DesignOps Summit 2021 – How DesignOps can Drive Inclusive Career Ladders for All (Laine Riley)

 

I’m going to be sharing with you all my team story of intentionally adding an inclusivity lens to our career ladder and the different levels of effort we’ve applied overtime, plus or process on how we got this all completed

Hopefully you all will find some inspiration to take back to your organizations!

I work at Salesforce which is a company that hosts over

  • 55,000 employees
  • We sell a lot of products and
  • We acquire a lot of companies
  • I support the sales for the User Experience teams
    • 300 people
    • I specifically support team operations meaning I put together programs to apply to our entire organization of 300 rather than supporting a dedicated design or product team
    • One of my programs is our career ladder
      • Our clear ladder is referenced amongst other internal design teams which fall under the umbrella of Salesforce Design

I’m going to explain how our career ladder is structured before I discuss our dedicated changes

We call our career ladder the UX Career Competencies

  • Tool used along with other talent review tools to assess our UX practitioner’s skills and performance against a progressive set of role and level specific criteria
  • Use these as a conversation starter between a direct and their manager
  • The manager hosts individual career competencies discussion with each of their directs
  • Managers host their own personal career conversations with their managers
  • Annual refreshes of the criteria to ensure our competences continue to be accurate and reflect any changes in the industry

Left hand column

  • List out a particular set of skill categories

Middle column

  • Lists out key attributes that connects to each of the skill categories on the left
  • These are individual expectations and responsibilities that are unique to each level
  • Higher levels you’ll see new skill categories highlighted but may even see the same skill categories on the left, repeated but with net new individual attributes listing new responsibilities

Right column

  • Displays a dropdown list of our four assessment types
    • Improving
    • Achieving
    • Excelling
    • Non-scoring
      • It’s a neutral assessment
      • Might represent an attribute that hasn’t not been observed yet or an attribute that’s not relevant to that certain employee

To kick off a competency discussion a direct will do their own self-assessment at their current level and the level above

Next, they will share their own assessment with their manager, and the manager will provide their own assessment using the same assessment system, against the same individual attributes

Then the two of them host a meeting where the conversation can be directed towards highlighting and discussing

  • Top attributes
  • Opportunities for improvement
  • How the manager might support that development
  • Where the manager and their direct differ in their assessment

Our competencies are NOT a checklist for promotion and NOT an expectation where directs need to get excelling scores to advance

As a UX team we focused on improving the working experience of our customers and our users and applied inward

2021 DEI as top priority

  • Diversity
  • Equity
  • Inclusion

Gaining dedicated support from our leaders gave our team the resources and time to create key initiatives to see effective change on the team

Organization Wide Goal

  • Shape a working environment that attracts and retains, as well as promotes and enables, a diverse employee base, with a strong sense of belonging
  • We feel that we are uniquely positioned as DesignOps practitioners to support DEI efforts at scale across our organization
  • One way we’ve applied this goal is through specific changes to our career competencies

Why the career competencies?

This initiative in particular could benefit with an additional inclusivity lens to retain, promote, and enable a diverse employee base

A good way to consider inclusion is to be aware of who you might be excluding – Inclusive Design is DesignOps (Saara Kamppari-Miller)

What did we tackle first?

Over the past 3 years we provided different levels of DEI specific changes with an increase of effort, resources, and time over the years

  • Revisit yearly to determine what needs to be added or refined

5 goals we had when making our “light changes” (editing what’s already been established)

Top Goals when editing – Be clear

  • We flagged possible misinterpretations and updated the phrases more specific to the requirements we’re looking for

Sub Theme of “Be Clear” – replace colloquialisms & slang

  • Phrases that might not be understood by everyone

Beware of extroversion

  • We don’t want our UXer’s to feel like they have to fit into a certain personality type in order to succeed

 

Gender coded words

  • Words that are biased towards one gender
  • Example:
    • Masculine – logical, drive, and independent
    • Feminine – collaborative, patient, and dependable

Research shows that these words influence someone’s decision to apply against an open job description, whether it’s consciously or unconsciously

We want to ensure that anyone could see themselves excelling to the next level of their career as a UXer

To work towards more inclusive language, we leveraged an online tool called – The Gender Decoder

 

Net New DEI Skill Category – Relationship Design

This new skill category was added onto every level regardless of your UX discipline

Including the new skill, we wanted to highlight that your work is not just what you do but how you do it

Components of the Relationship Design Skill

Collection of 4 mindsets that are connected and build on each other

  • Courage
  • Compassion
  • Intention
  • Reciprocity

Attribute examples unique to UXer’s specific role levels at Salesforce

Left  – Attributes for those Early in their career (associates)

Right – Senior employees

 

Reciprocity – The back and forth of providing support

Left – Mid-tier employees

Right – Senior employees

How did we get this done? – Best Practices

Get Many Perspectives

  • As you start you editing process get many perspectives
  • I started with 1 on 1 interviews

Don’t be too Prescriptive

  • If something was unclear or uncomfortable for one person that was an indication that it had to be edited in some way

Be Perceptive

  • Be mindful of how many new changes we are adding to employee’s career discussions

We did not want to change goal expectations entirely by adding too much too quickly

Once we have the edits made and signed off, we need to ensure awareness, education, and adoption

  • We started with a 1-page resource guide
  • We listed out background details FAQ and additional career resources

Release campaign

  • Highlighting our new changes in the resources guide, and at our monthly town hall, distributed through email and slack

Live Walkthrough

  • How to use the tool
  • Panel discussion with our Design Managers
  • Live Q & A

 

Our competencies are to inspire conversation between the direct and their managers