Engage and Empower Rasika Rajagopalan

In this episode Sid Pandiya talks about the story and inspiration behind Kona, his company that provides companies a tool to drive conversations around how teams are authentically feeling, and how to best support one another. Sid shares many tips around how managers can generally build trust and psychological safety on their teams, and how Kona leverages their learnings through their platform as they internal build their own company culture. Sid talks about his journey as an entrepreneur and what he's learned as he has built Kona through a time where more and more companies are moving towards distributed or hybridized work. 

In this episode, Emma talks about the evolution of the interview process over the last few years, and discusses what types of qualities employers should be looking out for as they evaluate talent. She gives advice to candidates that are contemplating a career pivot, and shares her personal story around how she managed the pivot from marketing to people operations. Lastly, we talk about strategies to build authentic employer brand, and how to think about creating that through the lens of how you think about branding your product. 

Sean Cervera has been in the diversity space for over 10 years and has a wealth of experiences leading diversity and recruiting initiatives from LinkedIn, Twilio, Uber, SpaceX, Google, and most recently, Curology. Sean talks about the distinction between Inclusive Recruiting, vs. Diversity Recruiting, the former being a philosophy and process towards enabling all candidates to have equitable opportunities, and the later focusing on key outcomes. Sean also talks about the challenges of developing diversity strategies for large globalized companies, and shares insights into how he has approached this in the past. 

In this episode, Claire talks about her inspiration to found AllVoices, a powerful platform geared towards enabling employees to anonymously share feedback with their company’s leadership and people team. AllVoices also provides leaders and People team members the opportunity to respond directly to employees around feedback, opening up conversations and dialogues that may not otherwise have surfaced. AllVoices captures everything from culture feedback, to harassment related feedback, to even Covid19 Health and Safety Related feedback. Claire talks about everything AllVoices has learned about harassment prevention and enablement as her team worked with many companies over the last few years through her product.

GitLab was early in the game in building a fully distributed work experience. In this episode, Darren shares insight into what guided GitLab's initial decision to be a fully distributed company, along with best practices around scaling your remote culture and experience. He discuss the importance of enabling asynchronous work, the value of in transparently sharing your philosophies, and the importance of discussing core values in your hiring process. 

In this episode, Aubrey talks about the power of Equitable Design in making meaningful, impactful, systemic change, and what this looks like at CultureAmp. She also talks about how companies can cultivate belonging as they transition to distributed models for the longer term. Lastly, Aubrey touches on diversity fatigue, the future of DEB, and the role that her own identity plays in this work.