Looking Back: A 2022 Retrospective on DEI at Yext

A big part of happiness at work stems from feeling included and welcomed. 80% of employees say that they want to work for companies that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Of course, ideas on how companies should promote DEI initiatives are different from person to person – and there's a strong variance between employee and company leaders' views. As a Harvard Business Review study found, 97% of HR leaders say they've implemented positive changes to promote DEI, but only 37% of employees strongly agree.

There is still room for improvement when it comes to DEI – a fact that Yext doesn't shy away from. In 2022, Yext continued its mission to create an inclusive, engaging, and diverse workplace. Now that the fiscal year has come to a close, we're looking back at over 50 Yext-sponsored events, thousands of dollars put towards employee-driven philanthropy causes, and hundreds of hours spent volunteering.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are priorities for us here at Yext. As a company, we value our employees – but as people, we want to create safe, inclusive spaces for our colleagues. It's not just a human resources mission statement; it's built into every interaction and decision at Yext, from hiring to training to growth opportunities and beyond.

Joining us in this public retrospective on Yext's DEI initiatives is Neal Booker, Senior Diversity & Inclusion Manager at Yext. Neal is the driving force behind the company's push towards equality and equity within the company. In the spirit of transparency for current Yexters, future employees, and anyone else invested in our DEI strategy, Neal will walk us through Yext's definition of and views on DEI, what actions the organization took to promote DEI initiatives in 2022, and what's still to come in 2023.

My name is Neal Booker, and my official title is Senior Manager of Inclusion and Diversity here at Yext. I've been with the company a little over two years. It's been such an impactful, important time in my life – not only because of the nature of the work that I do, but also because of how it impacts me outside of work. I am charged with enabling the improvement of equity, diversity, and inclusion. I lead our internal initiatives and work with colleagues to change processes and behaviors to support related external work and communication.

My work is something that I feel I was born to do. It really makes it so easy to have these conversations, to connect with folks on a global scale. I was joking with someone recently about what my day to day looks like; I could be having a conversation with the Editorial team around a blog that highlights the great work our ERGs are doing, like I am now, or I could be working with the Head of the London office on ways to support diversity and inclusion. And then, the very next day, it could be a meeting with an external partner to drive sustainable changes to protect the environment.

My role is broad but focused mainly on driving a culture of belonging within all aspects of the business, our policies and procedures, and then taking an analytical approach to increasing diverse representation for all.

Great question. I think it's important first to understand the definition of each of those terms, and then I'll dive into how Yext applies this to our own strategy.

Diversity is the sum of social, cultural, and identity-based human attributes represented within it. It can encompass a wide range of individual backgrounds and experiences. Diversity can also be based on age, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. At Yext, we try not to put it into a particular box; essentially there's so much more diversity that the world has to offer that fits outside of that particular spectrum that I just mentioned. We want to make sure that we're considering all of those things.

However, we are able to quantify many of these components to assess our current state and trends, and to make necessary changes to positively influence representation. Things like age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, and veteran status are all key components of understanding what our diversity at Yext looks like. And again, it helps inform how we address certain things and make the necessary changes to increase underrepresentation.

As it relates to equity, it's the access to opportunity and advancement for all members of a set group. It's distinct from equality and fairness. We have to ensure that there are equitable environments to address disparities, to eliminate systemic barriers that are preventing full participation for marginalized groups.

When we talk about equity and how we measure that, we're looking at things like pay equity, and ensuring that there is promotion equity as well. We want to ensure that there are technical pieces in place to measure set metrics, and again to make the necessary changes as we see fit.

And then, lastly, is inclusion; Inclusion is defined as the act of creating environments in which all members of a group are welcomed, respected, supported, and valued. Actions can involve intentional and ongoing engagement with diversity across various social and cultural groups.

We've come to know that inclusive environments increase productivity, awareness, knowledge, and empathy, even within very complex situations. Of everything within the DEI acronym, inclusion is the most difficult to quantify, because it's a feeling. It's ensuring you feel like you belong, and also that you're included in conversations.

We do have consistent measurements that we put into place, such as engagement surveys to reveal and/or to identify where some of these gaps exist within our teams, and to ensure that we are addressing them on a proactive and active basis.

