Loopio’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Annual Report (2022)

I have always believed that one of my primary responsibilities as a CEO is to build a safe and inclusive company culture, where people can thrive, and feel like they belong. It’s not only the right thing to do, but it’s a necessity for innovation and business performance.

I was born in Canada, but my parents are South-Asian and East-African immigrants. Growing up, I found myself in the “middle” of cultural and generational differences in many aspects of my life. I was constantly searching for my own sense of belonging, which led to both challenging and energizing experiences. I didn’t know it back then, but in hindsight, my upbringing heavily influenced how I lead today. It taught me that curiosity and compassion need to be at the forefront of every interaction; that progress is made by soliciting different perspectives for more creative, innovative, and successful outcomes.

Fast forward to 2014. When I started Loopio with my co-founders, we worked hard to build a culture we could be proud of, but our efforts around Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) were mostly reactive. By 2020, it became apparent to me that we had lost our way, and we were not as diverse and inclusive as we wanted to be—and as we needed to be. That year, we made our first formal business commitment to DEIB, which I am proud to say has proven to be an important part of our company’s growth and success over the past three years.

But we still have so much more work to do!

This past year, as we reflected on the work we’ve done to date and envisioned the company we want to become, a few things have become clear:

In order to create meaningful and sustainable change, our commitment to DEIB has to be intentional and transparent. It needs to be built into our business strategy so that it is part of everything we do as a company. And most importantly, as a leadership team, we need to set the tone from the top, take responsibility, and hold ourselves fully accountable for the outcomes.

I am humbled and proud to share this year’s Loopio DEIB Annual Report where we share what we’ve learned, as well as our three-year DEIB Strategy as we look ahead. I believe our Strategy is aspirational, yet I know it is achievable. It will take real commitment, investment, and accountability; and it will be a key driver in our business success.

We have lots more work ahead of us to achieve our aspirations. Sometimes, we may fall short of making the progress we need to make. But, we are committed to continue learning, growing, and improving.

At Loopio, we recognize we have a responsibility to foster a work environment where the diversity of our team reflects the communities where we live and work. And, we know that our work on inclusion and diversity—as individuals, in our workplace, and in the technology community at large—is never done.

In 2020, we introduced our first DEIB employee survey to better understand our workplace demographics, learn what it felt like to work at Loopio for team members of all backgrounds, and track how it changed each year.

We’ve continued to run that survey every fall since 2020, and have continued to listen and learn in both formal and informal settings so our team can continue to share their nuanced perspectives on their work experience.

Listening to employees—or as we call ourselves, “Loopers”—has been vital in helping us learn about where we have strengths, and where we can do better.

Last year, for the first time, we shared these key learnings from our 2020 and 2021 DEIB surveys to be transparent and hold ourselves accountable.

This year, in addition to sharing our 2022 DEIB survey results, we’re also introducing our recently launched three-year DEIB Strategy. Building an inclusive culture doesn’t just happen by accident–we all have a role to play in building an even stronger culture of belonging at Loopio and ensuring that our commitment to DEIB is embedded across our business. This is why our path forward to building an inclusive culture is shaped by our team members’ feedback and is grounded in concrete actions and goals to guide and measure our progress.

At the heart of this strategy is our #OneTeam Commitment, which is our company commitment to our most important asset—our team. I want to thank every Looper for continuing to be vulnerable in sharing their experiences, being transparent in their feedback, and challenging us to do better because it’s this feedback that helps us build a stronger, more equitable workforce.

We share this with you today so that all Loopio customers, candidates, partners, and friends know our commitment to our employees.

We want Loopio to be a place where a Looper joins, and regardless of what stage they are at in their career, they are given the opportunity to make an impact, answer thought-provoking questions, and grow more than they ever thought possible.

A real DEIB commitment needs to be built into everything we do—from the way we hire, to how we engage with and support our team, to how we make decisions, and ultimately, the way we do business. We have an opportunity to drive meaningful impact and change and I look forward to seeing what we can achieve, together.

As we’ve evolved our perspective and approach to diversity, equity and inclusion, we realized this past year that we were missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle— the “B” for belonging. Here’s why:

We define belonging as every individual feeling welcomed, valued, respected, and safe to show up as their full, authentic self.

Belonging matters because it is a key indicator of employee engagement. When employees truly feel they belong, they and the business have better and more successful outcomes. Another way we like to think about it is if inclusion is our intention (which it is!), then belonging is the impact or outcome. That impact, belonging, is what we need to track our progress and hold ourselves accountable.

At Loopio, our goal is to build a world-class workplace—and we can’t accomplish that without an inclusive culture that creates space for everyone to grow, equally and fairly.

This was a statement we shared in our 2021 DEIB Annual Report, and it is a statement that continues to hold true for the way we think about and approach DEIB today.

Our annual DEIB survey has served as an important data gathering tool to understand Loopio’s demographic makeup and employee experiences. This, combined with soliciting continuous feedback, ongoing education on DEIB-related topics, and engaging experts to support and advance our DEIB work, have helped inform the actionable steps we need to take to drive meaningful change through our DEIB efforts.

