Our 10th anniversary provides a moment to reflect on the company that we’ve built together.
What I see is a company that is successful to a great extent because it is diverse, fair and just. A company that strives to behave honestly, ethically and with great integrity.
I hear different voices, listen to different perspectives and hear discussion and debate. I see people of very different backgrounds and upbringings treated fairly and given equal opportunity to thrive.
Reward Gateway is becoming a great company because we employ as many women as we do men, because we pay and reward fairly and because we are open to everyone regardless of the gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, age or educational background.
It is this diversity that makes us strong and resilient.
But still, our ambition exceeds our ability. We want to do more. We need better ethnic diversity, we need better age diversity. We need to find and eliminate unfairness and bias wherever we find it. We need to drive out anything that stands between us and the best talent.
This report is another good step on that journey.
Glenn Elliott
Founder & CEO, Reward Gateway
rg.co/diversity
2. Our 10th anniversary provides a moment to reflect on the company that
we’ve built together.
What I see is a company that is successful to a great extent because it
is diverse, fair and just. A company that strives to behave honestly,
ethically and with great integrity.
I hear different voices, listen to different perspectives and hear
discussion and debate. I see people of very different backgrounds and
upbringings treated fairly and given equal opportunity to thrive.
Reward Gateway is becoming a great company because we employ as
many women as we do men, because we pay and reward fairly and
because we are open to everyone regardless of the gender, sexuality,
ethnicity, religion, age or educational background.
It is this diversity that makes us strong and resilient.
But still our ambition exceeds our ability. We want to do more. We need
better ethnic diversity, we need better age diversity. We need to find
and eliminate unfairness and bias wherever we find it. We need to drive
out anything that stands between us and the best talent.
This report is another good step on that journey.
Glenn Elliott
Founder & CEO
3. Methodology
This report uses gender, ethnicity, sexual
orientation, disability status and religious
beliefs from the Jan ‘17 survey and age data
from BambooHR.
We had a response rate of 76% (271 out of 355
staff) and we only report on people who
responded.
We don’t make assumptions from those who
didn’t respond but we did check HR gender
records and the non responders would not
have changed results significantly if they had
responded with their gender that is on record.
In some charts, you’ll notice we will summarise
data to protect anonymity in small teams.
We’ve shown what we think is the most
relevant and useful analysis of the data. If there
is a chart or data cut that you’d like, please just
ask us.
We’ve expanded the companies we
benchmark against to include Buffer and
Hubspot who are both smaller B2B tech
companies. Their full reports are here:
Apple Atlassian Buffer Google
Hubspot Microsoft
4. ‘Prefer not to say’ or ‘Prefer to self describe’
We hope that the benefit of sharing your
information is clear; it helps us
understand if we are diverse in our
management teams, in different
departments and compared to other
companies.
We wanted to get 100% response rate for
accuracy and completeness, but the
option of ‘prefer not say’ is just as valid a
response as any other.
Choosing that option is completely OK
with us.
We believe that the only person who has
the right to define your gender and other
preferences is you.
RG does not believe that you have to fit
into a particular box so it’s really
important to us that you can choose to
self describe.
We’ve reported overall numbers in this
report to preserve anonymity, which is
why you’ll see the ‘other’ category used
in some of the pie charts (with gender for
example).
7. Comparisons
Overall, a great result
compared to other tech
companies, and it’s
comparable to RG last year
when we had a 50/50
male/female split.
271 RG people responded.
135 female, 130 male, 6 other.
Gender split - all staff
8. Technical job split
Here we define ‘Technical’ as
engineering and/or product
focussed roles (not service or
admin focussed).
Last year we split into tech and
engineering roles separately. With
those definitions - the only people
considered as technical but not
engineering were the
Implementation team (26 people)
so it makes more sense to report
just on ‘Technical’ roles which
matches what a lot of other
comparative tech employers do.
33% of our Technical staff are female (31% of
engineers)
Gender split - technical staff
9. Data notes
The 20% of our staff in smaller
offices are really important, just
remember it takes a smaller
change in headcount in any
gender to move % more
significantly towards the 50/50
split.
To preserve anonymity, we’ve
combined smaller locations
(less than 3 staff) with their
most local office and we
haven’t included the prefer not
to say/self describe responses.
Our largest site is 48% female and all others
but 1 are more than 50% female
Gender by location
10. Comparisons
Since last year, People,
Finance, Sales and Client
divisions have moved closer
to a 50/50 male female split.
In 2016, we included one %
for Product which included
Richard & Will’s team. The
same applies to Sales and
Marketing which are now
reported separately. When
combined - both have also
improved their gender split vs.
last year.
Our gender split by division has improved
everywhere since last year
Gender by division
11. Analysis
As you might expect (&
similarly to 2016) our
departments individually are
further from the 50/50 split.
We have areas to look at
here, particularly some of
our support and
tech/product teams.
