Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Wistia
February 15, 2021
Chris Savage
Founder, CEO
Brendan Schwartz
Founder, CTO
Integrating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) into everything we do as a business is not only the right thing to do — it’s the best thing we can do for our teams and our community. This work impacts how we grow and build our teams, how we cultivate leaders, and how we create a company that fosters a sense of belonging for everyone in it. This work is exciting. This work is also hard.
We’ve been committed to making Wistia a more inclusive place to work for a long time now, but we found that without bringing our DE&I efforts in at the company level, we would often make progress and then get stuck as other urgent things came up. As a small business, the key for us has been truly making it a company wide priority.
After a careful look at the ways we could make progress, we decided to bring in the Diversity@Workplace Consulting Group in 2018. Diversity@Workplace is a diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting and training company that focuses on change-driven strategies. We worked with these experts to help us understand the best ways to implement change at Wistia, and then figured out how we could incorporate this work in an ongoing and sustainable way.
Over the past three years, we’ve achieved gender parity across the company at all levels, implemented fair and equitable pay practices, and made our product more accessible. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made so far, but we still have a long way to go towards achieving our vision for the future.
We also know that an important part of this work is being transparent and accountable about what we’re doing. We’re committed to trying new things, making changes, and learning along the way. Today, we’re taking the first step in that direction by sharing a new "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" page with you that highlights our current philosophy, data, and progress so far.
We’ve created a plan that’s grounded in three key pillars to help guide us moving forward — building the team, working together, and creating social impact. From our hiring processes and how we collaborate to how we build our product, we’re committed to approaching everything we do through a DE&I lens.
We’ll continue to share more insights, learnings, and updates with you throughout the year right here on the blog as we learn more. Plus, we’ve got a new podcast from Wistia Studios coming out soon all about DE&I at work hosted by two members of our DE&I Task Force, Jane and Colin, from our People and Customer Happiness teams. Stay tuned for more from us on that front!
We’re really excited to keep this momentum going and to continue to make this critical investment, but more importantly, we’re thrilled to make Wistia a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive place to work.
Chris Savage & Brendan Schwartz