I could talk about this all day, because there are so many! What I can say concisely is that we are committed to building an inclusive and diverse culture where every person is seen, heard, and valued. We want to make sure that we welcome applicants and employees of all races, colors, identities, disabilities, orientations, and veteran statuses.

Diving in more deeply, we have a three-pillar approach to ensure that all of our goals are met from a DEI standpoint, and those change year after year. We attach initiatives to each of these pillars to ensure that we're driving change.

Starting with our first pillar, Fostering Community: as I mentioned before when we were talking about inclusion, we're ensuring that managers, individual contributors, and Yexters in general have an understanding of what's taking place here. There are so many wonderful initiatives that are being driven, not only by ERGs (or employee resource groups) but across the global company.

As an example, In London, we have a partnership with a local community organization, where we invite 20 teenagers to come into the office, ages ranging from 14 to 17. They gain a sense of what Yext is like, and more broadly, what it's like to work at a tech company. These are students of all backgrounds and all walks of life, who would have probably never had the chance to see what an operation like this looks like, at least in this stage of their life. And not only is that a great opportunity for young folks of all backgrounds to see and experience, it's also a welcomed opportunity for Yexters, who don't necessarily get a chance to be as actively involved in the community to work on these types of initiatives. It's kind of a two-fold approach in that there's a sense of belonging here at Yext as well as connection with the broader community.

Additionally, so many of us – myself included – were virtually onboarded. We have a lot of remote employees, and some folks who don't necessarily go into the office at a very consistent pace for various reasons; they could be immunocompromised, a caregiver, or even simply prefer a flexible work style, but they still want to feel connected. Despite the distance, the soul of Yext is still here. It's still very vibrant, and we want to make sure that this feeling permeates not only within our global offices, but also to the folks who are not able to come into the offices at the same rate as their contemporaries. We want these remote workers to feel just as connected.

And that's really the ultimate goal of Fostering Community. We want to improve the connection that we already have, and make sure everyone is included.

Our second pillar is Business Impact. We're leveraging procedures, operations, and even utilizing our own products like Telescope to improve the visibility of diverse and inclusive initiatives. We're embedding what we do as a company into our procedures and operations.

We're also taking actions such as creating a sustainability mission statement, which we did in the past year. This was an impact-driven initiative that has already paid dividends into our business. We have a multitude of partners – including both existing and new clients – who are asking what our proactive strategy is to reduce our carbon emissions, or what our carbon footprint reduction strategy is. Today, we can speak very confidently to that, because our teams have developed a structure around sustainability, whether that's through ERGs or our Workplace and Real Estate teams. Being intentional about connecting diversity and inclusion with sustainability into the overall business has had a significant impact.

Harvard Business Review has already established the point that a more diverse team makes for a more productive team. It's important that we connect the warm, fuzzy goodness of what a more diverse and inclusive team looks like to the overall impact of the business.

Lastly, our final pillar is Talent. The talent component is challenging in itself, because everyone looks at the numbers, which is great information but hardly tells a full story. We've come a long way in developing an actual structure around talent analytics. When I initially started with Yext over two years ago, we had limited data to be able to show – let alone highlight – where we were current-state or what our historical trends could tell us.

In the past two years, and more specifically in the past year, we've developed a really strong structure to be able to capture those data. The next step is to evaluate how we are trending based on certain initiatives that we've implemented. We're evaluating our recruitment strategies, our HBCU engagement initiatives to bring in more candidates of color, our development strategies to promote women internally and specifically within organizations where there's a lack of representation.

Our overall goal is to ensure that we are measuring each of those, and that we have a proactive stance on ensuring that we know where we are, but also improving in each of those metrics.

Tangibly, we've seen a 7% increase in the amount of employees globally that are actively involved in our ERGs. Almost half of our employees now are members of at least one ERG. And we have very, very active ERGs; in 2022, we organized more than 50 events, including webinars, book clubs, donation drives, and more.

We try to make it as easy and relatively frictionless as possible to join an ERG because we understand that people are busy. People are challenged for time and resources. Additionally, depending on what team you sit on or where you are geographically, it's not the easiest thing to have conversations around diversity. We encourage Yexters to step away from their roles periodically to attend one of our many insightful fireside chats and safe space conversations.

