Auror truly believes everyone deserves to be treated with respect and feel a sense of belonging at work. Our aim is to provide a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment that enables people of different identities, cultures, and backgrounds to thrive. We also believe that our efforts towards better diversity and inclusion will ultimately generate greater profitability, innovation, and smarter teams. To achieve those things, we recognise that diversity needs to be a priority, not just a project. Being a diverse, equitable and inclusive company helps with our ability to build software that positively impacts our communities.
We have four key objectives for improving DEI at Auror, derived from the annual DEI surveys that we have conducted so far. For 2024 the priority order is as follows:
Transparent salary bands: A consistent and transparent approach to career progression and pay across all levels of the company.
Balanced representation: Addressing areas of imbalance across our leadership team and other teams lacking diversity, with a particular focus on ethnicity and gender. Listening to underrepresented groups: Creating spaces for people from groups that were typically under-represented in the tech industry (such as women, gender-diverse folks, LGBTQIA+ community and BIPOC) to gather and be
heard.
Effective DEI strategy: Clear communication on the strategy around our DEI work, and visibility of our goals, data and metrics.
Over the last 12-24 months, we have been able to co-design initiatives with the team that enable a culture of belonging such as: Launching our DEIB page on the external Auror website + provided transparency on our key DEI data, metrics and progress; Rolling out global salary benchmarking via Pave and revised our salary bands as a result; Conducting a deep dive analysis of every team at Auror to identify where any gaps in representation are, and adjust our hiring strategy accordingly; Taking direction from our affinity groups to drive initiatives to acknowledge events such as Pride, cultural holidays and
commemorations; Improving our benefits to all new parents; Continuing to make our hiring processes more inclusive: using specific job boards e.g. jobs for mums, ensuring we have a diverse panel of interviewers across the company, embedding culture interview questions throughout the process, assessing for culture add not culture fit, advertising transparent salary bands so we don’t encourage pay inequity (official band on the ad, externally visible to candidates). We have experienced 35% growth in the team over the past 12 months. We saw the number of managers increase by 33% but one of the challenges we faced was newer managers not being aligned with our inclusive hiring practices, instead defaulting to how they were used to hiring (which could be quite biassed). To overcome these challenges, we hired a Director of Talent who had a successful track record of improving talent density and team diversity in tech companies. We also rolled out training for all interviewers and hiring managers, to help people recognise and avoid unconscious bias in hiring, in addition to learning how to hire fairly but with diversity in mind.
Diversity in our digital teams, particularly in roles such as engineering where historically there has been a lack of representation from i.e. women, has brought some huge benefits such as helping us attract more diverse talent, higher levels of psychological safety and increased collaboration among teams. We also benefit from more diverse thinking while we are building out our product, helping us better reflect the needs of our users, so we can continue to build the best product for our customers.
We have now published our DEI goals and metrics, and have committed to sharing and communicating our progress for the future. We will continue to stay close to what our team tells us is important across diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging through running our anonymous DEIB surveys and sharing the results transparently. We’ll use our model of Listening, Learning, Unlearning and Actioning to ensure that progress is continuous. We have senior leaders at the highest levels as part of the DEI Collective who champion and sponsor our initiatives and ensure that progress is being made towards our wider DEI goals. We have the full support of our CEO and board of directors who look at our DEI metrics every month and identify ways that they can help us move the needle in the right direction.