, my team at J.D. Edwards was the most diverse I’ve ever worked on. My first boss was an African immigrant, second boss was a forty-something mom. Our team measured high on nearly every dimension of diversity — gender, race, religion, age, parental status, national origin, sexual orientation, disability status, veteran status.

Rich goes on to talk about how that experience contrasted with his subsequent experience with the monoculture of a hip startup:

When our office culture is focused on business rather than socializing, we reduce the number of ways in which we all have to be the same. When we do that, we allow diversity to flourish. If your culture expects people to work long hours or hang out off-hours, the strain on the people who are different, in whatever way, is increased, and your ability to retain a diverse work force is reduced.

He then discusses his experience at a startup, Fog Creek Software, that managed to retain the inclusive culture of his big company experience:

...the culture was mostly about the business of software, how you build it, how you sell it, how you support it. If you were excited about that, you automatically belonged. You didn’t need to stay late, or drink alcohol, or play Rock Band, or play board games, or not have kids to pick up, or go to church, or not go to church, or do anything except show up 9-to-5 and care a lot about good software.

…the lesson I’m taking for myself going forward is this: if you want to build an inclusive culture, build a minimum culture. Build it around professionalism, boundaries, and work-life balance. Make sure your senior staff walks the walk, and spreads the word.

I found this last bit so poignant, as it’s really sort of counterintuitive—perhaps the reason why so many tech companies fail at trying to bolt on “inclusiveness” to a monoculture after the fact.

For a company that really wants to have a diverse pool of employees, you have to back off the idea that they’re all going to be best buddies, and don’t insist that their personal identities are enmeshed with a corporate culture.