Ep. 193 - Asana's Sonja Gittens Ottley on Innovation through Diversity and Inclusion

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Sonja Gittens Ottley.  She's head of diversity and inclusion at Asana, one of the best work management platforms out there.  Recently, Asana has been highlighted in Fortune as the number one best small and medium-sized company to work for in San Francisco. And Sonja and I talk about diversity inclusion within Asana, how they hire, and some of the trends that she's seeing in the world of technology. Let's get started. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.io. a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Sonja Gittens Ottley, she is the head of diversity and inclusion at the company Asana.  Welcome to the show Sonja. 

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Thank you so much, Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm super glad to have you on the show. You're coming from a company called Asana. If you're involved in the startup world, and have seen the growth of what you're doing, it's pretty amazing. It's a work management platform that helps teams collaborate. Asana was highlighted in Fortune as the number one best small and medium-sized company to work for in San Francisco. That's no small feat, so congratulations on that.  Sonja, let's talk a little bit about Asana and what you do at that company. 

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Sure. I've been at Asana for four years. And during that time we've grown from a company just about 150 when I started, to over 700 people across many different countries. And one of the things that really drew me to Asana and has really made me stay at Asana is we've consistently, and from the start, been really intentional about diversity and inclusion. Approaching it in the way that we would any other business strategy. We recognize it as something that not only is the right thing to do, but it's also something that brings value to our business and to our workplace. Meaning our teams, our employees, everyone. We're really focused on creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive.

If you do that, and if you are approaching diversity and inclusion as an aspect of your culture, you're not only able to recruit top-quality employees who come from a variety of backgrounds, you're really ultimately able to retain your employees. That is one of the things that we've always been focused on, and it's something that as we continue to grow, we've really scaled in a way that makes sense for us as a company.

Brian Ardinger: It sounds like Asana has had that DNA or that desire from the beginning. How does a company, that it's leadership is maybe looking at this as a way to improve theirselves? How can they start that process of making diversity and inclusion a more impactful part of the business. 

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Part of it is really recognizing that culture and having a culture that is inclusive, ultimately benefits your company. If you think of culture as just something that's add on or something that just happens. As you build your business, you're not going to be doing this well. If you think about culture in a different way, which is that it allows you to achieve what you're trying to do as a business, your missions and your goals, and you recognize I need to have values that support that mission and that goal. How I want my company and my employees to show up and I think about values in a really intentional way. I don't think about values as something that, hmm, it might be nice to have this as a value. It's also being really intentional about what are the things that we absolutely are going to value as a company.

Then you're able to think about, well, what are the programs and policies that need to be in place to support that? And some of it are really foundational. Thinking about having a policy that creates an inclusive workplace means that you have an anti-harassment  policy. You're thinking about the fact that you could have people of many different agendas, so you need to think about a parental leave policy. You need to be thinking about policies that support all of the work that you're doing and the environment that you're trying to create. And also give signals to your employees, these are things that we stand for as well as these are things that we will not stand for right. So part of it is having that culture built in and having policies that flow from that.

Alongside that is really thinking about how are you training your managers who in addition to trying to figure out how they're having impact and making their teams grow, how are you training them to build and to empower inclusive teams? How will you give them skills that they probably have not picked up before? Managers do not come...As soon as they get appointed manager, they do not then magically get a set of skills. They have to be trained. So you have to really empower them to do that work well. 

And then alongside that is this piece around how are you essentially hiring and building a diverse team? How are you thinking about recruiting? How are you assessing people? How are you interviewing people and what are the policies in place that really look at creating a fair and level playing field? So thinking about it. Alongside the lines of not just recruiting and not just culture and not just policies, but really thinking about it along a really integrated model is ultimately how a company begins to have diversity and inclusion become a core part of their company and their company's DNA.

Brian Ardinger: How can a company get started? Is it first taking a level stock of the diversity that they have within the organization already? Does it start with hiring? Does it start at upper management defining those values in that? What are some of the starting places that companies can look at to start building this?

Sonja Gittens Ottley: It's really a combination of all of those things. To me, it's a Yes and. First off, what does our company even look like? Who's here? Who are the people that exist in our neighborhood, essentially? So it's really taking a stock of what are our numbers. What's our demographics? Some companies have done this through a survey of employees at Asana we did it through our HRIS where people could self-report how they identified, and we gave them a lot of different ways that they can identify in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, citizenship, a number of different ways, and they self report to that information. That's one aspect of it. So you get a sense of who exists. But the other, and just as important part is really understanding, well how do you feel. Do you feel as though you belong? Do you feel as though you have a voice? Do you have a sense of psychological safety. That gets into what's our baseline at our company around that sense of belonging and inclusion?

Those two bits of data really allow you to understand both qualitatively as well as quantitatively, where you are as a company and then decide, well, what are the next steps. The...