Staying social during social isolation - envato.com coupon

The current global health crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic is challenging workforces like never before, with an increasing number of organisations moving to a fully flexible working environment. 

For the team here at Envato, flexibility has long been at the heart of our day to day working life, and it’s certainly helped us become a better company for the global creative community.

There are now thousands of articles online with top tips, tricks and inspiration on how to make your time in social isolation work best – we quite liked Urban List’s tips on staying calm and Wired’s extensive gear and gadgets list  – but one important aspect to consider is how do we keep our social connectivity to our friends and peers in our jobs, even as our working lives shift to Slack, Google Hangouts, Zoom meetings and more. Unsurprisingly, happy employees often cite people as the reason they enjoy their job the most!

Changing the channel

Web Infrastructure Architect Andrew Humphrey knows more than most the challenges of connecting with a team, having been based in Bali for more than five years. While he’s a big fan of creating different ‘spaces’ at home for work and rest – “Remember that working from home doesn’t mean working all the time….find a separate space where its easier to switch off” – he also finds that there’s always a Slack channel he can dive into to find a social connection.

“While I’m in a privileged position of being video calls for 3-4 hours a day, where I get a lot of face time with my colleagues, I still jump into (Slack) channels like #random and #dad-jokes to help keep myself sane. I also find #work-from-anywhere a great place to turn to for advice about dealing with some of the frustrations that arise from time to time.  Folks in there likely have faced a challenge I’m dealing with and readily share how they solved it. Then for the purely social catchup, I occasionally join in the virtual coffee catchup that runs out of that channel.”

For Envato’s marketing team, who are more used to regular coffee catchups and walking meetings than solo isolation, the shift to fully remote has brought its own challenges…and opportunities. “We’ve started hosting daily coffee and tea catchups; short video calls where we jump on and hang out while making a brew,” says Marketing Director Adam Noonan, “and we’re doing a number of group activities in our team Slack channel. This week we’re running a quiz to guess what people’s home working spaces look like!”

New problems, new opportunities

It’s these new opportunities for human connection that has Jay Hyett, Senior Delivery Coach, so excited, especially as his role has a strong focus on helping teams across Envato connect and deliver their best work. “We have a great headquarters and office setup, so its a challenge to try and keep that atmosphere alive online. We’re trying a number of different ideas, including virtual water coolers for teams, where people can bring to life that impromptu hangout experience. One of our teams is trialling a Friday night drinks session over Google Hangouts and another is seeing if they can do workouts together!”

“Icebreakers are proving to be another big thing for our teams,” continues Jay, “and something that asks people to lean in and connect a bit more than they probably would day-to-day in the office. So that’s asking people to share photos of life at their house and where they’re working from, or even simply ‘are you wearing tracksuit pants today?’. Another team just did a retro where everyone brought a stuffed animal to keep them company.”

“Yes, it relies on people having a sense of humour, but that’s what makes it human, people connecting and supporting each other at a time when we’re probably having less interaction in our daily lives than ever before.”

Sharing and caring

Senior Developer Mary-Anne Cosgrove helped pioneer Envato’s social catch up program for remote workers and women in engineering. “People like to socialise over food and drink, so I set up the monthly women’s catch-ups at morning tea and lunchtime. The remote workers catch up time was a little trickier because we’re in quite a few different time zones, but we’ve settled on an early afternoon tea time. So the idea is to grab your food and beverage of choice before coming into the hangout. I’ve often asked my team to have a virtual team lunch, and sometimes they’ve even gone out to a cafe or restaurant in Melbourne and taken a laptop so they could include me there. “

“When they’ve done that, it has really helped me feel like a valued member of the team,” continues Mary-Anne. “This social interaction is hugely important, and different people need different levels of it. I’ve seen remote working fail for a person when they didn’t have enough interaction with their team and felt isolated and alone. If a person is hanging out with their team a lot in meetings and on Slack anyway they may not feel the need for virtual coffees or lunches – but the less formal virtual catchups allow us to get to know each other better than meetings where we are mostly discussing work.”

