2022 Equitable Design & Impact Report: Accountability and action at Culture Amp

“In order to build a better world of work, we have to build a better world.” - Didier Elzinga, CEO and Co-Founder

Culture Amp was founded more than ten years ago with the mission of building a better world of work. Every day, our more than 1,000 Campers worldwide work to help our customers build better experiences for their employees. We know that it’s not just the business we do, but how we do business, that will truly define our legacy in the world.

Culture Amp is a part of the larger business ecosystem, and we believe that every organization has the opportunity and responsibility to make decisions that leave the world better than we found it. In 2022, we rededicated ourselves to the commitments we’ve made to scale in an equitable way, evolve towards becoming an anti-racist organization, and hold ourselves accountable as a B Corp.

To achieve these commitments, we’ve expanded how we think of equity by incorporating it as a focus for our philanthropic and environmental work. We see each area – cultural equity & inclusion, social impact, and sustainability – as the concentric circles that define our impact on our Campers, customers, and the broader world. In each of these areas, we’ve intentionally considered how we can play a meaningful role in addressing the legacy of racism and other systems of exclusion in our world.

In this report, we provide an overview of the investments we made in 2022 and the impact we’ve been able to achieve. We’re also excited to share a preview of our plans to continue our journey to build a more equitable, impactful, and sustainable world of work in 2023.

Cultural equity & inclusion

In 2022, we continued building on the foundations of our anti-racism commitment. We focused on sustaining and extending the progress we’ve made for our BIPOC Campers and improving the areas where we’ve fallen behind our commitment to equity. For 2022, that meant an increased focus on accessibility programming and the experience of our Campers with disabilities.

2022 goals & progress

Last year, we published our company-level commitments to building a more diverse and equitable Culture Amp. In this section, we provide a high-level overview of our cultural equity & inclusion goals and the progress we’ve made in achieving them.

Company representation

While some of our 2022 representation goals were added mid-year, we’ve chosen to report all of our representation goals based on our year-end results.

While we didn’t achieve all of our representation goals, we made progress toward most of our goals, and the learnings from this year will inform our plans and investments in 2023.

Programming & investments

In 2022, we set programmatic goals to ensure that our leadership development program for mid-level Campers drove racial equity. To achieve this, we invested heavily in the partnership between our Talent Acquisition (TA), Learning & Organizational Development (L&OD), and Equitable Design & Impact (EDI) teams. We are proud to share that we exceeded our target. Not only did our leadership program include learning content on equity, but we also achieved our BIPOC and Black representation targets of 35% and 10%, respectively.

We also increased our investments in equitable hiring processes. Last year, we implemented a feature that enables candidates to provide voluntary demographic information, and added a team member to work on building equitable hiring experiences full-time. These and other investments helped us achieve 47% female representation at the Director level and above in our Engineering teams.

In the following section, we share a deeper dive into our goals, progress, and commitment.

Company representation

This year, we voluntarily collected demographic information from 1038 Campers, representing the variety of communities shown below. As a part of our commitment to evolving transparently, we are not only including data on five aspects of identity but also breaking that representation down for the whole company (All Campers), People Leaders, and our Director+ population.

Programming & investments

In 2022, we continued to invest in the programs that have contributed to increased representation and equity of experience for our most marginalized Campers. Additionally, we expanded our educational programming to ensure that as many Campers as possible have access to the learning they need to collaborate and work equitably and inclusively.

Some of our programming this year included:

• Equity audits: As in previous years, we implemented a statistically rigorous audit portfolio for our performance management, promotion, and pay processes. Each time we run one of these processes, we proactively audit the results for fairness from a gender, race, ethnicity, disability, LGBTQ*, caregiver, and native English speaker status perspective. Our processes are not considered final and/or approved until our audits show that our processes have resulted in structurally equitable outcomes.
• Employee Resource Groups (ERGs): This year, in addition to providing community budgets and compensation to our ERG Leads, we also introduced community-specific Social Impact budgets to match Camper donations to organizations positively benefitting our ERG communities in the broader world.
• Accommodations & Adjustments Policy: We formally launched our new Accommodations & Adjustments Policy with the aim of ensuring that Campers with disabilities have a clear, transparent process to get the support they need to thrive. To drive awareness and utilization of this policy, we partnered with Camp ID, our ERG for disabled Campers.
• Mental health support: We began a new partnership with Modern Health to provide on-demand coaching and therapy support for all Campers and their dependents. We also introduced a new Emergency Support Policy that provides enhanced leave and financial support to employees experiencing a crisis, including bereavement and targeting by hostile legislation (including anti-trans laws and those targeting access to reproductive healthcare).
• Equity & inclusion education: During the course of 2022, more than 60% of our employees had the opportunity to attend at least one equity & inclusion learning experience. We collaborated with various partners to host educational sessions on various topics, including anti-racist leadership, disability inclusion, Indigenous experience and equity, and mental health and wellness in marginalized populations.