Really imploring our teams and our managers in particular to be more involved with DEI and ERGs has also really helped. Not to mention, we have onboarded three new executive ERG sponsors in the past year for a total of 8 executive sponsors. To me, this signals a real and important change in the fact that Yext leaders from the top-down are invested in, involved, and will continue to be involved in DEI initiatives. In our overall presence, particularly from an ERG perspective, that goes a long way.

We're a US-based company, and most of our employees are based in the States. Even so, I'm happy to share that we have a global footprint in each of the countries where we have an office. It's very significant to the employee experience. As I mentioned, just last year we hosted over 50 in-person and virtual events. This ranges from safe space conversations to educational fireside chats, happy hours, and even virtual meet-ups. We've also hosted "Take Your Kids to Work" events, and these have signaled a significant change in the overall experience that team members felt.

In having conversations with managers globally. they've all been challenged with trying to get that sense of belonging back to the office, and that sense of engagement amongst their teams. The one thing that really drives attendance in-office and drives conversations outside of the day to day work has been things like our ERG and D&I events, which allow people to be a bit more forthcoming with certain things that maybe they otherwise wouldn't have had conversations about.

This allows space for people to just be people, not employees – and that's really important for the overall experience here.

I get goosebumps thinking about where we were globally in 2021. Obviously, given the pandemic and its global effects and challenges, we all collectively wondered on the DEI team, what does the future look like? Are we ever going to prioritize in-person events again? Is it even worth hosting an event virtually? Because you have to remember, folks were burnt out with Zoom fatigue, among dozens of other things. At times, it just felt like there was a relentless pressure on employees everywhere.

And then, you shift from that memory of 2021 to the overall economic landscape in 2022, where we've seen a number of layoffs and restructures with other companies. We had to ask ourselves, are these events and resources something that will resonate with the overall audience here? What we landed on is the fact that we need to ensure that there is a space in which people can thrive, that they can excel, and that they can feel included. And that there are others who, if they just wanted to grab a beer and talk about current events, that we would create a space for them to be able to do that, too.

With that, a couple of events from 2022 really come to mind. We invited a featured guest speaker to come in and speak on behalf of Express, Yext's LGBTQ+ ERG. It was called Trans 101, and our keynote speaker said, "Ask me whatever it is that you want to ask about the stigmas and the stereotypes associated with the trans community." It fostered such an open dialogue, and folks were able to ask so many questions without fear of retribution or consequence, while still being respectful to one another and understanding the very complex nature of the conversation.

Folks still come to me, to this day, talking about the impact that conversation had – and that event was nearly a year ago!

Another one that stood out to me was Black History month in the UK. Our Elevate ERG for Black employees was able to put forth so much content. Black History in the UK doesn't necessarily get the same attention that it does in the States, and it was an exciting time for folks to be able to learn. A big part of that was our "How to Be An Ally Campaign," which wasn't specifically just focused on the Black employees. That particular resource group educated folks on why it's important for them to be an ally, and how they can continue to support. That was very, very embraced.

One last event that comes to mind is our Working Parents Panel. We've had so many conversations around what it means to be a parent. Being a parent myself, I understand the challenges – particularly on the heels of the pandemic and working from home. I was pulling out all of my hair while trying to send emails and feed my daughter at the same time. The Working Parents Panel has received so much positive feedback; it's a place for existing parents as well as for those that are expecting, or planning to grow their family. Maybe they're planning for the future state, and want to know what to expect. People need to know how to have these conversations when you need to request family leave, or ask for more flexible work accommodations. We had necessary conversations, such as how managers could support their team. And then, lastly, the panel provided tips and tricks from folks that are leaders, like Amanda Watton, Sr. Recruiting Manager in the UK, and CFO Darryl Bond, and of course, a number of others. We're sharing tips and tricks on ways that we can balance personal priorities and family time in conjunction with work time.

This isn't a comprehensive list by any means, but each of those were super important to me. Again, we had well over 50 events over the course of the year, and way too many to call out now.

I've personally received messages and had conversations specifically with leaders talking about ways that they've specifically instituted pieces of what they've learned in these conversations, which goes a long way. We've been having conversations dating back to last year for Black History Month, talking about the lack of representation and understanding, the challenges and the complexities that society presents for people of color getting into roles in technology.

We understand that we can't undo all of the systemic issues, or single-handedly fix the diversity and equity issues plaguing tech and other STEM fields. But knowing that we can have an impact in some way, shape, or form, we feel obligated to work our hardest to create an inclusive and diverse environment at Yext.

So we've started to align ourselves with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and establish relationships therein. This allows us to not only create a new pipeline of candidates for our hiring team, but also to have some synergy along the lines of understanding what roles they could potentially be slotted in.

One final thing, we're being very intentional about transparency here at Yext. We're not only analyzing our DEI numbers and progress, we're sharing them company-wide at our recurring quarterly all-hands meetings. In years prior, and not just at Yext, there was a lack of transparency around progress and goals. This new visibility speaks volumes to Yext's commitment to significant change by way of communication. I stand up in front of the entire company every three months and share what has taken place in the last quarter, and I share up-to-date information regarding representation and even underrepresentation within our organization. And we can tie all of this back to the work that our ERGs are doing when they provide a safe space for communication.

We're breaking down the silos that – it's no secret – many of our teams have experienced over the past few years. We're able to talk about ERGs and DEI topics on a company-wide platform, with the same level of importance that we talk about revenue goals and our stock prices. It signals a change in mentality, and also underlines the fact that DEI is important to the business.

And, ultimately, we've achieved our goal of having these hard conversations. We've achieved a level of transparency that historically has not been there, if only because I'm the first in this role. We're ensuring that there's a vehicle for Yexters to be able to have these conversations, to exist in our shared spaces, to be able to have resources, and to support these conversations.

That way, when there is a call-out such as, "There's a lack of women in this particular department," we don't leave it at that. There are vehicles and strategies in place to be able to support each of these call-outs, and to ensure that we can consistently challenge ourselves to be a little bit better every day.

That's a great question. For the past seven years, our compensation team along with our people management team has conducted a pay equity analysis to ensure that differences in compensation are not based on immutable traits such as gender and ethnicity. We conduct this analysis and provide funding to close any pay disparities every year ahead of the annual compensation review. I'm obviously involved in a lot of those conversations as well, and I believe that we take an active approach to closing those gaps very, very quickly.

From a career development standpoint, it's something that's also analyzed during the promotion cycle as well, which takes place every first quarter. What we've come to realize is that, despite a lot of the other work that we do, there's still a gap that exists in terms of underrepresentation, specifically in leadership.

On the roadmap for the upcoming year is to set benchmarks around driving parity. The first step is to understand where we are. The second step is to understand from a historical perspective what the trends have been. Again, building more robust data sets and more robust pay structures; this is relevant because there are certain teams that, at one point, may have had a wealth of diverse talent and/or leadership, but that may have changed within the past year. Understanding the very nuanced context that may exist there, and simultaneously understanding that it may be an attrition issue is the prerogative. Maybe we just aren't sustaining our talent at a very high clip.

We're addressing those particular issues, and understanding why we might have underrepresented groups – particularly at the leadership level. We have a very exciting initiative that's going to be starting in FY24, which is coming directly from our CEO and our Chief People Officer: updating our internal mobility program and driving a greater focus on internal recruitment. We're taking a really strong look at how we develop and nurture talent. A component of that is to ensure that we are intentional about the development of all Yexters and of course pay close attention to underrepresented employees.

Absolutely. One of our FY24 goals is particularly around DEI reporting to ensure that we are capturing and establishing DEI metrics and reporting as a way to track our collective efforts throughout the organization. With these metrics, we will measure the outcomes, in progress DEI efforts, assign goals and in short, develop transparency within that reporting which we'll measure in 5 primary areas: recruitment, retention, advancement, representation, and pay.

There are a number of ways. Firstly, I'm always available so I encourage anyone who wants to talk about these topics, their experiences, or any suggestions to reach out directly to me. I'm very happy to listen to your perspective and embrace your ideas.

We also have a Telescope page where you may find a lot of our upcoming events and ways to join our ERGs. There is an ERG Slack channel for each of our ERGs, and also a general Slack channel for anyone who maybe doesn't necessarily identify with any of the groups; although, you are more than welcome to join all of them if you see fit. There are no limitations to folks joining and wanting to be an ally, or just to learn.

Finally, you can reach out directly to any one of the ERG leads as well. All of that information is available on our internal Telescope pages as well as our D&I webpage.