Workplace perks: Women and diverse staff looking for more than free lunch

Women and diverse staff in tech don’t care for in-house chefs or yoga classes despite the two workplace perks being offered up on a silver platter by many of the ­nation’s big tech companies.

Sarah Liu says development programs, diverse leadership and evidence of a healthy workplace culture are what really attracttech talent. Picture: Britta Campion

Women and diverse staff in tech don’t care for in-house chefs or yoga classes despite the two workplace perks being offered up on a silver platter by many of the ­nation’s largest tech companies.

The two perks are not even in the top five list of attractive qualities for either demographic, says Sarah Liu, founder of diversity, equity and inclusion firm The Dream Collective.

Rather, it is development programs, diverse leadership and evidence of a healthy workplace culture that are attracting the two groups.

Ms Liu said women and diverse staff in the technology sector wanted to see companies rewarding the right behaviours and addressing problematic behaviours in the workplace far more than any novel perk.

“It’s all well and good for companies to say they have a great culture, but if a potential employee goes to their website and realises that seven out of their nine executives are old white men, that in itself sends a very different message,” she said.

The comments arrive as the dial has shifted in what firms hired to attract staff, including The Dream Collective, are being contracted for.

Just 12 months ago the firm, which works with Google, Adobe, Cisco, AWS, Spotify and NEC, was still being asked to develop plans and campaigns to attract underrepresented groups.

But those plans had since been shelved, Ms Liu said, while tech companies, which make up 70 per cent of the firm’s clients, were looking at ways to keep their current staff engaged and on the books. “A really interesting point to note around what’s been happening in the tech space with a slowing down and a softening of the market is that we’re now seeing a really significant shift away from the massive hiring sprees,” she said.

“In the last six to 12 months, it really has shifted very significantly to talent retention.”

In the current tech market, where layoffs and hiring freezes had become common, companies were now looking to train their top talent and promote those at lower levels. This brought with it more opportunity for junior staff, Ms Liu said.

“The focus has shifted from top line to bottom line, which means that it’s actually much more important for them and much more mission critical to focus on working with an optimising internal talent,” she said

The training includes DEI management for people leaders as well as development programs, particularly women and culturally diverse staff.

The Dream Collective founder Sarah Liu: ‘It’s all well and good for companies to say they have a great culture, but if a potential employee goes to their website and realises that seven out of their nine executives are old white men, that in itself sends a very different message.’

Ms Liu said The Dream Collective was trying to shift away from outdated mentalities that encouraged employees to behave a certain way in order to be put forward for promotion, and considered ways to manage up, down and sideways.

When it came to attracting certain talent, the firm would use targeted campaigns that focused on skills certain people already had.

An example with AWS, she said, was rather than asking women if “they’d like to be a woman in tech”, they asked questions around whether they liked working in a team, were a great communicator and could solve problems. “We focus on the attributes and the transferable skills that they already have,” she said.

Internal training programs, once seen as mundane and tedious, were resulting in some unexpected consequences, Ms Liu said, with those who enrolled in and completed the programs having future-proofed themselves past layoffs rounds and, in many cases, up for promotion.

“The direct impact and outcome of these programs are the employee’s future-proofing themselves both within the ­organisation and outside of the organisation,” she said.

This was particularly true of Adobe, with 41.5 per cent of women who had completed an emerging leaders program developed with The Dream Collective having been promoted in the past 18 months. Of those who completed the programs, 88 per cent have stayed with Adobe.