SkillLab Life: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at SkillLab

SkillLab’s team has doubled in size over the past year. As the company progresses to grow and diversify, so does our intention to foster an inclusive culture and equitable work environment. SkillLab has made a commitment to diversity in order to best serve its multicultural client and user network. Besides that, the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) initiatives help everyone in our team – people representing about thirty different cultures – to feel as their best selves in a work environment. 

SkillLab has a DEI Committee that includes SkillLabers from across the company to champion DEI initiatives. With the start of a new year, we are celebrating the last year’s achievements of the DEI Committee, and setting clear objectives for the future.

Growing Team Diversity

Diversity can be looked at in multiple ways, such as gender, culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability or socioeconomic background. During SkillLab’s growth phase, the team’s cultural and gender diversity has increased.

Our team is very diverse culturally. SkillLab proudly comprises 52 people with 27 nationalities. Our cultural diversity extends far beyond this numerical representation.

Our team has gender parity: 53% of self-identified female colleagues and 47% of self-identified male colleagues. We are proud to have this team composition in the usually male-dominated tech sector.

Looking forward to the future, we are aware that only male representatives are currently in team leadership positions and we need to diversify the decision-making further. Additionally, we are working to move past the binary conceptualisation of gender and promote the recognition of non-binary gender identities. Overall, we are striving for a systemic inclusion that considers intersectionalities in all talent processes and decision-making bodies.

Celebrating the Achievements of 2023

At SkillLab, we have two rounds of feedback per year, which includes reflections on work, wellbeing, and team satisfaction. It also helps to measure the success of the DEI Committee’s initiatives. Here is what we are proud of achieving in the past year:

  • Diversity: We have successfully completed a cultural awareness workshop for the whole company. Additionally, we ran events celebrating the diversity, such as Eid Al-Fitr (end of Ramadan), LGBTQIA+ Pride and Keti Koti (Emancipation Day in Suriname). We have also exceeded our objective to achieve 40% non-cis male team participation at SkillLab. The survey reveals that everyone enjoys working in a culturally-diverse team and our colleagues generally feel that everyone is included. 
  • Leadership: We have successfully organized a workshop for team leads to support leadership in guiding diverse teams. The company-wide survey shows that team leads at SkillLab are considerate, transparent, and improving the work environment. 
  • Parental Support: We made efforts to create a more family-oriented workplace environment. This was successfully achieved by enhancing and formalizing our system of parental leave support.
collage of four different photos with different colleagues

The Objectives for 2024

Building upon accomplishments in 2023 and identified areas for improvement, it has become apparent that SkillLab must enhance diverse representation within decision-making and leadership spheres. Additionally, we recognize the need to cultivate a more inclusive and safe work environment. Therefore, we have set three objectives for the upcoming year: 

  • Objective 1: Foster diverse decision-making, uphold unbiased promotion rates, and create an inclusive culture that nurtures leadership capabilities within SkillLabers. This will be achieved through encouragement of board diversification and DEI leadership training for our colleagues who have the potential to become team leads in the future. 
  • Objective 2: Strengthen leadership effectiveness and decision-making and implement a framework to enhance support across the organization. This will happen through DEI trainings for current team leads and creation of a support guide to help those going through difficult times.
  • Objective 3: Improve SkillLab’s culture by cultivating psychological safety, promoting a sense of belonging, and ensuring that more people feel comfortable voicing their opinions. This objective will be achieved through establishing SkillLab community guidelines, completing the DEI cultural events, and implementing DEI workshops for the whole company during our retreats.

As ever, our dedication remains steady in engaging the entire team to ensure each member contributes to fostering a more diverse, inclusive, and safe work environment. SkillLab is committed to acknowledging and valuing everyone's needs, opinions, and ideas, ensuring they are recognized and heard.

If you want to learn more about diversity, equity and inclusion at SkillLab, please refer to our gender equality plan.