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I spoke about building a diverse and inclusive global team recently, but the topic has weighed on my mind for a while and I have a few more thoughts I’d like to share.

Scaling a company to serve millions of customers and generate billions in revenue requires a strong, resilient and collaborative team. It’s not an easy feat to achieve, and not many companies ever reach such lofty ambitions — especially global ones! But the ones that do have carefully thought through their people strategies, their leadership structure and their hiring tactics.

People power businesses

People are the essential element in scaling a business effectively. One of the biggest challenges hyper-growth companies face is hiring the right people in the right place, and at the right time. Ensuring leaders cultivate a positive workplace is essential in mobilising the strategy at pace. One questionable hire can throw a team’s culture, momentum and ecosystem off kilter. Screening for cultural fit from the moment a candidate engages, and readjusting teams to scale while maintaining ‘the magic’ is an ongoing process. One that happens while balancing new hires with retaining key talent.

Led by a CEO passionate about diversity and inclusiveness, Xero encourages their people to blaze their own trail, take ownership and do beautiful work. It’s what enables our more than 1,500 employees to do the best work of their career and be part of rewiring the small business economy. Putting employees at the heart of our strategy is what enables Xero to continue to grow at rates higher than most global tech companies.

We have internal tools which provide a barometer of the sentiment of our people. This includes a global engagement survey, Officevibe, which provides real-time feedback on a weekly basis. Offering our people the ability to participate in a weekly engagement tool in such a fast-paced global environment is essential to ensuring a constant pulse is checked. It gives people across the entire business – whether in product development, sales, marketing or customer experience – the opportunity to provide open and honest feedback.  While the scores that the tool provides gives us the ‘pulse’, it’s the comments that provide the valuable insights – both what we are doing well, along with what we need to address.

Hiring

We focus on consistently filling a our talent pipeline. This ensures we have the ability to make the right hiring decisions as our needs are expanding at pace. We invest in internal research skills to let us to not only tap into the active candidate pool, but also the passive candidates who may be a good fit for our business. Pipelining key leadership talent also something we focus on. The executive team spends a lot of time on this as we believe it’s the key to our success.

Leadership – diversity and inclusion

Diversity and inclusion should be a key priority for any business. One of the main reasons being that businesses thrive when led by varying perspectives. We’re committed to hiring the best person for the job – regardless of geographical location. This has led us to have a globally distributed Senior Leadership team comprised of 50% women. Our diversity of locations and people lets us do more. We’ve produced an organisation of ambidextrous skills, capabilities and personalities. This means we can look at issues through a multitude of lenses and perspectives.

In addition, our customer base is diverse in it’s make up. We have both the SMB marketplace and accountants and bookkeepers. They comprise diversity of people and that ensures we are better able to build products that meet their needs. Diversity and inclusion is a key part or our corporate strategy from both an internal and external perspective.

Building in transparency and cutting hierarchy from our ranks also promotes agility and initiative right across the organization. In order for a global company to grow, we must promote autonomy and decision making must be fast. Building a flat and agile team drives growth into the future whilst enabling individuals with a growth mindset to flourish.

To set your company up for continuous growth you just need to do a few things. Ensure the right strengths are employed. Have a clear and purposeful strategy that you always communicate. Empower leaders and teams to work with autonomy. With that you have a stronger chance of growing without compromising culture.

The post International Women’s Day: How to build diverse and inclusive global teams appeared first on Xero Blog.

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