The change we want to see starts with our own actions
Bench doesn’t work unless we create opportunities and build pathways for greater equity. Through our work, the people we hire and the learning we do every day, Bench is committed to building a more just and inclusive society.
Commitment Updates Archive
At Bench, we’re committed to the ongoing work of creating systemic equity as a company. Each quarter, we provide an update on the progress we’ve made, and where we’ve fallen short. This is not about patting ourselves on the back or virtue signaling. It’s about continuously holding ourselves accountable to make big changes in how we operate as a company—and how we play our part in effecting systemic equitable change.
July 2023 to September 2023
In July, we shared Bench’s first comprehensive accessibility guide for people leaders called Benchmarks of Inclusion. It was followed by launching a series of leadership training aimed at equipping people leaders to gain the skills and competencies in order to create and sustain an inclusive workplace. Topics include; how to facilitate inclusive meetings, how to navigate difficult conversations, with a module on neuro-inclusive communication techniques, and how to foster a feedback culture that promotes inclusivity.
Our senior leaders continue to meet monthly to support. We have adopted the Inclusive Leadership framework which will guide how we integrate DEI into all we do and how we lead. Inclusive Leadership emphasizes the importance of senior leaders connecting DEI efforts to strategic business priorities, and then modeling the behavior that would help to achieve desired outcomes—making inclusion a deliberate and conscious effort.
We are committed to cultivating a workplace that belongs to us all—and that includes creating visibility and support structures for celebrations and commemorations that are significant to our Benchmates.
Here’s what we got up to:
- Disability Pride Month
July was disability Pride Month! As part of our celebrations, we gathered for a disability-themed screening of an Oscar-award winning short film called The Silent Child. Based on a true story, it showcases so many important topics: ableism, audism, and oralism; our expectations for disabled individuals; being a disabled person surrounded by those who are able-bodied; the social implications of disability; disability in education, and so much more. We highly recommend you watch it too!
- National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
As part of meaningful reconciliation work, it is important for us to reflect on the ongoing impacts of colonialism, in Canada, through education. We observed this day by learning about the residential schools through the stories and work of Indigenous artists, human rights advocates, politicians, and survivors who have made it their lives work to heal the legacy of residential schools.
We are committed to greater representation of women and BIPOC in our senior leadership roles. In order to achieve this goal, we now have a specialized role on our recruitment team who will solely focus on sourcing diverse candidates.
Bench is using diversity sourcing as a process to recruit candidates that are underrepresented within our company in order to create a workplace that reflects the world we live in. This does not mean we are haphazardly hiring people to fill diversity gaps. We are approaching diversity sourcing in a systematic process where we use data to determine what groups are currently represented and create a plan to address any shortfalls in staffing.
Our leaders in Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) continue to prioritize gender representation on their teams. Representation on teams has increased from 31% to 47% and representation of women in senior roles on the EPD teams has increased from 31% to 40%. Our hope is that this reinforces greater and greater empowerment and growth for the women and genderqueer folks on our EPD teams.
Gender pay equity
In the last quarter, our unadjusted pay gap increased by $0.04—from $0.15 to $0.19. This quarter it dropped to $0.18. We are hopeful that through new, clearly defined executive leadership DEI representation commitments in FY23 (including the already more intentional succession and development planning through our extended leadership team), we will address this shortcoming head-on in the year ahead.
April to June 2023
In July, we shared Bench’s first comprehensive accessibility guide for people leaders called Benchmarks of Inclusion. It was followed by launching a series of leadership training aimed at equipping people leaders to gain the skills and competencies in order to create and sustain an inclusive workplace. Topics include; how to facilitate inclusive meetings, how to navigate difficult conversations, with a module on neuro-inclusive communication techniques, and how to foster a feedback culture that promotes inclusivity.
Our senior leaders continue to meet monthly to support. We have adopted the Inclusive Leadership framework which will guide how we integrate DEI into all we do and how we lead. Inclusive Leadership emphasizes the importance of senior leaders connecting DEI efforts to strategic business priorities, and then modeling the behavior that would help to achieve desired outcomes—making inclusion a deliberate and conscious effort.
