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As the one of few women in leadership at mabl I thought it would be helpful to readers if I responded to this review personally. I’ll start by saying I’m disappointed to learn that one of our former employees had the experience described here. I’ve been with mabl nearly 2 years and have not witnessed evidence of a culture that is unsafe to women or BIPOC employees. I have also verified that we do not have any formal complaints about feeling unsafe or being discriminated against on file with HR. In fact, the company has and continues to organize initiatives to ensure everyone on the team feels included, respected, and has an equal opportunity to grow both personally and professionally. We recognize that it’s a work-in-progress with areas still in need of improvement.
The DEI Committee is far from performative. The group meets bi-weekly and discusses a range of topics including employee well-being, improving hiring practices, employee inclusion, welcoming and supporting diversity, among other topics. More importantly it’s not just discussion, the group advocates and leads company-wide initiatives like:
--Dedicated time on Juneteenth for employee education including sharing resources, and viewing and discussion of Juneteenth Jamboree from PBS and the documentary, 13th.
--Promoting awareness of and hosting a discussion group on addressing mental health in the workplace.
--Organizing psychological safety awareness and training for people managers.
--Organizing training on how to give and receive constructive feedback for all employees.
--Revising job descriptions and the company team page with language that is more inclusive.
--Expanding new employee recruitment to sources that are more diverse and outside our own personal networks.
--Organizing the recognition and celebration of a diverse group of holidays that are meaningful to employees (Diwali, Women’s Equality Day, Ramadan, Mardi Gras, etc).
Beyond the DEI initiative, the leadership team works to deliberately create opportunities for employees (including and especially women and BIPOC employees) to lead projects, present findings or results both internally and externally, demonstrate work completed, and be recognized for their contributions both in public accolades but also in compensation. One example is our recent Experience 2021 event, where we focused on including a diverse group of experts from mabl and from across the industry to present at the event. The result was 45% women and 55% men; our goal is to make it even more diverse next time.
As the woman in the room on the leadership team, I’m surprised to learn that a former employee perceives my role as an ally to a “Boys Club” and not an advocate for women on my team or at mabl. I have personally organized regular meetups with our internal affinity group (women @ mabl), actively participate in the DEI committee, regularly bring issues to the executive staff for discussion and action, advocated for company-wide mental health days, proactively set aside dedicated budget for my team to use for professional development and training, spent hours providing detailed feedback as a tool for my team to learn and grow, conducted an evaluation on compensation to adjust for market rates and achievement, recruited experts in my personal network to share their knowledge and different perspectives with our employees - just to name a few. Every one of these things is 100% my responsibility and equally my responsibility to keep pushing these, along with new efforts, forward on behalf of women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ employees.
The last point worth addressing, is that while some employees work long hours, by and large it’s at their own discretion. Sometimes we all put in extra hours on weeknights or weekends when working to hit deadlines and exceed our goals; it’s an exception not the norm. However, mabl offers a very generous vacation policy and managers encourage their teams to take time to recharge. After a few of the busiest times, the company has also closed for mental health days to allow everyone to unplug without the pressure of being the only one out of the office.
Transparency is a behavior that is valued at mabl. Leadership leans on transparency first and gives mablers many opportunities to ask questions and share feedback - to be transparent in return. We appreciate the transparency that this forum enables for current and past employees to share their experiences; it helps us reflect on what’s working and not working.
Despite this former employee’s belief that mabl and our co-founders are hopeless, we take this feedback seriously and use these signals along with anonymous employee engagement surveys to ensure we pay close attention to our employees’ experience, make absolutely sure that none of our employees feel unsafe, encourage employees to speak up if they need help in these areas, continue to evaluate how we are doing through this lens, and actively look for ways to improve our culture at mabl.
