Within the Salesforce Trailblazer Community, equality and diversity are a huge factor into why we all work so well together as one. Salesforce committed to ensuring equality and equal rights not only amongst their internal culture, but also everywhere they get involved. Click For Salesforce Implementation Partners
The Trailblazer Community is a vast collection of like minded people who care so intensely about each other, expressing our desire to spread equality and diversity and set an example for the world to make change happen. We all want a better world, let’s start here, and let’s spread that message.
Salesforce has 12 equality groups focused on providing support to those who, traditionally, may miss out on opportunities to work in technology. Personally, my first encounters with the Trailblazer Community was through Salesforce Military (formerly Vetforce) in their effort to include service personnel, veterans and spouses into Salesforce career opportunities. So, you may be asking: ‘How can I help?’ I’ve collected my thoughts on the subject of equality and will be sharing Salesforce’s ‘Equality Ally’ best practices, so that you too can become an advocate for equality.
Understanding Equality vs Diversity
What’s the difference between equality and diversity? Without going too deep, Equality is about ensuring everybody has an equal opportunity and Diversity is about understanding the differences between people and groups of people, and putting a positive value on those differences.
eople can be naturally biased, even when you try to be completely fair. Your brain can have a hard time being impartial. Cognitive or unconscious biases is the brain’s way of forming these links between two attributes automatically and can be helpful mental shortcuts, allowing us to process information quicker.
We instinctively place people into groups or categories using these attributes, such as skin colour, age, gender, weight, sex, level of education, accent, sexuality or social status. This grouping saves our brain the time and energy of absorbing and processing information, allowing us to use our mind’s resources for other consuming tasks.
Unfortunately, the same instinct can also affect our behaviour in unwanted ways and inhibits us acting in our own best way. When we perform unconscious bias in the workplace it can mean that we are also losing the best interests of the company in which we represent.
Grouping people can lead us to make assumptions that are, in a lot of cases, wrong or detrimental to the person in question and/or the person thinking it. This leads to treating them differently based on those biases. Even if we don’t we may not consciously believe in these stereotypes, unfortunately our brain has a natural tendency to rely on them. This is why it is ever so more important to look at our actions and think twice before making choices or decisions.