We are committed to cultivating a workplace that belongs to us all—and that includes creating visibility and support structures for celebrations and commemorations that are significant to our Benchmates.
Here’s what we got up to:
- Disability Pride Month
July was disability Pride Month! As part of our celebrations, we gathered for a disability-themed screening of an Oscar-award winning short film called The Silent Child. Based on a true story, it showcases so many important topics: ableism, audism, and oralism; our expectations for disabled individuals; being a disabled person surrounded by those who are able-bodied; the social implications of disability; disability in education, and so much more. We highly recommend you watch it too!
- National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
As part of meaningful reconciliation work, it is important for us to reflect on the ongoing impacts of colonialism, in Canada, through education. We observed this day by learning about the residential schools through the stories and work of Indigenous artists, human rights advocates, politicians, and survivors who have made it their lives work to heal the legacy of residential schools.
We are committed to greater representation of women and BIPOC in our senior leadership roles. In order to achieve this goal, we now have a specialized role on our recruitment team who will solely focus on sourcing diverse candidates.
Bench is using diversity sourcing as a process to recruit candidates that are underrepresented within our company in order to create a workplace that reflects the world we live in. This does not mean we are haphazardly hiring people to fill diversity gaps. We are approaching diversity sourcing in a systematic process where we use data to determine what groups are currently represented and create a plan to address any shortfalls in staffing.
Our leaders in Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) continue to prioritize gender representation on their teams. Representation on teams has increased from 31% to 47% and representation of women in senior roles on the EPD teams has increased from 31% to 40%. Our hope is that this reinforces greater and greater empowerment and growth for the women and genderqueer folks on our EPD teams.
Gender pay equity
In the last quarter, our unadjusted pay gap increased by $0.04—from $0.15 to $0.19. This quarter it dropped to $0.18. We are hopeful that through new, clearly defined executive leadership DEI representation commitments in FY23 (including the already more intentional succession and development planning through our extended leadership team), we will address this shortcoming head-on in the year ahead.
July to September 2022
After a year of efforts (and a lot of failure) to prioritize greater gender diversity and representation in our senior and executive leadership, we’re beginning to see positive results. In the last quarter alone, our unadjusted pay gap decreased by $0.05—from $0.22 to $0.17 (we recognize this gap is still far from our goal of unadjusted gender pay parity). This reflects the increase in representation from 35% to 46% women in senior leadership in the last quarter. Today, 50% of our executive team are women.
This year was the first time we celebrated Disability Pride Month, which began in July of 1990 in the U.S., and has since become a worldwide movement of empowerment, visibility, and pride for people with disabilities. One of the highlights of the month was a watch party hosted by our People with Disabilities Affinity Group of Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution—a documentary film about a summer camp for teens with disabilities and the alumni who went on to start a radical disability justice movement that led to historic changes in human rights legislation in the U.S. We encourage everyone to host watch parties of this important documentary.
Since its inception over a year ago, we now have 12 affinity groups supporting roughly a third of our Benchmates. They continue to play a critical role in creating safe spaces and belonging for our Benchmates to support one another, as well as to activate important changes that need to take place across our company. This quarter, our DEI Team will be rolling out new support systems for the incredible Point People who lead these groups, including bi-annual stipends.
April to June 2022
We launched the pilot of Bench Bridge—a partnership referral program that connects us with organizations working with underserved small business owners. The program provides the networks of partner organizations with exclusive discounts, free resources, and additional consultations. If you’re interested in becoming a pilot partner, reach out through the Bench Bridge landing page. We’re so excited to chat with you!
Throughout the month of June, the First Nations Technology Council met with Benchmates across our company as part of the discovery phase of our Moving Beyond Inclusion partnership. We look forward to gathering again in September to review insights from FNTC’s discovery. Together, we will workshop how Bench will take responsibility for and sustain action towards reconciliation within and beyond Bench.
