In April 2017, we launched our diversity initiative, the Omnibus Project, to promote diversity at Busbud and beyond. Every quarter, our team carries out up to 5 actions to help foster diversity and in turn reports publicly on our progress.
We are thrilled to share the results for Q1 2021, ending March 31st. Here are our actions:
1) Start to set diversity metrics
Since we started the Omnibus Project, we’ve been able to accomplish over 40 actions to promote diversity and to make Busbud a better place to work. These include organizing and hosting events that are focussed on aspects of diversity, in order to better educate our team regarding more sensitive topics.
We also believe it’s time to hold ourselves accountable for becoming a more diverse organization. You can’t improve what you can’t measure, so our plan is to have a more in depth analysis of our current status and set goals that can serve as a vision for our hiring efforts. We want to go beyond the ratio of women/men as we understand that diversity is not reduced to aspects such as gender or visible diversity traits.
Being a small organization, some of our teams don’t have more than a handful of members. With that in mind, we want to focus not only on representation targets but also on behaviours that we believe will impact how diverse we become as our teams grows. We want to hold hiring managers accountable for recruiting and fostering diverse teams. Some initiatives include:
- Host combating bias training for interviewers twice a year
- Include job postings on platforms that target specific demographics
- Source candidates from specific programs/associations that target a specific demographic.
This is a process that can’t be completed in one quarter. We invite you to keep up to date with our progress as we advance with this initiative. We understand there’s a long road ahead, but we know that by becoming a more diverse workplace we will be able to deliver more to our customers and partners!
2) Improve accessibility for users on Busbud.com website
Busbud is committed to accessibility of travel for all, this is why we have implemented several actions to improve the accessibility of Busbud, in particular for people with visual impairments.
During the Hackathon held by Busbus in March 2021, we decided to make some changes on the titles, labels and buttons on the home page. These changes increased the accessibility score from 74% to 86% according to the webaccessibility.com tool.
We have also written a detailed list of concrete actions to be implemented in our design system to further increase the accessibility score.
Finally, our user interview process now includes people with visual impairments. Indeed, thanks to a call for participants shared by the RAAMM, we had the chance to already speak with two people with visual impairments and to understand the obstacles present on the Busbud site that we must resolve.
This is just the start of a long road ahead that we are excited to begin!
3) Free market
Sustainability being one of Busbud’s most important values, we decided to launch a #free-market channel on our communication platform, Slack. This channel would allow everyone to give what they don’t need anymore, but could still have value for other people in the company.
There’s no trade, no exchange, simply give. The purpose of this was to bring awareness to our consumption and reduce our ecological footprint. With this new channel, we can encourage people to reuse and avoid throwing away useful things and therefore help reduce the production of new goods.
Since we implemented the channel, we had a total 42 items to give away and 8 of those successfully found a new home.