How can employers foster welcoming and inclusive workplaces?: CodeNewbie Podcast

Ale Thomas, Frontend Engineer at Amazon, came on the podcast yesterday to discuss mentorship, the importance of representation, and finding your favorite coding language.

On the podcast, Ale shared that one of the things that she does before accepting a job is inquiring further about the diversity, equity, and inclusion at the company.

She shared:

“Things like [asking questions about diversity during interviews] I think are very important.

[But so is] just being very observant, because it’s obviously very easy to just say like, “Yeah, our culture is great”. but it’s a very important decision, [to take a job] because you’re going to be spending a lot of time with these people.

You want to know that it’s going to be a safe place for you.”

We know through this episode and through experience/history that hiring diverse employees at a company, while extremely important, is not enough to foster a safe, inclusive, and comfortable workplace for everyone. It is important to create and recreate systems that are deeply rooted in care, healing, equity, and liberation.

We would love to use this as an opportunity to ask you all what practices you have seen or would like to see in the workplace in order to uphold these qualities.

With that, our main question for today is:

Besides hiring a diverse team, how else can employers foster welcoming and inclusive workplaces?

ICYMI— find that episode below or wherever you get your podcasts:

“Diversity Dialogues in Tech”: CodeNewbie Podcast S25E4

Sloan the DEV Moderator for CodeNewbie ・ Sep 6

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Send us your thoughts below and don’t forget to give it a listen here or wherever you listen to your podcasts! 💜