June is an important month. As a company, we’ve been learning what it means for us to evolve our relationship with and responsibility out of observing National Indigenous History Month, National Indigenous Peoples Day, Pride, World Refugee Day, and Juneteenth. Fundamentally, commemorations are not simply about the day or month, but rather provide a rhythm of new and better transformation year after year. This year that transformation for Bench included observing Juneteenth as a company for the first time. We prepared for this day of observance with a company-wide internal training—particularly for our largely Canadian Benchmates—to learn about the history and ongoing significance of Juneteenth.
Congratulations to &Access for winning a year of free bookkeeping and a $1000 cash prize, and Joy Village School for winning a $1000 cash prize as part of our Black History Month Giveaway. We feel deeply honored to play any part in the amazing work of both organizations.
No company has been immune to the ongoing challenges impacting workplaces around the world. In the midst of this, we’ve been deeply encouraged to find through our most recent employee engagement survey that the experience of Belonging at Bench is nonetheless at an all-time high, at 92%.
We have also formed our very first affinity groups for Muslim and Indigenous Benchmates. Affinity groups continue to provide a supportive space for those who share traditionally decentered identities and experiences, and provide a safe space to raise any concerns to our senior leadership for change. We’re genuinely privileged to have such insightful and strong voices across our affinity groups.
Our affinity group leaders are still not being compensated for the work and value they bring to Bench. We hope to change that this quarter.
Further development of our DEI analytics space has stalled, including our second iteration of the Parity Project to identify inequities in pay, promotions, hiring, etc. across identities. This has obvious implications for our accountability structures. We continue to run a lean version of DEI analytics, however, greater investment is needed next quarter.
Disability Pride Month in July is a reminder to us of our ongoing intent without action to reach Level AAA conformance to accessibility across our digital presence. We would like to invest in a full audit and plan towards conformance in the future. Know of an organization that can support us in this effort? Contact us at dei@bench.co.
January to March 2022
The DEI Team continues to grow! In February, we hired a DEI Manager to focus on equitable People Systems and Representation. Our small but mighty DEI Team of three is focused on providing strategic DEI integration support across the business and focused investment in belonging for traditionally decentered and underrepresented Benchmates.
As part of our partnership with the First Nations Technology Council, our executive and senior leadership took part in two sessions this quarter grounding us in the transformational work of decolonization. It’s difficult to speak to the profound impact the facilitators and the sessions have already had on us individually and as a group. We cannot commend FNTC, and Indigenous facilitators Shelley Joseph and Chastity Davis-Alphonse enough.
This Black History Month, we focused on the necessity and complexity of Black Futures and Black Joy. Our quarterly company-wide DEI training challenged us to broaden our understanding of Black History Month and to live in the tensions between Black History and Futures—Anti-Black racism and the powerful resistance of Black Joy. As part of our engagement beyond Black History Month, we kicked off a giveaway for a one year subscription to Bench and $1,000 cash prize for three Black small business owners investing in Black Futures and Black Joy in their communities. Winners will be announced later this month.
Our leaders in Technology, Product, and Design continue to decisively prioritize gender representation in hiring and promotions. 57% of new hires this past quarter were women or non-binary—many of whom are women of colour. 60% of new seniors hired were women. Counting promoted women, proportionate representation of seniors who are women on the TPD teams has more than doubled in the last year from 13% to 31%. Our hope is that this reinforces greater and greater empowerment and growth for the women and genderqueer folks on our TPD teams.
For Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, we kicked off our first series highlighting the women leaders at Bench. 58% of Benchmates are women or genderqueer. We want to ensure we are investing in their development and growth so that representation is reflected throughout our company. This is only a small step, but our hope is it plants a seed. This action is also part of how we continue to fall short when it comes to representation across all demographics in our leadership.
Gender diversity in our senior and executive leadership hasn’t really changed over the last two years. Only 17% of our executive leadership and 33% of our senior leadership are women—none are genderqueer. Representation of other identities are equally low, if not lower. This reality negatively impacts so much of our business that is otherwise 58% women and genderqueer, including visibility, decision making, and pay equity. Given the success we’ve seen in hiring and representation on our TPD teams, we are exploring what learnings we can apply to our approach to executive hiring.