2023 commitments

In 2023, we plan to continue investing in our anti-racism commitments and prioritizing the experience of our disabled and transgender Campers and candidates.

To hold ourselves accountable for making concrete improvements for our most marginalized Campers, we are committed to:

• Ensuring population-level representation of BIPOC Campers at all levels.
• Improving our mentally disabled and/or neurodiverse Campers’ intent to stay by 10% points.
• Collecting data on the representation and experience of trans and/or non-binary Campers, and building a whole-company strategy to positively impact their experience.

We look forward to providing updates transparently on these efforts in our next annual report.

Social impact

In 2022, we worked to align our social and philanthropic efforts across the business into a cohesive set of programs that allows us to have a greater impact on the communities we operate in.

Culture Amp Foundation

To ensure that we can meaningfully and measurably impact issues beyond those we can affect commercially, we set up the Culture Amp Foundation.

This year, our Foundation Council – made up of senior executives, philanthropy champions, and Campers around the world – helped define the mission of the Foundation as an extension of our corporate mission:

To build a better world of work – and make it more attainable

The Culture Amp Foundation is committed to bridging the gap caused by long-standing, generational disadvantages in the ability to access supportive working environments by investing in anti-poverty, education, and skill development for members of underrepresented communities. It’s this mission that has inspired the focus of our broader social impact portfolio.

The Foundation team has identified our first partner, and in 2023, we are dedicated to finding various ways to support them, including through financial giving and skilled volunteering. We look forward to sharing more about our new partner and their incredible work throughout the year.

Employee activation

One of Culture Amp’s values is Amplify Others, and we strive to help each Camper make a positive impact on their communities through our philanthropic programs.

At Culture Amp, we offer Campers what we call “Social Impact Days” – paid time off that Campers can take to amplify causes in the communities they care about. This year, we increased this benefit from once a quarter to a full week per year. We also introduced company matching for Camper donations for specific causes and initiatives, like our Giving Back Month, throughout the year.

We’re proud to say that our Campers raised the bar again in 2022. Throughout the year, Campers:

• Raised more than $68,000 for 228 organizations, including more than $21,000 in matching funds provided by Culture Amp.
• Used more than 750 Social Impact Days to better their communities and the broader world.

We hope to increase our impact in terms of both time and dollars in 2023 while also maintaining our commitment to supporting marginalized communities.

Customer grants & discounts

Core to our mission of building a better world of work is helping other organizations build more equitable and inclusive workplaces. Culture Amp recognizes that our platform isn’t equally accessible to all organizations, which is why we offer various discounts and grants to organizations seeking to build positive experiences at work and in the wider world. These include:

• Discounts for B Corps and registered non-profits
• Black- and Indigenous-owned business discount: We provide a 38% discount on our software in acknowledgment of the wage gap that exists between Black women and White men
• Kevin Wiggins Racial Justice Grant: A grant program for non-profit organizations that work to benefit the lives of Black and Indigenous people

While we set a goal of providing more than $4 million in discounts and grants throughout 2022, we far exceeded our goal. This year, we provided more than $5.4 million dollars in discounts and grants to eligible organizations. More than 16% of our giving was through our racial justice programs, and we hope to increase this proportion in 2023.

Modern slavery statement

Culture Amp has steadily grown in size and scale over the last few years, and 2022 was our first year reporting under the Australian Modern Slavery Act. We took this as an opportunity to refocus on our responsibility to our customers, employees, and suppliers. As part of this work, we strengthened our supplier assessment processes, implemented training, and planned out ongoing reviews and audits to ensure continuous improvement.

