For several years we’ve been working to do better when it comes to inclusion and diversity at Lamplight. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has been in the news in the US recently, and it’s all pretty disheartening. While we can’t change that, we can keep doing what we’re doing. 

Why, though? 

Firstly, we believe it’s the right thing to do. It’s incredibly obvious to us that we don’t live in anything like a meritocracy. In other words, lots of factors unfairly help or hinder people as they make their way through life. We want to use the position we find ourselves in to try and combat this. 

Secondly, a lot of the work we’re doing is about making better decisions. Our brains are naturally lazy and take short-cuts. That’s a feature that works well some of the time, but at others we are let down by it. We make the quick or easy decision – but not the best one. Making the effort to understand ourselves better means that we make better decisions and see more clearly when our easy decision makes life harder for someone else. 

What, though? 

This isn’t a comprehensive report, and we’re still a work in progress. But here’s some of the things we’ve done over the last few years. 

Better Recruitment 

We completely revamped our recruitment process to remove many of the irrelevant signals that traditional practices include. Names, addresses, gender, school – all these and more have no bearing on whether someone is the best person for the job. But our brains can’t help but latch onto some of these and sway our decisions. So, by removing these unhelpful clues for as long as possible in the process, we allow ourselves to focus fully on someone’s capability for the role. It’s been a massive improvement. 

Understanding Ourselves 

The whole team has been doing some training to help us understand our own biases a little better. Our different histories inevitably shape us in different ways, and the training and implicit bias tests have helped to illuminate this. Some of this is obviously quite personal and has been done privately, but we’ve also had time in small team sessions to talk it through a bit. 

Changes to our products 

We’ve introduced a number of elements to Lamplight to make sure it’s accessible and supports our customers in their social justice work. Lamplight has long enabled customers to understand the demographics of the people they work with, and how that compares to their community. More recently we added a built-in pronouns field, for example. 

We’ve also put accessibility at the centre of our redesign work. We’re aiming to meet the highest current standards (WCAG 2.2 AAA) so that all our customers can use Lamplight effectively. We’ve had fantastic input from a number of customers with users who have visual impairments, or who are neuro-diverse, or who have other accessibility requirements. 

Reflecting on our Processes 

In 2023 James and Rusel led us through the Queerify accreditation process. This has given us another valuable opportunity to think about how we support one another within the team. It’s also been great to have external input and support to help us continue to improve. 

What Next, then? 

We carry on learning, reflecting, changing, improving. In 2025 we’ll continue to think about how our biases affect our decisions, how we can change our thinking, and how we can improve our processes to protect against those. We’ll also be broadening the scope of the work we’ve done around product accessibility. We’re pleased with the progress we’ve made on the product itself and are keen to make sure all our services and documentation is as accessible as possible. 

Photo by Cultura Creative