We weren’t able to capture enough demographic data from our employees in our most recent request for this information. This means we’re currently unable to move forward with the second Parity Project meant to incorporate multiple demographic identities beyond gender in our pay parity analysis. We don’t have an accurate picture of representation of other identities across our company, and where we most need to focus our attention. We will revisit following the busy tax season.
Though we have shifted gears to focusing greater attention on how partnerships can open opportunities for us to reach and support marginalized and underserved small business owners and entrepreneurs, we did not hit our quarter end target to launch our first DEI referral partnership program and onboard pilot adopters.
July to September 2021
September was a milestone month for us in our Moving Beyond Inclusion partnership with First Nations Technology Council (FNTC). FNTC’s facilitators presented insights from their discovery phase and took our senior leadership through several hours of workshopping how we might take sustained action towards reconciliation within and beyond Bench. We look forward to receiving FNTC’s final report and recommendations. Action planning will kick off in the new year.
Salary bands for all roles at Bench are now transparent and live! It’s common practice to keep compensation design and bands hidden from employees. Intentional or not, this practice has allowed for more “flexibility” in compensation determination. The hard truth is, there’s no silver bullet for how much to pay your people; market compensation data is noisy and complex, so decisions using this data are often driven by gut feeling and negotiations. As a result of implicit biases and systemic inequities, these decisions more frequently pay people of marginalized identities less. Publishing our pay bands holds us accountable to pay parity across all identities.
We recognize that the historic and current landscape of banking and financial services is steeped in systemic racism, oppression, and exploitation of marginalized and racialized communities. So a cross-functional team of leaders working on our Bench Banking product have been learning about it in a 5-module series on (In)Equitable Banking. We finished our 5th and final module this month! What comes next? We will put together a project plan to design a different and more equitable banking experience for underserved and underbanked communities.
This past quarter, we kicked off an Annual Calendar and Stances project. This focused on two primary objectives:
Center the experiences of underrepresented and marginalized current and potential employees by cultivating visibility around the times of year most important to them—and our stances in solidarity with them associated with those occasions.
Inspire other employees into compassionate learning, engagement, and action. This is not about performative allyship. This project will transition our verbal celebrations into a more robust, purposeful, and shared responsibility.
Our senior leaders continue to meet monthly to support one another and hold ourselves accountable to our quarterly commitments to integrate DEI into all we do and how we lead. We are learning so much together and making more impactful and collaborative commitments each quarter.
Last quarter, we committed to investing in more equitable People Systems for sourcing, hiring, and promoting—and ensuring our leaders are better onboarded to these systems. Though we have invested heavily into the systems, we fell short on the onboarding. The outcome is that our gender pay gap widened over this past quarter. We hired women to more junior positions on teams and in roles where underrepresentation particularly exists. But we also hired more men into senior roles. Though we prioritized hiring more people of color into senior roles, we know that identities are not tokens to be traded. Greater representation is needed and required across all identities. We are doubling down on hiring manager training and devoting greater attention to this matter in our monthly Senior Leaders DEI meetings.
We continue to falter in our efforts to reach, engage, and support marginalized and underserved small business owners and entrepreneurs. There are a number of early stage initiatives and small win projects in this space. But overall, we’re holding ourselves accountable to real and tangible outcomes for how we are affecting measurable change in communities of underserved small business owners. The area we are focusing greater attention is our partnerships space. One thing we are sorely aware of is the trust that has been and continues to be broken between financial institutions and folks in many marginalized communities. We hope partnering with organizations who have earned trust with these communities can help us bridge that gap and provide client-centered support.
As stated last quarter, one glaring gap in the integrity and consistency of our approach to our DEI commitments as a company is in the area of social, environmental, and economic responsibility outside our business. Structured and robust engagement in this area still does not exist. Our intent continues to be that our investment in the growth of our DEI Team in the next few months will also increase accountability and support to invest more in effecting public-facing change and giving back.
