Taking action: Ways business leaders can show up and support the AAPI community
2 mins, 40 secs read time
In Part 1 of this series, I shared my personal reflections and experience as an AAPI leader. This blog post will highlight insights of how I collaborated with my peers to turn those reflections into action.
Hold safe spaces for conversations
One of my favorite things that we’ve created here at Greenhouse is the Virtual Realities series, a safe space we hold for our staff to have conversations. The topics range from anti-racism and how to become better allies to mental health and more. Participants show up as humans and leave their professional masks behind. If you’re not having these conversations at your company yet, consider centering the first conversation around an article or resource to get the discussions flowing. At Greenhouse, we have a vetted facilitation team of volunteers to run the programming with the sponsorship of our Director of DE&I, Jamie Adasi.
Plan impactful and educational programming
At Greenhouse, leaders from our DE&I council and employee resource groups (ERGs) assembled to create impactful AAPI Heritage Month programming The first component was to create safe spaces for conversation. Since we don’t yet have an AAPI ERG, we designed our three-part conversation series to gradually open up the participation makeup. There was an AAPI identity-specific session, an AAPI + ERGs session, and a company-wide session. The thought was to crescendo the community-building, safety and allyship through a format of closed, semi-open and completely open sessions. We closed with a fireside chat with Nobel Prize Nominee Amanda Nguyen to finish everything with a bang.
We also hosted PBS API documentary screenings and shared daily fun facts about the AAPI community in our #diversity Slack channel. Lastly, we provided resources for employees to learn more about organizations supporting the AAPI and Black communities, and Greenhouse matched employee donations up to $10,000.
Make lasting changes
Effecting change means putting in the effort, time and intention. For example, I refined the Customer Success hiring process with my leadership team, and developed an inclusive hiring toolkit that other departments could also use. It’s one of the many ways I try to tie the work back to serve my community. If I can make some changes to the system and process of how we hire, we can get closer to meeting our diversity goals, which includes a number of underrepresented groups.
In that effort, I reviewed our pipeline by demographic reporting during our hiring sprint earlier this year. It was critical to get real with our progress and to intentionally slow down our hiring speed so that we could open up the funnel to accept a wider range of candidates from different backgrounds. As a hiring manager, I feel an immense responsibility to build a diverse and high-performing team.
Up next for me? I’m in the process of starting our first AAPI ERG with a few other colleagues. From there, I hope to create a space where we can mentor the next generation of AAPI leaders, build a stronger sense of community and partner with other ERGs at Greenhouse to celebrate our cultures.
Ready to learn how to create a culture of belonging in an interactive format? Register for Greenhouse Open Forum: Building Belonging.
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Kevin Do
is a Senior Manager of Customer Success at Greenhouse who challenges Silicon Valley’s cultural norms by prioritizing the human first in order to get stuff done. He has created programs for self-care, and self-advocacy through nonviolent communication. He brings to Greenhouse his superpower of helping people feel permission to embrace the highs and lows of life. His passion lies in facilitating safe spaces for people to feel like they belong.