Applying Diversity Strategies to Remote Equity with Lever's Annie Lin

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Whether you work remote, in person, or partially remote, the new world of work contains multiple employee experiences. Today we are joined by Annie Lin, the VP of People at Lever, a company known for helping businesses grow their workforces and improve their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Annie joins us to discuss the new world of work and how to negotiate it from a talent perspective. While some people return to the workplace, others don’t and because everyone’s day-to-day experiences are different, creating an equitable environment for workers is a new challenge that we face. Annie explains how we can think about these new hybrid forms of work in a similar way to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Tuning in you’ll hear how Lever is aiming for equity in everyone’s ability to have an equal impact, irrespective of their day-to-day work experience, and how the company is now less focused on effort and more focused on results. You’ll also discover insight into developments in the job market and talent war, the importance of finding ways to attract diverse candidates, how Lever sets its goals for DEI, and why they break these down to the team level.

Key Points From This Episode:

• An introduction to Annie Lin, her role at Lever, and her background.
• The realization Annie had that drew her out of business management and into people ops.
• How she pushes her team to think about their roles from the mindset of being partners to the rest of the business.
• The realities of Annie’s role right now in the context of the new world of work.
• How she level sets for all of these different experiences to create an equitable environment for the individuals in them.
• Lever’s goal for equity in everyone’s ability to have an equal impact.
• How Lever is less focused on effort and more focused on results.
• How Annie thinks about this in a similar way to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
• Annie’s contact with the customer base and the product team.
• Insight into developments in the job market and how to stand out in the talent war.
• The importance of finding ways to attract and bring in diverse candidates.
• Insight into Lever’s OKRs with regards to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and how they set these goals.
• What success looks like in terms of DEI for Lever.
• Why they break down DEI to a team level.
• Annie’s analogy for looking at the positives of hybrid work and its challenges.

Tweetables:

“There’s a lot that makes a business work or not work and I truly believe that almost everything boils down to people; who you have, who you don’t have, how those people work together, how they don’t work together, how they evolve and grow as the organization evolves and grows.” — Annie Lin [0:03:52]

“I really push my team to think about their roles from the mindset of a partner to the business.” — Annie Lin [0:05:00]

“We’re actually not aiming for complete egalitarianism in terms of everyone’s day-to-day experiences, but rather what we are optimizing for and aiming for is equity in everyone’s ability to have an equal impact.” — Annie Lin [0:11:51]

“We have people who quite frankly are just effective in different types of environments and we want to be inclusive of all of that. We want all of those different types of people to still be able to be successful.” — Annie Lin [0:14:41]

"I would encourage other people leaders to think about as well, is not just think about the world of hybrid work as a problem that has to be dealt with, — but also as this incredible opportunity to really tap into the strengths and the upsides that come with it as well.” — Annie Lin [0:27:38]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Annie Lin

Lever

Hired

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