Pre-Interview Essay: Describe a time when you contributed toward making a work environment or organization more welcoming, inclusive, and diverse
Please describe a time when you contributed toward making a work environment or organization more welcoming, inclusive, and diverse
At FaceTube, I contributed toward making our work environment more welcoming, inclusive, and diverse by helping our team members from Australia, Mali, Iraq, and Shanghai to integrate with the Reno-based core product team. FaceTube hires representatives from each large market and relocates them to Timbuktu to form a team with expertise across all of FaceTube’s major markets. When I joined the FaceTube product team in Reno, our members in Timbuktu, all of whom came from other countries, told me that they did not feel included our team’s processes.
To facilitate more inclusive collaboration and make the most of our members’ diverse perspectives, I started proactively including them in product discussions and setting up one-on-one weekly calls with them. three months later, I traveled to Timbuktu and met the team in person. For example, Chava, who is originally from China, showed me how our product was not equipped to capture bullying violations in the Chinese market due to how user-names were presented. After I implemented this long overdue change, we saw a measurable increase in the effective identification of bullying content in the Chinese market.
The Timbuktu-based international team told me that our proactive actions finally made them feel included in our product team. I now work on a different team at FaceTube, but the inclusivity process for our Timbuktu-based team members continues to be robust. The teams in the US and Timbuktu collaborate on building roadmaps, and members of the Timbuktu team are included in every major product decision.