It’s important that we continue to measure and share our progress and key learnings with both our employees and external stakeholders to ensure that we:

Our first internal DEIB survey in December of 2020 provided us with a baseline for tracking our workplace demographics and measuring progress against it. Our third survey was completed in 2022, and these results are reflected below.

To help conduct our DEIB survey, we partnered with CultureAmp, an industry leader in transforming employee experiences through research-led initiatives. The survey is intentionally designed to track responses in an “unattributed” way where we can’t link data back to an employee’s HR profile, ensuring our employee’s privacy is protected.

DEIB is an ongoing process, and not something that can only be solved by an annual DEIB survey. Along with our annual DEIB survey, we foster an environment that encourages open conversations, ongoing educational opportunities, and provides a safe space to hear and learn from our team throughout the year.

After our 2021 DEIB survey, we identified a few key growth areas for 2022, including: 1) increase representation among our leaders, 2) learn more from our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), and 3) continue to build our community partnerships. Now, a year later, we reflect on those commitments and how we’ve progressed against them.

Focus 1: Increase Representation Among Our Leaders

Diversity can’t only happen at the Individual Contributor level—or else we aren’t building a truly equitable workforce. We wanted to equip our people leaders with the tools and training needed to increase their ownership over DEI among their teams.

Focus 2: Learn More From Our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)

We spent the year listening to and learning from our ERG members who have impactful and tangible ideas on how to improve Loopio as a workplace, and in 2022, we increased our investment and support of their efforts and role within the company.

Focus 3: Continue to Build Community Partnerships

We’ve learned so much from our community partners, and in 2022, we doubled down on these efforts and engaged with organizations that support traditionally underrepresented groups in technology.

In 2022, we learned a lot from Loopers through our various feedback forums. Some of our key learnings and highlights:

The following is only a partial representation of the total data we garnered from the 2022 DEIB Survey. Beyond the data shared below, we also surveyed for additional data related to other demographic identities/groups/associations, such as disabilities and conditions, religious affiliation, family status, education and more.

Race and Ethnicity

As of 2022, almost half (49.6%) of our workforce identified as BIPOC or other, with just over 50% identifying as white.

Compared to 2021, this was a 10% increase in BIPOC representation, and an 18% increase compared to 2020. We attributed this to consciously expanding our recruiting efforts and diversifying our community partnerships and candidate pools.

Gender

In 2022, we saw strong representation of both men and women in the workplace, with just over half the workplace identifying as a woman or non-binary.

*While we do have a small group of employees who identify as non-binary, this group did not meet the reporting minimum (for confidentiality protection). For the survey results, we grouped non-binary responses together with women.

In our 2022 survey, we took a deeper dive into gender distribution by job level and department where we found that each job level had at least 33% women represented. Many of our departments had strong representation of both men and women, with our People team having the highest representation of women (89%) while our Engineering team had the lowest representation of women (25%).

Sexual Orientation

In 2022, 12% of Loopers identified as part of the LGBTQ2S+ community, 87% identified as heterosexual, and 1% did not specify.

Compared to 2021, we saw a drop in LGBTQ2S+ employee representation (-5%).

We know from industry research that there is a connection between EDG representation in people manager and leadership roles and the experiences of employees who identify with one or more EDGs. Therefore, in addition to understanding the demographics of Loopio overall, it is also important to understand the demographic makeup of our team of people managers and company leadership. We analyzed our DEIB survey results to better understand representation and related trends within our leadership teams. We also assessed if/how the diversity of our team of people managers and company leaders reflects the diversity of our overall Loopio population.

In 2022, more than half of people managers identified as women, with over one quarter of people managers identifying as BIPOC and 6% were LGBTQ2S+ managers.

Over the last two years (2020-2022), we have seen increased representation of women in people manager positions by 5%, and of BIPOC people managers by 14%. LGBTQ2S+ representation in people manager roles fell slightly by 1%.

It’s an exciting time as we kick-off 2023 with the launch of our 3-year DEIB Strategy. This strategy is aspirational, yet achievable. Our DEIB strategy establishes our 1) DEIB pillars, 2) strategic objectives and measurable goals for each of those pillars, and 3) a tangible action plan with clear initiatives to move the needle toward achieving those goals. We believe a 3-year timeframe is long enough to demonstrate our commitment, as well as measure and track our progress in a meaningful way.

At the heart of our DEIB strategy is our #OneTeam Commitment to all of our Loopers. We like to think of it as the “north star” that guides everything we do.

Our DEIB Strategy is not separate from our business strategy. Rather, it is an essential part of our business strategy, with the goal of being part of everything we do.

Our DEIB strategic pillars are the backbone of our strategy. They act as a guide to ensure our strategy prioritizes diversity, equity, AND inclusion. Although not part of the DEIB acronym, the fourth strategic pillar, leadership, is equally as important. The leadership pillar is where we hold ourselves accountable as leaders, both at Loopio and within the industry.

We’re committed to investing in diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging because it is the right thing to do and because it will be a key driver in our business success. We know that it is going to take every single one of us to make it happen, and we are confident that together as #OneTeam, we can and we will continue to build a world-class workplace where everyone has the opportunity to succeed.

If you have any questions about anything in this report, please contact work@loopio.com.