When Gravitytank was acquired by Salesforce in the Fall of 2016, the former Gravitytankers had to get to know Salesforce and the tech industry we were about to join. Put simply, Salesforce is a tech company built on an initial unmet need in the sales industry of making the sales process smarter by reaching customers when they need the services the sales team could provide. Salesforce was one of the first to ditch the CD-ROM software model and move to a “cloud-based” model where updates happen automatically without contract commitments.

What is it like to work in tech? Will our sales, tech and innovation mindsets help or hurt us as we integrate?

Every company has a culture. While both companies wanted to work towards improving experiences, each side saw things through different lenses. One of our biggest challenges was understanding how a tech company built on a sales model with over 30,000 employees would align with a small scrappy innovation firm of roughly 80 employees. While we both consciously coupled our two innovation groups, we ran into assumptions, expectations and biases that didn’t always line up.

More broadly, the tech industry has a problem. For an industry that is on the forefront of innovation and rapid growth, it lacks diversity and equality across all levels and positions. While this issue has been widely publicized and many organizations and start-ups are making concerted efforts, the numbers speak for themselves:

Salesforce Equality Data 2019

Salesforce and Equality

Luckily, Salesforce continues to make public commitments to diversity and equality as they play their part within the tech industry. They make concerted efforts with diverse hiring practices, equal pay attempts and transparency of process. Salesforce has a clear vision of the big picture. Even with the permission and encouragement of the Salesforce organization, it is hard to know what we, the employees, could do everyday to foster that ideal work environment. The Women’s group, set out to have a workshop on Women’s day where we opened up the session to everyone, not just women. We used the time to ideate ways we could create equality in the workplace.

We came out of the workshop grateful for the participation and a ton of ideas for how to drive equality in the workplace. Knowing that we shouldn’t stop there, we took some time to analyze and cluster the ideas. Three primary observations/findings stood out from the rest:

1. There is a way to advocate for yourself and for someone else.

2. It is really about everyday actions and behaviors to foster and enact.

3. It is better to call attention to positive behavior to make it sticky.

We looked at outside examples that showcased these principals in action. One example came shining through by the former White House administration. Washington Post Article

We formed an Equality group at Ignite

Our Goal – Push to create the culture we all want at Salesforce Ignite where we treat each other as equals who do great work together everyday.

With the Women’s day workshop as a catalyst, we wanted to experiment with what we learned and see if we could create a positive impact in the newly integrated Salesforce Ignite. We developed a set of guiding principals:

We put a plan together and got people involved

We developed a four-week experiment plan that would lead up to the Salesforce Ignite offsite in Chicago:

Weeks 1 & 2 - Test and shape tactics in the Chicago Innovation Center
Week 3 - Survey the office and analyze the results
Week 4 - Share-out our findings at the global offsite for Salesforce Ignite