Accelerate Your DevOps Culture of Innovation with Everyday Inclusion & Belonging

Based on The Unicorn Project stories, DORA annual reports, the Accelerate book, Google studies and many significant researches conducted in the last 10 years on cognitive diversity and innovation, we know that safer and more inclusive DevOps teams perform and innovate better.


Companies that have more diverse management drive 19% higher revenue due to greater innovation. Racially diverse teams outperform non-diverse ones by 35%. And 67% of job seekers look for evidence of inclusion and equity programs when considering a new company. Yet, leaders still struggle to create an inclusive environment for their teams. Too often diversity initiatives stop at diversity and fail to address teams' inclusion, belonging and equity.


In order to be authentic and effective, inclusion behaviors need to be owned, modeled and lived daily by teams and their managers. Development managers, in particular, must actualize inclusion in daily interactions, conversations, decisions and must engineer a climate of openness, collaboration and safety. The objective of this presentation is to share effective and actionable practices to help DevOps teams and managers embody inclusion through everyday collaboration and team practices.

SA

Shaaron A Alvares

Senior Agile & DevOps Coach, T-Mobile

Transcript

00:00:07

Wake up to my session and welcome to my home in Seattle Washington, I sent me three topics that does London and I am trialed that inclusion in technology got selected because it's an important and very relevant topic. We're going to talk about how we can accelerate our culture of innovation with teams and managers, inclusive practices. My name is Sharon Alvarez and I work as an agile and DevOps transformation coach. I am also an editor at info Q and a DevOps ambassador at the dev ops Institute. I want to look at the research data to understand the impact of diversity on teams and organizations. Then I want you to describe a teams and managers, inclusive practices that you can leverage within your own organizations.

00:01:04

The last 10 years we search the benefits of diverse teams is absolutely irrefutable. We now know that teams that operate in an inclusive environment out there form their peers by your staggering organizations, where men and women are equally numbers and inclusion, 41% more revenue and cultures that are racially and cognitively diverse, outperform, non diverse one by 35. There are various reasons for that diverse teams are more likely to generate unexpected and out of the box ideas, they are able to emphasize and they block project are tailored to a diverse or global customer base. So they greatly prevent bad product decisions. They also contribute to developing non diversities because they challenge group thinking and the status quo workplaces that diverse workplaces attract high performers and foster greater engagement and retention.

00:02:19

The case for diverse teams is no longer up for debate yet. We know we don't have to explain that tech is not diverse enough. probably the only research existing on DevOps diversity. It published a global data in the last few years that shows that less than 25% of the DevOps workforce identifies as minority and only 6% identifies as woman. The same data is presented in these grade 2019. Talk at tide turned a crisis of diversity and inclusion in depth, but great news. We have two major opportunities that we can see. Now, the first one is the hiring horizon for the next decade. And the second is the millennial. We know that the technology skill gap is estimated to cost the us economy $2.5 trillion over the next decade. We also know that 2.4 million jobs will be unfilled over the next decade as well. So one way to meet the shortage and grow your talent pool is to actually hire and develop a diverse workforce on the dev ops fraud, based on the 2019 enterprise DevOps report by the DevOps Institute, 37% of companies are currently actively hiring for DevOps keys and 40% will be hiring in the next 12 months.

00:04:05

The second key opportunity is the millennials are born between 1981 and 1980s, 96. Then we represent 75% of the global workforce by 2025, which is just around the corner. There will be anything between 29 and 44 years old. They fully fully understand and support the relationship between cognitive diverse teams and innovation. 83% of millennials are actively engaged when they believe their organization foster an inclusive culture and 47% of them are actively looking for diversity and inclusion. When sizing up potential employees, that's right to attract millennials and diverse talent. We need to ensure that we have an inspiration robust and genuine diversity and inclusion strategy in place because 54% of women today, we search a company's diversity and inclusion policies before accepting an offer. And 61% of women specifically investigate companies leadership team before accepting an offer.