B Corp Recertification

During 2022, we rededicated ourselves as a B Corp and improved our scores from our previous certification in 2017. As a venture-backed technology company, we recognize that it is a rare choice to embark on the journey to be certified as a B Corp. However, we see B Corp certification as fundamental to embodying the purpose-led, culture first company we’ve always striven to be.

This year, we received a score of 92.8 out of 200 from B Labs, which highlights both our successes in building a culture first organization for our employees, and the areas where we have yet to make progress. We believe that our efforts in building an equitable and inclusive workplace and providing significant support to customers doing good have contributed to our overall elevation in score. This process also emphasized the progress we still have to make, especially in regard to improving our environmental impact, which you can read more about in the following section.

Sustainability

As Culture Amp committed to in our 2021 Equitable Design & Impact Report, we are currently laying the groundwork for our sustainability roadmap. As a culture first business and B Corp we understand the urgency of the climate crisis and the importance of rising to meet the challenges we collectively face.

Programming & Investments

Emissions Inventory

In 2022, we deepened our understanding of our company's impact on the environment. We undertook a carbon emissions inventory for the first time to get a clear picture of our climate impact. The emissions inventory process showed that we created 122 tonnes of direct operational emissions (known as Scope 1 & 2 emissions). Most of this came from our offices using electricity from grids backed by fossil fuels. Looking ahead, we are committed to increasing the percentage of the electricity we source from renewables over time.

The results also showed most of our business impact is through “indirect” (Scope 3) emissions from our suppliers. This is generally reflective of the larger Software as a Service (SaaS) sector since we, like our peers, neither own nor operate a significant amount of physical infrastructure. As we work to reduce these emissions and their impact, we plan to collaborate more deeply with our suppliers. As part of this commitment to collaborative action, in 2022, we joined the global Tech Zero Initiative, a coalition of tech companies taking action on climate change.

Below is a chart representing our first efforts in reporting our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, a practice we will continue as we expand the impact of our sustainability program.

We also supported grassroots climate action through our ERG group, Camp Climate Crisis. In 2022, this group led a campaign encouraging employees to switch their home electricity to renewable energy providers. They also organized volunteering events across our office locations – from fabric recycling at Fabscrap in New York, to beach cleanups in London, San Francisco, and Melbourne.

Sustainability survey

In 2022, we launched sustainability questions within our flagship engagement survey product. This new offering enables customers to understand the impact of their sustainability initiatives on employee engagement. We also used these questions internally to measure the impact of our sustainability program on our Campers.

Our survey results show that 58% of our employees believe we demonstrate a day-to-day commitment to sustainability. We will continue to measure this sentiment over time to ensure that we progress in the right direction. A key part of our future efforts will include educating and engaging our employees on how they can support us on our sustainability journey, as well as providing meaningful and impactful ways for them to contribute to positive climate action.

Facing climate impacts

Our employees are already experiencing the impacts of climate change firsthand – from smoke entering our San Francisco office during California wildfires, to having to evacuate flooded homes in Australia. Many Campers also have family and friends living in emerging countries that are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts, such as Bangladesh, which experienced devastating floods in 2022. In countries without the resources and services to effectively respond to climate change, loss of life and economic impact are far higher.

In 2022, Culture Amp introduced an Emergency Support Policy, which includes financial support for employees facing climate emergencies. Beyond this, our well-being partner Modern Health provides 1-on-1 sessions and a therapist-led support circle for Campers who are navigating global crises and/or dealing with climate anxiety.

2023 Commitments

This year, we want to continue to build on our intention to reduce emissions by charting a clear pathway to meaningfully reducing our operational impact on the environment. We will look to align our efforts with the global effort to reach net zero emissions, and are actively working on our roadmap to achieve this. To keep ourselves accountable on our journey, we will continue to audit and report our emissions annually and consider where we can lend our voice in support of collective efforts to usher in a net zero world.

The future ahead of us

As we move into 2023, our focus is on sustaining our progress and improving in areas where we are falling behind. Below, we’ve summarized our key achievements in 2022 and our main commitments for this coming year.

We are incredibly excited to continue driving Culture Amp forward to embody what it means to be a Culture First business, and we are grateful to be able to share our journey with you.

Join us in our journey building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive world of work

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