<aside> 💫 Creating the world’s best workplaces - Best practices to create diverse and inclusive places to work.

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Introduction

Following the survey on Experiences of inappropriate behavior and practices in the Finnish startup industry commissioned by the Finnish Startup Foundation, Finnish Startup Community, FiBAN, Finnish Venture Capital Association, Aaltoes, and Slush in 2023 the ethics committee formed by these organizations decided to gather a toolbox of best practices for startups and scale-ups to build workplaces that are safe and inclusive. This database is built based on interviews with tens of operators and founders from the Finnish ecosystem - thank you to everyone who gave their time!

This document is divided into 4 wider topics. Recruitment, feedback and reward, data and goal setting, and reporting and reacting to inappropriate behavior. Each section includes a short description, best practices that you should do, and some ideas on what else you could try as well any legal requirements in Finland if there are any related to the topic. When it comes to DEI, it’s not one size fits all, your organization's DEI efforts should look and sound like you. Think of DEI as an integral part of each and every process rather than something you add on to your processes.

The idea of this document is to act as your guide into creating, reviewing, or updating your DEI principles. You can save this Notion page to your own Notion and use it as guide on your way.

Recruitment

Building your team and your culture starts with recruitment. In order to attract the best builders to your company, it is important to seem attractive to a diverse group of people. Once you have the people in your pipeline, you need to make sure you are making recruitment decisions based on the right things.

Best recruitment practices:

Make sure the text on your job announcement is attractive to a diverse group of people.

• [ ] Use a tool like this Gender bias decoder to review the text.
• [ ] Include a diversity statement in your announcements, but make it sound like you, not like something you copy-pasted.
• [ ] If you use recruitment agencies or external recruiters make sure to discuss your diversity goals with them.

Use sourcing to increase your recruitment pipeline in diversity.

• [ ] Recognize what kind of profiles you struggle to attract as inbound applicants and make an effort to reach out to those profiles in Linkedin.
• [ ] Set intentional goals for sourcing - who is it that we are looking for? E.g. We want to contact people that have graduated from 10 different universities, or we want to reach out to a group of people where 60% are non-male.

Make sure recruitment decisions are based on the correct things

• [ ] Consider who is in the hiring panel, whose voice is heard in the decision making, are for example peers heard? Are there people with different backgrounds in the process? E.g. make sure all candidates meet at least one non-male in the interview process. In early founding teams this might not be possible, but remember that you can also utilize your network to help you, e.g. investors, advisors or external experts.
• [ ] Have an intentional framework on what you are measuring. This helps you avoid biased decisions based on feeling like someone is a great fit. That feeling is often based on similarity.

Ideas to try: