Our journey towards inclusivity: one team, many voices

As a team, we believe that inclusivity is crucial for a healthy and successful work environment. We started the journey of Poort8 as 4 Dutch men with similar degrees from Delft University. Although we have lots of similarities, we also have lots of different personality traits, views, and work styles. However, we decided that it was time to grow our company and we realized that diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences could fuel innovation, collaboration, and personal & professional growth. Recognizing the importance of creating an inclusive workplace, we have started an exciting journey to promote inclusivity within our team.

Since the beginning of our journey, we’ve been working with different interns who contributed to the company’s development significantly. In 2022, we realized that it is time to grow our team and we made inclusivity one of our core values. Now we have three new team members, Amy, Eliz, and Bent who are already contributing to Poort8 not only professionally but also on a personal level. We can already feel that these different voices made our team younger, more dynamic, and more productive. However, our journey toward inclusivity just started and there are many steps to take. Indeed, we are excited to see what the future brings!

To define our next steps, last week we had a meeting focusing on the term of inclusivity. Each of the team members defined their views on the topic and how we can collectively integrate our perspectives into Poort8. In the end, we all agree that the mission and vision of Poort8 should include values such as purpose-driven culture, inclusive & diverse environment, environmental & social responsibility, and authenticity & transparency. As a first step, we updated our About Page, in which you can read more about our company vision and team.

Our approach

In this blog post, we want to share our approaches and experiences that highlight our way toward building an inclusive team.

1. Educating ourselves as much as possible

Our starting point is education. We know that to create an inclusive environment, we need to understand the challenges faced by different cultures, communities, groups, and individuals. We started to educate each other by sharing our personal views about inclusivity and actively engaging in conversations. We actively seek sources that would develop our understanding and we aim to stay informed about current social and global issues. In that way, we will be able to create a safe workspace and shared language for future team members.

2. Embracing differences

Embracing differences comes from education. Throughout the process and the conversations that we had, we realized that inclusion and diversity are much more than aspects such as gender, race, and nationality. We also value different ideas, views, personalities, and experiences. We believe that everyone should be heard, and having conflicts is not a problem but an advantage in our team. Different perspectives and personalities are actively enriching our problem-solving capabilities.

3. Diverse recruitment

We recognized that inclusivity begins with diverse recruitment practices. We revised our recruitment processes to ensure that our job descriptions and qualifications are inclusive and don’t use discriminatory, biased, or stereotypical language. Therefore, including diversity is one of the key factors in the future hiring processes. Our goal is to make any talent feel comfortable and willing to join our team. Indeed, adding new backgrounds and perspectives to our team will add new and unique values to Poort8.

4. Respectful culture

Impactful communication comes from respectful behavior. Although diverse ideas are always welcome, as a team, we agreed that while sharing arguments empathy, respect, and kindness should be always present. Collectively, we determined zero-tolerance policies for discrimination, or any form of bias, emphasizing the message that respect and kindness are non-negotiable.

5. Measuring progress

The way towards an inclusive team is led by continuous learning and improvement. We tend to establish measurable metrics, such as diversity representation and employee satisfaction, to track our progress. As a team, we are open to learning from our mistakes, as well as, celebrating our successes.

How does Bent look at this?

As we mentioned before, we appreciate to be open about our opinions and learn from each other. In this blog, Bent, our newest team member, shared his experience within Poort8, as well as his views on inclusivity. The interview was done by Eliz. Keep reading to get to know Bent!

1. What is your role?

Currently, I am in the process of completing my master’s degree in supply chain management at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. I am working on my thesis through an internship at Poort8 for 3.5 days per week. In addition, I work as Sales Support for 1.5 days per week. In this role, I am responsible for mapping the sales process, facilitating customer onboardings, and resolving back-end issues.

2. What is our team’s biggest strength in your opinion?

I think the biggest strength of our team is that we can quickly adapt to the specific needs of our customers in an innovative way. It allows us to remain competitive in a rapidly changing environment.

3. What is inclusivity for you?

Inclusivity for me is ensuring that everyone is accepted, valued and treated fairly, regardless of their backgrounds or personal characteristics.

4. How would you describe our team's commitment to inclusivity? (What is inclusivity for Poort8)

In my opinion our team is doing well in terms of inclusivity. For instance, last week we held an open brainstorm session about inclusivity with the entire team, which I think is a nice example of practicing inclusivity at our office.

5. How do you think our team can continue to learn and grow in terms of inclusivity?

I think our team can do multiple things. First, we should continue our open dialogues. In addition, we could use external training to broaden our knowledge about inclusivity. Furthermore, we can focus on diverse hiring, as we operate with a rather small team now.

6. Are there any specific practices or strategies from other organizations that you believe could benefit our team's inclusivity efforts?

I noticed that an increasing number of organizations are presenting inclusivity statements. We could consider following their example, in addition to our blog post about inclusivity. In this way, inclusiveness becomes even more part of our culture.

Conclusion

Our journey towards inclusive culture is an ongoing process that already significantly improved our work environment. Inclusive culture plays an important role in our vision which guides decision-making processes. By actively educating ourselves, embracing differences, diverse recruitment, respectful culture, and, measuring progress we are building a supportive team with many voices. Accordingly, we realized that committing to inclusivity continuously improves our productivity, creativity, and accomplishments. As our team grows together, we remain committed to building an inclusive environment where everyone feels respected, comfortable, valued, and empowered to reach their full potential.