Digital diversity

An important part of the groups’ popularity is the breadth of activities that BRGs can organise and their digital capability – which has become particularly useful during a period in which many workers are working from home. Indeed, with Twitter announcing in early May that many employees will work at home permanently, digital channels will become an important fixture in delivering diversity. In fact, Anne explains that digital technology has enabled the organisation to continue its inclusion efforts virtually. She refers to an activity that the BRG Twitter Faith recently facilitated online.

“Most people that have a faith will bond over food so [Twitter Faith] is having a virtual cookery course where people are cooking online and eating together and it’s really important,” Anne explains. While colleagues can’t be physically together at the moment for religious celebrations, such as Passover and Easter, Twitter’s EMEA HR lead explains that the group has done a great job at facilitating these group get-togethers virtually. Not only has this helped employees to feel included and less isolated – with Mental Health Foundation research finding that almost a quarter of Brits have felt isolated during lockdown – but it has helped the firm promote a positive company culture.

With the firm’s global Glassdoor rating standing at an impressive four out of five stars, it seems they are doing something right. Yet, Twitter Faith isn’t the only BRG to have adapted to this new style of virtual working. Anne explains that the Twitter Open group has scheduled regular ‘café slot’ calls where colleagues can just turn up and chat to one another, while Twitter Asians hosted a #FlockTalk – an agile approach to open discussions – with their Asian Twitter population, which was facilitated by the D&I team.

The power of Allies

The BRGs – which operate both in a global and localised capacity – rely on buy-in from employees who share mutual passions. Yet Anne explains that there is another facet to the BRGs that is really growing at Twitter. This – she tells me in our Zoom interview – is the notion of allyship which helps Twitter achieve true inclusivity. According to Anne, this is the concept that each employee will always have somebody to listen to them and someone that will have their back – regardless of their background, culture, sexual orientation or any other differentiating factor. “You might not be directly involved in Twitter Parents because you are not a parent but, equally, you empathise with that; you have parents you look after and you might form an allyship with that group. So, you always are standing side by side with someone in that group as a friend – I love that concept,” Anne explains, “it’s like cheering from the side-lines”.

While the BRGs are set up by employees themselves – because Anne admits that there is very little point in head office creating groups that employees aren’t passionate about – she explains that Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, fully backs the firm’s D&I efforts. In fact, the social media giant has an annual cycle of budgeting dedicated to supporting BRGs. “When we are thinking of what money we are putting into resources or tools or processes, we’re also thinking about what resources we put into our BRGs,” she adds.

The importance of managers

Another D&I initiative that Twitter has introduced is its Inclusive Hiring Programme. Through this, managers are upskilled to ensure that their thinking is inclusive – receiving unconscious bias training whilst being taught about the true meaning of worker representation. Initiatives like these help Twitter with reaching future D&I goals. But not only that, Anne explains that Dorsey commits the leadership team to advocate these D&I efforts too and each one of Dorsey’s direct reports is given workforce representation goals to help move the dial. “The support for this must start at the top and feed all the way down,” she adds. And the progress made on the back of these efforts is highlighted in some of the firm’s internal D&I data.

Twitter’s data has shown that it has made considerable progress in the D&I space. In 2019, 47.1% of new hires were female (up 1.4% from 2018) and 15.7% of new US hires were either Black or Latinx (up 3.4% from 2018). Twitter is not resting on its laurels though. In its public March 2020 Diversity & Inclusion report, the social media giant stated that by 2025, half of its global workforce should be female (which currently stands at 42.5%), with further targets around the representation of women across technical roles (42%) and leadership positions (41%) too. Within five years Twitter has also pledged to ensure that at least one quarter of the US workforce is made up of under-represented minorities. “[They are] very big goals but we will absolutely go after them,” Anne adds.