Leveling the playing fields so everyone can play

- To create a healthy culture, we have to lean into the nuance, into the differences to create inclusive design. It's only by listening where we're marginalizing employees where we get to the healthiest design, and so, if you think about the outliers, if someone has English as a second language and they're struggling to communicate in an organization and you're using technology, why can't we use closed captioning for every meeting so they can flourish? We know, for a fact, that if I design for the outlier, for the exception, for the individual, if you will, that all rises. If I care about you, which I do, then everyone will benefit because I guarantee you that extra care will improve how we recruit, how we pay, how we support you in times of need, how we think about our benefits and our policies. We know people struggle. If we can help them through that struggle, their voices will be heard. We'll create better products. We'll have more diversity of thought and we will be more competitive in the marketplace. It is a business imperative, but you only achieve that business imperative if you care about the human at an individual level, and again, I go back to storytelling. Storytelling is our most powerful tool in the human history. Listen to your marginalized employees, listen to your majority, find out what works, what doesn't work and solve those problems. There is a difference between a mentor, teaching you a skill, and someone that's your advocate and sponsor in an organization, and advocates and sponsors speak on your behalf and break barriers for you when you're not even in the room, and if you don't find those, if you don't have access to those, which is really hard if you're a marginalized employee, then your career slows down. That's a broken rung and you lose the majority of the voice. To make great change happen, you need to have more voices heard, and so, you need allyship. What if they don't understand your story? What if you haven't told your story? How do you have that story be heard? And so, as leaders, as allies, as friends, listen, learn, find out the difference, help them create an equitable system, not an equal system. 'Cause an equal system assumes you have all the access to tools, to advocates, to mentors, that you don't have those false ceilings along that career ladder, and we know that's not to be true. So we have to do different things to support people in this, in this new world, and I think technology will help equalize some of the playing field, but not all. It takes human intervention. It takes storytelling and it takes us having courage to be uncomfortable to hear that we are not doing things as fairly and equitably as we should.