Over the past decade, employee engagement and trust have reached an all time low, employee isolation and burnout have reached epic proportions, and traditional approaches to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have failed to drive meaningful change. During that same period of time, Ultranauts has been able to build a high performing organization that’s growing rapidly, while creating an empowering workplace that embraces diversity in all its forms.
As part of our mission to help other companies build inclusive, high performing teams, we have codified the learnings from almost a decade of experience and experimentation into a series of training workshops, courses and tools based on the practices that have emerged in our Universal Workplace.
Objective Recruiting
Challenge While there has been much attention to making recruiting practices less biased, including an explosion of innovation in the form of AI and SaaS tools, Talent Acquisition teams still face significant challenges to ensuring their recruiting process is inclusive and equitable.
Overview Objective Recruiting is a 2 hour interactive workshop to help Talent Acquisition leaders integrate inclusive, evidence-based hiring practices that can fill the critical gaps left by modern recruiting tools and ensure an equitable process for all candidates.
Topics covered include
- How can job applicants be screened more efficiently and equitably to reduce time spent reviewing resumes and interviewing applicants and decrease the time to hire?
- How can the skills of candidates for non technical roles be evaluated more effectively to improve the quality of hires?
- How can the interview process be made more inclusive to allow all candidates to shine, including those who are neurodivergent and/or have disabilities?
Equitable Promotions
Challenge Most companies today have an annual performance review and promotion process based on self assessments, 360 degree feedback, and cross-cohort calibration. These can have critical flaws that can negatively impact marginalized groups of employees – including unclear or inconsistently applied standards, positively or negatively biased reviewers, and opaque decision making impacted by whether employees have strong advocates “in the room”.
Overview Equitable Promotions is a 2 hour workshop to help Talent Management, Learning & Development, and other leaders explore more equitable alternatives to traditional approaches to career progression and promotions, including the Community Driven Promotions process pioneered by Ultranauts.
Topics covered include
- How can job functions and roles be structured so team members have more frequent opportunities to move up?
- How can learning & development become more employee driven so team members can take ownership of their own career trajectories?
- How can promotion decisions be made in a more community-driven way that minimizes bias and incorporates independent, expert validation?
Design for Neurodiversity
Challenge One of the main reasons neurodivergent employees find traditional workplaces challenging is the ambiguous nature of communications. What are the exact requirements of the job? Which specific priorities are most important? Why are certain decisions made the way they are? What does a manager actually expect? What is my colleague trying to say? What concrete actions came out of a meeting? When left unanswered, these questions can create stress and anxiety, lead to easily avoidable misunderstandings, and waste time and effort.
Overview Design for Neurodiversity (DfN) is a 1/2 day workshop to help managers reduce ambiguity in their communications and processes, based on the DfN methodology pioneered at Ultranauts and its extensive experience applying it to reduce ambiguity in its own organization.
Topics covered include
- How can work systems and processes be designed to be effective for neurodiverse individuals and cognitively diverse teams?
- Why does ambiguity undermine team wellbeing, including causing stress and anxiety?
- What practices and tools can managers and teams adopt to systematically reduce ambiguity, and what tangible business benefits can be realized?
Online training modules and AI-powered ambiguity detection tool available in 2023
Inclusive Agile
Challenge Many software development teams and many other types of technical and non-technical teams have adopted Agile methods to organize their teams and work. While Agile was intended to be inclusive, in reality, practices are often implemented in a manner that leads to rigid deadlines, ineffective communication, inaccessible knowledge, and a continual stream of daily changes and volatility. As a result, Agile often ends up undermining the well-being and productivity of both neurodivergent and neurotypical team members.
Overview Inclusive Agile is a 1 day workshop to help engineering and other leaders evolve their Agile practices to be more inclusive to improve the wellbeing and productivity of their teams. It is based on Inclusive Agile® practices developed at Ultranauts and originally published in Software Quality Professional in December 2020.
Topics covered include
- Why do typical implementations of Agile and Scrum negatively impact the wellbeing and productivity of cognitively diverse engineering teams?
- How can engineering teams adapt their approach to be more Inclusive?
- How can teams quickly and effectively adopt or incorporate Inclusive Agile practices?
Online training modules and certification available in 2023