More varied gender mix by dept
Gender by department
13. Our management levels
The new larger Leadership Team (since the
2016 reshuffle) means there’s no need for
the extra level of management included in
last year’s report. Here are the four simplified
levels:
1. Member of the Leadership Team
2. A senior manager who has broad
global/regional remit, manages
managers and/or works with LT
strategically as well as operationally
3. Senior professional staff or managers
who manage a team/function
4. All other professional staff
We are not sharing everyone’s management
levels this year for 2 reasons:
1. Your ‘level’ is nobody's business but
your own
2. Most importantly, this structure is to
help us understand diversity - it isn’t to
determine seniority, salary or anything
else at all
If you would like to know where you
personally have been grouped, the People
team will be happy to let you know.
14. Comparison to 2016
As the categories are different
for 2017 (4 not 5 levels),
comparisons are not
particularly helpful here.
We can say however that we
are 30% closer to an even
50/50 split across all
categories than in 2016.
Gender by management level
Women have 3 out of 11 Leadership Team
positions, Senior Management is 65% female.
16. Definitions
Similarly to us, the Apple and
Atlassian ‘Leadership’ category
covers mid and senior level staff,
quite simply anyone under the
category ‘manager’.
In truth, our stats would be better
(exactly 50/50 male/female) if we
looked at just senior management
and compared to Buffer, Google,
Hubspot and Microsoft who classify
‘leadership’ in that way.
With this, more honest and accurate
filter, we’re still 17% ahead of Apple.
Across all management levels, we have close
to gender balance at 45% female, 55% male
Gender - all management and leadership levels
17. Definitions
Whenever there is a small %
in one category, drilling down
further encroaches on
potential anonymity, so we
haven’t done that here.
Atlassian is the only other
company to share data on
sexual orientation and they
report 11% of their workforce
identifying as LGBT.
9% of our professionals identify as Lesbian,
Gay or Bisexual, but only 3% of management.
Sexual orientation by management group
19. RG UK ethnicity
The table might seem to show we’re on track
with the UK population, however there are 3
reasons we still want to improve UK diversity:
1. Census info is only from 2011
2. The census covers all ages and we’re
looking at RG staff of ‘working age’
3. RG staff are city-based and the census
covers the countrywide population
RG UK
Staff 2017
UK Census
2011
Asian/Asian
British
12% 8%
Black/Black
British
3% 3%
Mixed Heritage - 2%
Other Ethnic
Group
1% 1%
White 84% 86%
21. RG Bulgaria ethnicity
This chart shows that we are slightly less
diverse than the 2011 census stats. The first
two issues found with the UK census apply
here (date of data collection plus age of
respondents).
Also, Plovdiv represents less than 5% of the
Bulgarian population means we need to bear
in mind the differences that may be present
between potential Plovdiv-based employees
and all Bulgarian residents.
RG BG
Staff 2017
BG Census
2011
Bulgarian 93% 84.8%
Turk 1% 8.8%
Roma 0% 4.9%
Other / Mixed
Heritage
4% 1.5%
Prefer not to say 2% N/A
23. RG Macedonia ethnicity
Macedonia is one of the RG countries with
fewest employees (14), so the stats here are a
little misleading.
We will keep focus on diversity in all regions
but it would require less actual headcount
change here to be at least equal to census
data compared to some of the other regions
with smaller % disparities.
RG MK
Staff 2017
MK Census
2011
Macedonian 90% 64%
Albanians 0% 25%
Turks 0% 4%
Other/Mixed
Heritage
0% 7%
Prefer not to say 10% N/a
25. RG Australia ethnicity
RG people in Australia were asked two questions on ethnicity:
do you identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander? And
which ethnic group do you most identify with?
We researched what we thought would be best for the second
question, but some feedback from our RG people once the
survey was out, showed us that there is a better way to do
things.
The next slide shows some of the data we gathered, but the
next survey will be slightly different, asking for place of birth
instead of which ethnic group our staff identify with. The place
of birth statistics are more commonly available for comparisons
and that’s what we’ll use next time.
26. RG Australia ethnicity
With a sample of 21 staff responses in
Australia, the stats here can move by nearly
5% with just one staff member in a different
category.
Therefore, similarly to our conclusion on
Macedonian ethnicity, this doesn’t highlight a
great concern when compared with some of
the other regions with greater % disparities.
RG Aus
Staff 2017
Aus Census
2011
Aboriginal 0.0% 2.3%
Torres Strait Islander 0.0% 0.1%
Both 0.0% 0.1%
Neither 90.5% 97.5%
Prefer not to say 9.5% 0.0%
27. RG USA ethnicity
So...the USA. It has a population of around 318 million people. We’re looking at a sample of 10
responses. Even just looking at Massachusetts and Colorado where our staff are based, that’s
12.1 million people. I’m not highlighting this to say it’s not worth monitoring and analysing, but
just to highlight how much smaller our sample is versus the whole population.