April to June 2021
We’re starting a bank! And…the historic and current landscape of banking and financial services is steeped in systemic racism, oppression, and exploitation of marginalized and racialized communities. So a cross-functional Bench Banking team of leaders and staff are learning about it in a 5-module series on (In)Equitable Banking. We are leveling up our understanding of the specific ways we can and need to adopt alternative practices in the banking ecosystem. This will allow us to more confidently make decisions we have control over and leverage our partnerships to influence change.
We finished our Gender Pay Parity analysis in June, along with a report of our findings and planned action. Two very important and powerful findings came to the fore. One is that the vast majority of the findings actually validated our hypothesized concerns, i.e. the primary areas where gender disparity show up at Bench are in representation of folks with marginalized genders in hiring and promotions to senior leadership roles and Product & Technology teams. In other words, there are no glaring unknown sources of severe bias or discrimination at Bench on the basis of gender. In the same breath, our major concerns are absolutely critical. It is unacceptable to us that these disparities in gender representation exist at Bench, and we are committed to addressing them systemically—at their root.
Some of our action plan in response to our Gender Pay Parity findings already began this past quarter through better People systems. One is that we have designed and rolled out a new company-wide proficiency framework to support our managers in more consistent, transparent, and defensible performance assessments, and therefore promotions. Another is that we finalized a full audit of our salary bands and are ready to release all salary bands internally and add salary bands to all future job postings in order to responsibly eliminate salary negotiations.
Affinity Groups have never existed at Bench before, but as of May they officially do! We are so privileged to have 6 up and running affinity groups and more starting each day to support underrepresented Benchmates through community building and an avenue to voice shared concerns to senior leadership.
Our senior leaders continue to meet monthly to support one another and hold ourselves accountable to our quarterly commitments to integrate DEI into all we do and how we lead. We are learning so much together and making more impactful and collaborative commitments each quarter, which is truly exciting.
Our gender pay parity analysis showed that we not only have a history of hiring predominantly men to our highest paid roles, but that we continue to do so—and that it has gotten worse over the past quarter, not better. This past quarter’s failure was largely due to a hurried process of hiring multiple leaders to our Product & Technology teams and in marketing functions that led to a company-wide apology by our VP of Technology. We need to continue to invest in building more transparent, consistent, and defensible People Systems for sourcing, hiring, and promoting, and ensure our leaders are better onboarded to these systems and how to apply them responsibly and equitably.
We have revisited the conversation on how to provide additional support to marginalized and underserved small business owners and entrepreneurs, but continue to falter when it comes to direct, targeted support. Our new Partner Program focused on NGO’s and organizations specifically supporting marginalized and underserved small business owners is close to launch, but missed our quarter-end target. This program, when released, will offer discounted pricing and free additional advisory support and educational resources to clients referred by these partners. That said, we can do more and better.
Last quarter, we mentioned that we did not yet have a concrete plan for how we will develop robust DEI-focused measurement, reporting, and therefore accountability. Although we have started tracking a number of belonging, representation, and impact related metrics, we still have yet to develop a comprehensive system for ongoing DEI-focused measurement and reporting.
One glaring gap in the integrity and consistency of our approach to our DEI commitments as a company is in the area of social responsibility. Structured and robust engagement in this area does not currently exist. Although it is in our backlog, we do not have a commitment to tackle this in the next quarter. Our hope is that as our DEI Team continues to grow, capacity will grow to hold ourselves and our leaders accountable to investing in giving back.
January to March 2021
As a part of our ongoing commitment to anti-racism, we pledged to donate 20% of all new revenue generated in February to organizations that support Black-owned small businesses. We selected four organizations to receive our donation that have contributed in meaningful ways to the Black small business community. The recipients were:
Tech Spark: Canada’s first tech and design school committed to empowering children of colour, girls, women and teachers through innovative education. Learn more
Canadian Black Chamber of Commerce: The CBCC was created to serve the purpose of Commerce, Black-owned businesses, Entrepreneurship and Economic development within the proud Black Communities across Canada. Learn more
Black Connect: The only national, membership based organization focused solely on eliminating the racial wealth gap in America by increasing the number and success rate of Black-owned businesses. Learn more
Black Girl in Om: Black Girl In Om exists to hold and catalyze healing within black women around the world on their unique journeys towards wholeness. Learn more
For our Gender Pay Parity project, we completed a full regression analysis of our compensation across the company at every level and in every department. This information will be used in the next quarter to identify key insights and develop recommendations for systemic change across our company.