Bringing people together

Office-based events are often a perfect chance to bring people together, so spare a thought for the social committees and event organisers around the world who are scrambling to reschedule or reshape their event calendars. Envato Office Manager Ruth Crespo and Office Coordinator Tamar Collins turned the cancellation of the company’s Harmony Day potluck gathering at the Melbourne HQ into an online-based talent show, not to mention essential recipe resource.

“It’s 100% possible and necessary to find online ways to still celebrate events. Social interaction is so vital for mental health, even if it’s from the screen. It’s better to create something and give people the option to participate and connect online, than to offer nothing.

“It’s fun taking on the challenge of pivoting to cater to the new norm, and I feel lucky to have a component of my role that helps create that culture,” adds Ruth. “We really love our jobs and bringing joy to Envato staff, so it was a bit of a sad realisation when months of planning and preparation for many different events went out the window – but it’s been fun to get together and brainstorm alternatives.”

 

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Understanding Envato’s commitment to diversity and inclusion - envato.com coupon

We are now in our fifth year of reporting on Envato’s approaches to boosting diversity and inclusion across the business – you can catch up on last year’s report here – and in doing so, outline how we rise to the challenge of improving our workplace for everyone, every year. 

While we are pleased with the improvements we made in these past 12 months, much of which can be attributed to the passion, advocacy and commitment of people across the business, we appreciate that delivering better diversity and inclusion outcomes is not a challenge that is ever ‘solved’. Rather, it’s a process we have committed to, knowing that every year we will need to take stock, respond and adjust our plans to ensure we’re delivering positively for all our employees. 

Our Out@Envato committee is an excellent example of demonstrating what a passionate group is capable of achieving in a small amount of time. From changing our gender options in our HR system, to petitioning the annual Great Place to Work Australia study to change their global demographic metrics to be more inclusive, the volunteers at Out did an amazing job to ensure we’re inclusive to non-binary folk. Their energy and momentum have inspired others across the business to see the same advocacy achieved for mental health inclusion, aiming to educate and support Envato folk in mental health-related topics.

Pleasingly, over the last 12 months, we saw further improvements in our gender balance across all position types across the business, while also introducing non-binary reporting metrics for the first time. Along the way we also adjusted our gender pay gap analysis reporting process,  meaning we can now report and act on any misalignments every quarter. And in our commitment to striving for gender equity, we’ve excitedly cheered on our third successfully graduating apprentice developer and have welcomed two more apprentices into the Envato Apprentice Developer Program.

Gender Equity

Headcount

Our gender balance increased 6% on 2018 figures, making it the fourth year in a row we’ve improved on this measure.  In the knowledge that individuals may identify as a gender other than the sex they were assigned at birth, or may not identify as exclusively male or female, we have changed our reporting demographics to man or woman. We’re also reporting on non-binary stats for the first time, with the inclusion of trans/gender diverse demographics. 

Since we started reporting on these figures, our overall split across the company has improved by 37% on 2016 figures.

We’ve improved the equity in our technical roles by more than 100% over the last four years.

Our improvement in non-technical roles continues to be steady, now up 10% in the last four years.

Leadership roles were the only category where we took a slight step back on 2018 figures.

 

Note: for the purposes of our graphs above, the term trans/gender diverse includes those who choose to identify as trans, those with a trans history, and those who identify as gender diverse, bigender, agender, gender fluid, genderqueer, non-binary or other.

Industry Measures

For the fourth year in a row, we submitted Envato to the Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI), a non-profit organization who provide a benchmark and survey in relation to inclusion for the LGBTI community. With a revamp of the Out@Envato steering committee and its renewed focus on LGBTI inclusion initiatives, we saw an 8 point increase in our score this year. 

Code Like a Girl Sponsorship

Envato continues to be a Gold Partner for Code Like a Girl. It remains one of our longest-standing business-wide sponsorships and we’re extremely proud to be able to support Code Like a Girl in their efforts to empower more women to embark on a successful coding career. 

International Women’s Day

This year’s IWD theme was all about #balanceforbetter; inspiring action to forge a more gender-balanced world.

