With our powers combined…
Together, we welcome diversity and celebrate each person’s individuality. Our team culture is an inclusive environment that promotes engagement and the right to self expression. We feel our environment enriches the work we do by embracing diverse perspectives to drive meaningful solutions for all walks of life.
Who is DockYard?
DockYard is a digital product consultancy specializing in production-ready apps. DockYard offers a range of consulting services with capabilities in product planning, design, user experience (UX), full-stack engineering, and QA. Over the last decade, the company has solved complex product challenges for visionary brands like Netflix, Apple, Nasdaq, and Harvard.
DockYard is a fully distributed company with 53 employees in 22 states and five countries.
Introduction
We can all learn so much by listening to the important discussions taking place around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I). One resounding message? Don’t “tell” the world how you will effect change, “show” it through action, accountability, and transparency. At DockYard, we listened to this call. We’re responding by deepening our commitment to creating a culture of respect and inclusion. In doing so, we strive to attract and retain amazing talent from underrepresented groups in the tech space. Simply put: We provide the best environment to do our best work by embracing diversity and inclusion. That’s why DE&I has become a core part of our mission:
DockYard crafts impactful, inclusive, and reliable digital products to enrich the lives of users. From idea to impact, we empower human-centric organizations to grow and innovate around people.
This past year illustrated that we needed to take action that extends beyond our own teams and into every project we touch. To that end, DockYard sharpened its focus on accessibility by making it an integral part of our product design and development. We’re also counseling clients on the importance of including diverse users in research and testing.
From an accountability perspective, we agreed to publicly denounce social and racial injustice. We worked with employees to craft public statements addressing social unrest, match contributions to charitable organizations, and offer them paid time off to vote.
DockYard is not only reevaluating how we engage in DE&I, but also who we engage in our workplace community. Representation is key to empowering and harnessing diverse perspectives. And we cannot improve the world we live in if we do not understand where we ourselves are starting from. This report is born from that desire.
The DockYard DE&I 2021 Report offers transparency around the demographic makeup of our organization–even if it shows our reality doesn’t match where we want to be. It holds the company accountable by setting specific goals for a more diverse workforce and outlines the actions we are taking to create a more equitable and inclusive work environment for all.
The DockYard DE&I Pillars: Empower. Educate. Engage.
In 2017, DockYard began a DE&I group driven primarily by very passionate employees. By 2019 it became evident that we needed a dedicated champion to lead this group. It was at this time that we appointed a DE&I lead and provided more structure to the program including the creation of our DE&I Pillars: the mission of our DE&I group.
Our approach to diversity and inclusion is driven by our most important asset: our people. DockYard’s diversity and inclusion initiatives empower, educate, and engage every member of our community to create a better work environment for all.
Through the lens of these pillars, DockYard has taken a number of steps to help Empower, Educate, and Engage including:
- Peer-to-peer onboarding program: Launched The Narwin Guide Program to help welcome new employees by offering them the opportunity to be paired with others that they identify with as they navigate their new role and company.
- Educational “programming”: Hosted educational panels, trainings, and presentations open to all of DockYard. A number of employees have used this as an opportunity to share their own stories on topics including Lunar New Year, Juneteenth, Pride, Mental Health Awareness, Microaggressions, and Unconscious Bias to name a few.
- Sponsorship of DE&I focused organizations: Sponsored a variety of external organizations including ElixirConfAfr and Women Who Code to help empower the communities we are a part of to be more inclusive.
- DE&I resource sharing: Compiled lists of important books, blogs, podcasts, and articles which have also launched ad hoc discussions. DockYarders have further contributed to the conversation by publishing their own blog posts on DE&I (see: Recommended Reading, below).
- Safe spaces for dialogue: Created Slack channels for safe, open communication around a variety of topics including BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and Women-specific open channels in addition to our broad “diversity” channel. Each of these channels is open to anyone that wants to learn more or share information regardless of identity. We’ve also added space for people to voluntarily add their pronouns in Slack.
Our Diversity Data
As DockYard’s DE&I program matured, we recognized that we needed to evaluate our baseline employee demographics and seek to improve. In mid-2021, we evaluated our data from January 2019, January 2020, and January 2021 to gain an understanding of our current and historical demographic data. We only captured information about individuals identifying as “male” or “female”. To ensure we are truly inclusive, we are adding additional identities to our data.
DockYard Employees
DockYard Leadership
Goals and Efforts
DockYard recognizes that in order to facilitate change, goals must be set and efforts aligned. When this data was collected, we set a goal of increasing recruitment and retention of underrepresented individuals at DockYard by 10% by year end. Women and BIPOC employees represented 40% of our population when we conducted this internal study. We are striving to align our efforts to increase that to 44% by year end as a first step. We will evaluate how we progressed toward these goals in early 2022 and will begin setting new targets for the year ahead.
Next Steps
DockYard is committed to continuously improving inclusion at our company. In addition to continuing and enhancing our programs above, we are also implementing the following:
Empower
- Making our data, our efforts, and our results as transparent as possible, both internally and externally.
- Expanding how we gather information through more nuanced voluntary surveys that capture data surrounding gender identity, sexual orientation, and other demographic data points.
- Supporting employee-led DE&I initiatives and providing leadership sponsorship.
Educate
- Supporting education, empowerment, and engagement through training, panel discussions, book clubs, presentations, and other opportunities.
- Developing external-facing resources such as our annual DE&I Report and blog posts.
- Partnering with external organizations to offer educational opportunities to individuals in the industry.
Engage
- Reevaluating recruitment efforts to reduce bias including blind interviewing, training and coaching of hiring team, and ensuring both diverse candidate slates and diverse interview panels.
- Ensuring our job descriptions do not include gendered language thus dissuading underrepresented individuals from applying to roles at DockYard.
- Embracing the globalization of the industry and looking at employing individuals outside of the US.
Come work with us
We are always looking for talented people to join our collaborative, fully remote team. Visit our Careers page to see current open positions.