In January 2021, all of our executive and senior leaders began meeting monthly to discuss what we are doing in our various business units to further integrate DEI into all we do and how we lead. This is our way of ensuring DEI is never a separate program, but rather at the forefront of the way we operate everyday and everywhere.
The DEI Team expanded in March! And will continue to. We successfully hired our second member of the DEI Team at Bench.
Last year, we launched the pilot of Bench Bridge, our partnership referral program that connects us with organizations working with underserved small business owners. Since then, we have struggled to gain traction and build successful referral relationships with early adopters. The program provides the networks of partner organizations with exclusive lifetime discounts, free resources, and additional consultations. If you’re interested in becoming a pilot partner or know an organization who might be a good fit, reach out to us at dei@bench.co. We’d love to hear from you.
July 2023 to September 2023
2021 Annual Lookback
It’s been almost two years since we started taking our responsibility to meaningfully participate in the work of anti-oppression as a company seriously, intentionally, and holistically. We’ll be the first to say it…this work has been and continues to be difficult. It’s confronting, growing, discouraging, inspiring. Our commitments everyday and every quarter have meant we’ve been forced to grow and grow up. We’ve had setbacks and fallen short. And it’s been the relentless commitment of our employees and our leadership that keeps us on this road towards ever-better.
In the spirit of focusing on hope, here are some of the steps forward that have been most significant for us as a company.
We grew from a single head to a team of three providing strategic DEI integration support across the business and full-time support specifically for traditionally decentered Benchmates. We started offering quarterly company-wide DEI training to all Benchmates.
We developed and ran the (In)Equitable Banking Learning Group. In this five module series, we learned how the historic and current landscape of banking and financial services is steeped in systemic racism, oppression, and exploitation of marginalized and racialized communities. This will inform the products we build and how.
We launched our partnership with the First Nations Technology Council. They’re guiding us in the work of reconciliation, decolonization, and the role we have to play in changing the tech landscape for Indigenous Peoples—and invariably other folks with marginalized or underrepresented identities and experiences.
We launched an entirely DEI-focused, monthly 90 min meeting where all senior and executive leaders gather to learn together, support one another, and hold ourselves accountable to integrating DEI into all that we do and how we lead our teams.
We added a separate DEI-specific interview to every senior and executive level interview process, Director and above. And we ran a preliminary audit of our job postings and applications for inclusive language edits and additions, and added an equity lens as a leadership competency to all Manager and above roles.
We clarified and systematized our company approach to compensation and reached salary band transparency for every role.
We launched our inaugural Gender Pay Parity analysis which built the foundation for a second and larger Parity Analysis Project launching this year. This next version will include multiple demographic identities and experiences across pay, hiring, promotions, and other forms of representation and equity. Moving forward, we plan to run this twice a year.
We started a multi-phase process of revamping our performance assessments and review process to ensure greater equity in promotions and compensation.
We launched our very first Affinity Groups at Bench. We now have nine groups up and running, and are already seeing the difference these groups are making for people through survey data.
Since February 2021, we quadrupled the percentage representation of women in Manager and above roles in Technology from 7% to 30%. That means we went from one to nine women in Manager and above roles on the Technology Team.
As a company, we commemorated Black History Month, National Indigenous History Month, Ramadan, and so many more occasions for the first time as part of our commitment to greater visibility and support.
We made displaying our pronouns in our Slack and Zoom profiles ubiquitous at Bench.
Our Commitment to You
We will continue to provide quarterly updates on our progress towards becoming an anti-racist and anti-discriminatory company. We owe that to you, the people who work here, and our community. Doing so holds us accountable, and ensures that we maintain momentum on this critical and ongoing journey.
Thanks for being here with us. As always, please let us know if you have feedback, questions, or suggestions.
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We acknowledge that Bench headquarters is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.