This is the only region where we’re not actually sharing the data. Preserving RG people’s
anonymity is the MOST important factor here, and by sharing the info we’d be compromising
that.
When we have more staff in the US, our stats are likely to be more meaningful and we’ll be more
likely to share them without compromising anonymity.
29. Analysis
Breaking this down further
by location or adding
specific numbers to each
category would compromise
the anonymity we’ve
mentioned before.
It’s something we are using
as a first benchmark to
compare to future years’
data, so whilst we want to
share as much info as
possible now, it’ll be more
useful to us in subsequent
surveys.
Many different religious preferences at RG but
an uneven spread
31. Analysis
The age profile is hugely
weighted towards employees
under 35, however when you
compare to Buffer, it’s not too
dissimilar.
It’s trickier to compare to
more tech companies as
fewer report on age diversity,
and those that do use
different age bandings.
When we look into age
profile by gender, it shows
that there is very no
significant disparity between
male and female.
We have a predominantly young workforce
32. Our management levels show a good
benchmark to work from
Analysis
This is something we will
continue to report on and
seek more external
benchmarks to work
towards.
Buffer published that 100% of
their staff in ‘leadership’
roles are aged 25-34 which
isn’t what we’d aspire to.
You might expect an age
spread like this when we
look at seniority, but we
don’t want to settle on that -
we’ll always look for a better
and more diverse spread.
Age profile by management group
33. Analysis
It’s useful to know that our
age diversity isn’t the same
in all our offices as it allows
us to focus our efforts.
There is strong age
diversity across our largest
offices in Plovdiv, London
and Sydney.
Whilst the employees in our
smaller offices represent a
larger % on these charts,
there is still under
representation which needs
addressing.
Age diversity varies across our global offices
Age profile by location
34. That’s it for the data. What do you think?
Speak Up and let us know...
rg.co/speakup
35. What else did we promise for this report from
our Sept 2016 Action Plan?
1. Create the diversity group
2. Create a schedule for what data we collect
3. Expand our recruitment search
4. Review our recruitment selection and promotion
5. Identify how we can promote and celebrate our commitment to diversity
6. Integrate Diversity & Inclusion into Learning & Development
36. How did we do? In truth, we focussed
on the data....there was a lot of it! But
overall I think the results are pretty
strong.
37. Our Diversity Team is now up and running with 13 members
across the UK, USA, Australia, Bulgaria and Macedonia. We
share ideas, thought-provoking content and we worked
together to decide on the data we collected in our first full
diversity survey in January 2017.
38. What about recruitment?
Broadening our recruitment search and how we select candidates is a work in progress.
We’ve gathered all our recruitment sources in all regions and we’re looking at broader and more
innovative ways to search for our potential candidates.
We’ve also started a programme of unconscious bias training to help our recruiting managers
make fairer decisions.
39. Two things for the next report...
January 2017 also saw our first unconscious
bias training session with managers and
members of the Diversity Team.
That’s just the first step, there’s lots more to do
with Rob and the People team to integrate
diversity & inclusion into L&D across the
business. We have a new LMS on the way and
a bigger L&D team than ever to make this a
priority.
We’ve created the Diversity Team and on a
worldwide scale, we saw the amazing launch
of the RG Foundation helping girls into
education, women into work and people from
ethnic minorities have a fair chance at building
a business.
There are however specific awards we want to
enter in the future to promote and celebrate
our diversity.
40. This is our first deep dive into more
detailed data, but there’s lots more to
do in other areas of diversity.
You’ll see our next data report like this in January 2018, but the mid year report will update
you on progress in recruitment, promotion and L&D.
In the meantime, the survey data is what we’ll keep in Bamboo. It will appear in your
dashboard and you’ll be able to change any of the fields yourselves.
Thanks so much for reading and for sharing your data, it’s exciting to see how we’ll
continue to progress with RG diversity.
41. I’d like to start with a big thank you to Sarah Akanbi for delivering this
second report, this gives us another great benchmark to work from.
I think of this as being very much progress, but not perfection. I am
especially pleased with two areas; firstly our continued balance in gender
diversity, and secondly the level of diversity in ethnicity across the
business, and in particular the UK and Australia. Amazing building blocks
that we will continue to improve on.
There are lots of areas where I can see we can do better, and I’ll be
working with the People teams to create initiatives to deliver those
improvements
I am also excited about talking to colleagues about how we can drive up
the response rate, as whilst the survey is optional, having 76% of staff
respond feels like we are missing some pieces of the jigsaw. I’m eager to
understand how we can increase this number so if you’d be happy to
Speak Up and tell me how I can make responding easier for you, I’d really
appreciate it.
Thank you to everyone who responded, Diversity & Inclusion are areas
which will remain a key focus for us going forward, so your help with the
data collection is key. Rob Hicks, Group HR Directo
@HRinLondon