The Value – and Challenge – of Accountability: PagerDuty Releases Our Third Annual Inclusion, Diversity, & Equity (ID&E) Report
In the last four years, corporate America, including the tech industry, prioritized and invested in Inclusion, Diversity and Equity (ID&E) initiatives more than ever before. A turbulent economy, the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic, and the reckonings over systematic racism accelerated long-overdue conversations, reflections, and programmatic changes for many businesses. The most successful enterprises have chosen not only to implement ID&E programs, but to make them a business priority.
However, any realistic accounting of this work must recognize that we are still in the initial stages of this journey as an industry, and there is much more that needs to be done to close equity gaps in the workplace. There is no such thing as a “set it and forget it” ID&E initiative. Making ID&E a business priority requires personal commitments from employees and leadership, a new mindset and operating model for the organization, and full integration into business strategy and company culture. It also requires agile planning, and a willingness to acknowledge where progress must go further.
PagerDuty’s third annual ID&E report is a testament to our company’s commitment and dedication as we continue to build toward positive and progressive change. But this report is not intended solely as a celebration of progress; it is an important vehicle to hold ourselves accountable as an organization, and an opportunity to outline our key areas of focus for the coming year. That’s why our key initiatives in 2023 will focus on upskilling Dutonians to establish a universal understanding of an ID&E mindset; creating strategic mechanisms of accountability, starting with our executive leadership; and ensuring we outline objective measures toward the outcomes that will drive the true, and lasting, change required for our company and industry.
Key findings
“Bring Your Self” and “Run Together” are core PagerDuty values, and central to our ID&E work. But equally as important are two other PagerDuty values: “Take the Lead,” and “Ack & Own.” Taking the Lead requires holding ourselves both out as an example, and to a higher and evolving standard; Acking and Owning requires us to rigorously measure our progress in hiring, retention, and leadership composition year-round, and own both our successes and our challenges. In FY23, PagerDuty has hit its business targets and got to Non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) profitability ahead of schedule. And as the report demonstrates, we’ve achieved this success while still centering our ID&E goals.
Some key findings from the report:
- Board diversity: two-thirds of the board is classified as non-white, with women making up nearly half of all board members
- U.S. race/ethnicity: 61.6% identify as white, the remainder as non-white. Senior U.S. leadership (VP and above) falls along the same lines
- LGBTQ+: nine percent of Dutonians identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community
Putting “People First”
These results aren’t just numbers to us, or a matter of simply checking a corporate responsibility “box.” Our goal is to foster internal accountability and external transparency across all things ID&E – and that begins with living our methods of putting people first.
Our culture binds us together and guides our decisions. Unique employee backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives give us our competitive edge, allowing us to remain the most innovative, efficient, and trusted digital operations management partner for our customers.
That also means our ID&E work is inevitably tied to both our business success, and our team’s Impact Work. Over the last several years, we have:
- Created six different ERGs, with 2022 ERG membership growth reaching an incredible 80%
- Distributed $2 million since 2019 in unrestricted funding to organizations like Trek Medics International, Nexleaf Analytics, and SIRUM, and deployed $1 million to close the global vaccine equity gap
- Launched a climate equity fund in 2022 with initial investments in organizations that are building solutions to the climate crisis
- Created an ID&E Ambassador Program, which provides a global perspective on cultural and business norms for every region
- Added an ID&E session to The Dutonian Experience employee onboarding program
- Developed an Executive Leadership Development Series (ELDS) with a focus on emotional intelligence and global awareness
The road ahead – accountability is critical
We are all proud of what we’ve accomplished so far. The collective commitment to these principles and to building an inclusive culture of belonging will ensure that equitable representation and opportunity exist for all.
But this report is a milestone – an early milestone – on our journey. We must continue to push forward in 2023 by furthering our inclusive hiring program, elevating pay practices and policies, and ensuring that pay philosophy is built on the foundation of equity. We’ve already expanded the compensation team’s resources and tools to align pay equity strategy with diversity representation, and have expanded pay transparency.
Continuing to expand and support ERGs will also be a key priority in 2023. We are providing ERGs with increased opportunities to support PagerDuty’s diversity goals and help them create structure, consistency, transparency, and global scalability. During Q1 we will debut Elevate, a new ERG that aims to foster a more inclusive and equitable community where women are empowered to own and excel in their career development.
Finally, we will continue raising the bar within our ID&E training and development series, building inclusive leadership with accountability to diverse representation, and upskilling to establish a universal mindset of ID&E within PagerDuty.
From executive leaders to Dutonians worldwide, we all have a responsibility to ensure that our organization is truly inclusive, diverse, and equitable. We must be accountable to ourselves, to each other, and to our customers and partners. Our role as a company is greater than the sum of our parts – we must push ourselves beyond the boundaries of our own business to support and advance a more equitable world. This is the spirit behind the newly developed Dutonian Accountability Plan, which provides Dutonians with a baseline understanding of ID&E, while holding our executive leadership accountable for improving our diverse representation, and defining how inclusion drives innovation within each business unit. Together, these initiatives will drive a greater sense of global belonging as we continue to understand how to best serve and support the communities where we live and operate.
I encourage you to read the report and see for yourself why PagerDuty is a great place to work and thrive. The full report is available to read here.