00:05:30

There's no doubt. Diversity makes teams better, makes organizations better wealthier and more resilient. Diversity makes everyone smarter and diversity benefits everybody. It's the right human and social thing to do. So why on companies are more diverse and inclusive when the business case in favor of diversity inclusion strengthens every year we often say, and we hear that diversity equals innovation and revenue, but that's it really when it actually doesn't work like that diversity in itself, a one drive innovation. If you have a diverse workforce with no inclusion or equity strategy, it will not generate innovation or revenue. The equation is actually a lot more complex than that. We need diverse teams. Yes, we need a team psychology cause safety team, inclusive collaboration managers, inclusiveness and managers practice of eight. And that leads to innovation and revenue. We need all of these para maters to work together every day and we can't remove any one of them teams that needs to feel included and safe before they can better collaborate. And we can see that we have, uh, two critical opportunities that we don't explore it enough or well enough at the team level. And at the managers at the team level, we are going to review a practice called or the team inclusive collaboration. Self-check, it's a practice that you can introduce in your own teams. And at the manager level, we look at team increasing hiring practice. And these are practices that you can also introduce in your organization.

00:07:53

Collaboration is really important, but in order to get the benefits of diversity, collaboration needs to be inclusive collaboration, by the way is another one Haskill mentioned the 2009 enterprise DevOps scale report. And it's the number two. Can you mention after a GDT in the big nine organization's values identified by MIT? And so what is the team inclusive collaboration? Self-check, let's take a look at it. Yeah. Object. Some this game is to identify what it means for a team to be an inclusive team and develop a team person or a roadmap to get there yet. TT is composed of three steps, gather data insights, and decide what to do in gather data team asks themselves what it means for them to be an inclusive collaborative team. They collect this information on stickies that are on an online form. It's really important to identify tactics and actionable behaviors that they can apply every day in their day to day work and interaction, not value.

00:09:19

I recommend to stay away from value of vague behaviors, such as we matter. We, listen, we listen, is, is great, but who do we listen to? How do we discern? And what does that look like? For example, some of the best actionable behaviors I've seen and that you can see on this board are don't interrupt. When someone is speaking during a meeting, let them finish ensure that they are understood by validating what they say and then share your opinion instead to generate insights. The team that reviews the tactics collected, discuss and clarify, these combines them when they are. It's not an easy exercise to do. And just that practice itself requires a lot of inclusive discussions, collaborations, and decision-making then, because we try to develop a roadmap to becoming more inclusive. The team adopt vote on the tactics they lacked, or they want to prioritize here.

00:10:33

I use the ideas board, an online tool that allows you to rent this activity fully online from anywhere and to solve the stickies by boat teams at teams in general, calm, reasonably work, and improve on 10, 15, 30 inclusive behaviors at the time. So we asked them to pick the top five that they want to work on and focus in, decide what to do. The team decides how they want to work on these identified or behaviors. A practice I've implemented with few teams is to add the top five behaviors in a table and review it at the end of each sprint during the retrospectives. And the team discussed how they doing it and they vote with the time's up side or down. They collaborate. They decide which behaviors they do well and which one they need to focus on and improve. It's important to practice every day.

00:11:38

And that's why it's really good to review that progress during the retrospective at the end of each screen. And it's also really important to hold everyone accountable because inclusion is not a one time thing. And once a year thing, it's, it's a behavior that needs to be live that every day to our daily interactions, sometimes the team wants to be more real and more impactful. They want to identify actions they can do to exemplify the behaviors they identified. So here is an example of one of the behaviors they selected. When we have a strong reactions to someone, we check our assumptions and ask ourselves why. So how do we do this, that to do that? The team decided to identify three to five questions to ask themselves when they are in a similar situation. And some of those questions they identified are could I be wrong in my perception of the situation? What do I know about myself that may have triggered this reaction? And in what other ways could I responded to this person or situation?