Our guest speaker Kerryn Harvey shared her incredible story of courage and resilience after a horrific bike accident resulted in a full arm amputation. Kerryn inspired many of us to focus on what’s important and how to set goals to keep us progressing. 

LBGTI inclusion events

Our Out@Envato team hosted a number of events over the last 12 months, including : 

• International Trans Day of Visibility. An annual international celebration of trans pride and awareness, recognising trans and gender diverse experiences and achievements. 
• Wear it Purple Day:  A national day to raise awareness for LGBTI people – especially young people, across Australia with a simple message: you have the right to be proud of who you are 
• Two Out Tech meetups, which aim to bring together Melbourne tech industry workers who identify as LGBTI or Allies, with more meetups planned over the next year.

Our Out@Envato team also created our new look Envato Pride t-shirts which are now a staple wardrobe piece for many of our team, from Melbourne to Mexico!

Some of the Envato team flying the flag for International Trans Day of Visibility

 

Envato staff rockin’ our new pride tees!

Mental Health Inclusion Events

As part of World Autism Acceptance Month in April, we took part in the “Hoodies Up for Autism” campaign. We asked people to wear their hoodies to work to show a little more understanding of how we can support and embrace people with autism and celebrate the diversity autism brings to our world. Why hoodies?  Some people with autism experience sensory sensitivities and can become overloaded by stimuli in their environment; wearing their hoodie up means they can block out bright lights and busy environments which helps calm them.

The Envato team at our Melbourne HQ donned hoodies for autism awareness.

And in October we celebrated Mental Health Week with a Health and Wellness Expo in our Melbourne HQ, which included a workshop on Mindfulness and Meditation including a practical session using Muse headsets, a mental health panel run by our Mental Health Inclusion group, and a Recognition BBQ acknowledging all the positive work our peers do to make Envato such a great place to work.

Improving our Parental Leave practices

We have been reflecting on how we support employees and managers through times of parental leave, acknowledging it’s an area we can continue to make positive improvements in. In the last 12 months, this has meant tangible changes to leave allowances, while setting clearer expectations internally around how we support individuals and their managers to ensure that everyone who takes parental leave has the best experience possible. As part of this, we are continuing to improve how we provide support, clarity and career development in the lead-up, throughout and after an individual’s parental leave.

Some of the improvements we’ve made so far include:

1. Primary carer leave has increased from 18 weeks to 20 weeks at full pay
2. Partner Leave has increased to 2 to 3 weeks, full pay
3. Formally including adoption and stillbirth leave into our policies 
4. Two professional coaching sessions offered to all those taking primary carer leave.
5. Superannuation will now be paid on the unpaid portion of parental leave for all primary caregivers up to 12 months

Equity and Inclusion Officers

We rolled out our Equity and Inclusion Officer program, providing all Envato employees with a number of trained employees who they can talk to about anything they need support with. This is something we’ve been aiming to achieve for some time now, as it goes a long way to ensuring that Envato can provide a genuinely safe space for people to have difficult conversations. Equity and Inclusion Officers provide this by offering Envato’s staff community another friendly face to talk to when they need support, on top of their Manager, People Partner and our EAP service. 

Indigenous education skills development 

The Envato Foundation continues to support Australia’s young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population through partnerships with organisations that focus on opportunity creation, education and skills development. This year we donated $255,000 to our foundation partners, with the money supporting everything from new books for children in remote communities, education, training and employment programs for school-aged children, as well as fully funded secondary school scholarships. In late 2019 we were excited to announce a new partner, Indigitek, which focuses on increasing the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in tech roles. 

In Mexico, our donation efforts have focused on supporting Cres Estipac, a high school focussed on educating indigenous youth in a way that will assist them to support and transform their communities. Our donations this year helped to expand the girl’s dorm of the school. 

A Look Ahead 

There’s plenty more to be done building on our most recent diversity and inclusion roadmap, from, building out internal resources with a dedicated D&I intranet page to focussing on the initiatives that have been guided by our AWEI and WGEA submissions.

While our focus inside Envato continues to be primarily on gender, LGBTI and mental health, we remain committed to  improving any practices that maintain an inclusive workplace, be it training, reporting or other activities that help to foster an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive.

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