Omnibus Project: Q4 2018 results

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 reports publicly on our progress.

We are thrilled to share the results for Q4 2018, ending December 31st. Here are our actions:

1) Busbud Book Club

Our team decided to create a Busbud Book Club as an opportunity for our team members to share and discuss their unique perspectives on a common topic. We will read four books in 2019 that each relate to one of Busbud’s four values:

• Going Places: On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• Independent Spirit: Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground by Emily Parker
• Sustainability: Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard
• Super Helpful: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Busbud celebrates that its team members and customers come from diverse backgrounds, and have different perspectives. When sharing insights from different life experiences, we enrich each other’s lives.

2) Mental Health Guidance

At Busbud, we recognize that there is an opportunity for tech startups to do more when it comes to mental health, and we want our team members to know that Busbud takes this issue seriously.

So we’ve taken steps to make more information available to our team on this topic. We’ve clarified the mental health support offered under our group health insurance plan and written a brief overview of the state of public mental health support in Québec.

We’ve also summarized the actions that Busbud is taking to promote a healthy workplace environment, including hiring for sustainability, training our leadership team in active communication, and running our quarterly diversity initiative!

3) Discover the World Through Music

Busbud’s team members come from many different parts of the world. Quite a few also are avid travellers or have lived in other countries. We wanted to find a fun and creative way for team members to share about their home country or a place they really enjoyed – through music.

We started an account on Spotify, a popular music streaming platform, for the team to share music from, or related, to a country or a region. So far, Camila from our Engineering team shared playlists with music from Brazil and Andalucia. Francisca, from our Customer Experience team, created this playlist that she describes as follows: “The best of Portuguese music, from rock to pop to fado, to jam to while cruising through the coast of Portugal”. We also even added a bus/travel music playlist!  These playlists are public, have a listen as our library grows!

This way, we can easily integrate some local music into a team lunch or other group event, which can also include other elements from that country/region (food, beverages, decor, etc.)! We will be starting in February with our first country: Portugal.

4) “Shadowing” Day

Shadowing Day is a 1 day “job swap” where Busbud team members can opt-in to discover a job of their choice, different than their own, with a colleague working in that field.

The idea was to give team members an opportunity to understand more about how other teams interact with the product, our customers or partners in a different context. In turn, this enriches your own perspective, context and work.

This activity definitely changed the way some of our team members viewed the work of their colleagues and how they approach their own work.