00:13:01

Here's another version of the safest size that consists of developing a team inclusi. The agreement is exercise is more based on values and tactics. The team here identified their core inclusive values on an easel sheet and put the poster on their team site. You can see that these values are less tactical. We matter to the team and our work is appreciated by the team. One of them is we all belong and we all share what some of the best practices I want to share with you. When you run this exercise first to allow your team to define the game and the inclusive behaviors they want to display, they need to own it. Inclusive collaboration happens every day during every interaction. Then finally managers need to support the teams, inclusive investments and dedicate time for this game can also be customized to have managers foster greater inclusiveness within their organization and their teams that their managers teams great noticeable outcomes, probably because teams that is a, in a speak-up culture of 3.5 times more likely to contribute their food, innovative potential. It created the understanding that inclusive collaboration and belonging is the responsibility of everyone on the team. Not the managers are not just HR. It improve the trust level equally among the entire team. And it drove a quicker and better decisions.

00:14:52

Now let's look at the manager inclusive practice, which is including the team in the hiring decision process with great power comes great delegation. So let's see how we can inclusively, delegate that power. This is a real situation. I was far off a few years ago, two directors and a senior manager, all location interviewed several scrum masters for a project and dev ops team. They landed on two candidates, but they were not sure about their decision. One candidate was a Caucasian male, and one was a woman from a diverse background. They had a clear preference for Davey when asked. They said that they liked him by roughly 30, 65 and Sangeeta by 35. So I asked them that. So they asked me to interview both candidates because at that time I was overseeing a scrum masters training and development. Instead of me, I asked to involve the dev ops team itself and allow them to facilitate their real life meeting or ceremony with the candidates.

00:16:10

I have the team, but they design idea event on their own. We show us a backup refinement because we wanted to include the product owner as well. The team identified the features and the user stories they wanted to refine with the candidates. They run the ceremony. The result was a success and eye opening for the team and for the managers, USF to be familiar with the say, we recruit in our own image. So right after the interview, both a candidate have the person of the team unanimously agreed that same guitar way better than David. There was no doubt among the team, especially in terms of Hoskins. They just spent an hour and a half with each candidate, but they felt that San Kita had always been on the team. This experience was a great success. Everyone on the team felt valued, trusted, and empowered to make an important decision that impacted then everyone bought into the hiring decision.

00:17:22

And the result was so impactful that the directors decided to roll out more inclusive interviews, practices that many other opportunities for managers to include teams in hiring processes, but they can help remove hiring biases. Managers can include them, can put the teams in reviewing resumes or even in job description. What are the practice that is for managers to partner with other managers within their group and to design an inclusive program that has a bar raiser program, but not specifically dedicated to inclusion. A bar raiser is an outside of the team interview work, but was brought into the hiring process as an objective by bringing in somebody from the company, but who is not associated with the team. We ensure that we hire for culture, add and innovation and not for culture fit within the team. And we are therefore more likely to make objective inclusive and better longterm hiring decisions as a conclusion and T take away that inclusive collaboration is creating good to drive safety, innovation, and a better culture. We have two very important opportunities to practice at the team and managers understanding and actualizing inclusion and belonging at the workforce and the workplace that is everybody's responsibility managers that need to model their behavior. No each person on your team equally include your team in important decisions that impacts them invest harder in people that are different from you. I would be back at the Dallas last big acid November, and I will be really happy to share additional practices.

00:19:38

In the meantime, this is how you can have dev ops that needs inclusive managers more than ever. So test these practices with your teams together, design and implement everyday inclusive practices, make safe and inclusive collaboration, not a priority, but the priority on your teams prioritize and embed inclusion in your hiring plans for the next five years and spread the world. Talk about inclusion and safety at well, because it's really important. One more thing. Talk about inclusion and belonging at conferences. When you're ready to search on YouTube for diversity and inclusion talks, you will see that 99 point 99% of them. And mostly are Ted talks, daily Byrd by women and minorities. That's not very diverse. Is it very liter? Two known diversity talks out daddy bird by Caucasian male and managers. So please make inclusion a priority and come back next chair at dos to talk about your inclusive practices, all of you, not just women and minorities, the vast majority of technology, people managers we know are actually men and Caucasian yet. Very few, two zero of them. Talk about inclusion at conferences. So here I want to share three talks about being the only one by the bird. And I highly recommend John's keeps talk. He stated, listen, makes pace, learn and act in collaboration. Beautiful. We can win at this noble cause if women and diversity no longer are the only one to talk about.

00:21:50

Thank you, London. I hope to see you next year and in-person this time stay safe and stay healthy.