An inside look at how Canva incorporates diversity in its daily operations

One of the most important initiatives I’ve worked on is making Canva a true ‘Celebration of Diversity’. Before Canva, I was at a company of 40ish people and wanted to build a workplace where everyone felt that they belonged. I attended seminars, talked to diversity experts, and read a lot.

Still, many of the ideas seemed too far ahead of the stage we were at. The mountain of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) was too daunting, and for a time I was stuck, fearing I could unintentionally offend someone if I launched initiatives incorrectly.

Out of apprehension, I didn’t take action as much as I wanted to. But I kept learning. When I was asked to work on Canva’s DE&I strategy — I jumped at the chance. At Canva, we have a company-wide approach to diversity; we believe that we’re all responsible for creating a diverse environment. While our DE&I working group is a team of 16 from all corners of our team, true diversity takes the work and continuous learning by every one of us.

As a global team, we have focused on a cycle of listening, learning, setting goals, doing, reviewing to ensure our growing team is as inclusive as possible (alongside the teams working on our Product Diversity Initiatives).

While it’s still early days for us, we have made a commitment, as a company, to continuously learn and put in the work. I​n this blog I’ll take you through some of the actions we have taken at Canva to build a more inclusive team.

Our intention is to share for two reasons:

1. Share what’s working for us, so that anyone in the position I was in can take ideas that might work for their teams; and
2. Share with those thinking of joining the Canva team so they can openly see what we’re working on and how much more we still want to do.

That’s not to say we have it all figured out — we don’t. While we have made progress, we know there is so much left to learn and a long way to go.

And while this list is not exhaustive of what we’re doing, in this blog we’ll focus on inclusive hiring, awareness and education, health and wellbeing, learning; and then more tailored information on supporting parents and caregivers and the LGBTQIA+ community. First up…

Diverse and inclusive hiring

To create a team rich with dynamic perspectives who work together with shared values towards a shared vision, it’s crucial everyone involved in hiring is supported by the right processes and makes an intentional effort. Some steps we’ve taken to create a more inclusive hiring process:

• We added a note to job postings to ease imposter syndrome: We value all types of experiences here at Canva, so if you don’t meet all the qualifications, we’d still love to hear from you;
• Removed unnecessary degree requirements and exclusive language, such as “guru” and “rockstar”, from job descriptions. We found diversity decoders helpful to check this; and
• Our job descriptions and benefits don’t refer to social gatherings that may exclude people. For example, beers at the office at 7pm aren’t everyone’s idea of a good time, so we excluded this language from our job postings.

Sharing a welcoming work environment can show candidates who you are and offer a peek into your culture; we recently did this by sharing a video of our team’s own stories.

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• Being transparent about policies through partnerships with organisations like Work180 can help applicants make informed decisions on benefits and policies before applying;
• We host workshops for everyone involved in hiring to ensure we all understand how to fairly assess candidates, recognise and mitigate biases, and help to improve our standardised interviews and feedback; and
• Hiring for “Culture-Fit” can be detrimental to inclusive hiring, so we assess candidates “culture-add” using our values in interviews instead. For example, for our Empower Others value, we look for candidates who have developed themselves and others and who openly share information.

Inclusive awareness and education

• To make sure that our internal events feature a variety of artists and entertainers and use guardrails to ensure at least 50% come from underrepresented groups;
• We believe in our responsibility to champion diversity externally too. We encourage everyone at Canva to only only participate in external events or panels if there is a diverse range of speakers;
• At Canva, we love to celebrate. It’s important that celebrations factor in cultural sensitivity and individual circumstances such as being mindful of an event time being parent and caregiver friendly, events being organised with decent notice, alcoholic drinks as optional, and remote-friendly events; and

• Accessibility is core to our product and workplace. We have a fantastic team working on this at Canva that recently hosted an Accessibility Day where we all came together to work on our accessibility goals. If you’re interested in increasing accessibility, the Canva team wrote a blog on inclusive design here.

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Inclusion in our health and wellbeing

The health and wellbeing of everyone at Canva will always be our top priority, and it is crucial every decision in this space is as inclusive as possible. Different people around the world will find different things most helpful for their wellbeing. Some initiatives we see working well at Canva:

• Surveys help us to hear directly from our team. Especially if they are succinct, not too frequent, and actions are taken quickly. Some of the steps below are from survey suggestions;
• We introduced Vibe & Thrive, a dedicated allowance that each person can claim for whatever best supports their wellbeing; from health memberships, to celebrations, to wellbeing and education;
• Based in fostering both flexibility and team connection, we recently updated our Future of Work policy; this approach is helping to support and hire more people from diverse backgrounds who have different needs and personal priorities;
• We offer a confidential Employee Assistance Program that allows our team (and/or their immediate family members) to seek up to 13 paid sessions per year with a fully qualified practitioner;
• Meet-Free Wednesday and ‘Sacred Lunch Hour’ have been added to everyone’s calendar to give space for deep work and give introverts or those not comfortable on Zoom a break; 
• During the global lockdowns, we made a week of paid Flex-Leave available to anyone needing an extended break. The team also isn’t required to formally log periods under 1 day off when caring for themselves or others.

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• A recent survey showed that adding a Canva-wide Recharge Day for a collective team break has been one of the most impactful initiatives for wellbeing, especially for those in our team caring for others; and
• A way of supporting our team has been inviting our Wellbeing Partners, Select Wellness, to share tips, eg: Habits to Ease Anxiety, Creating Boundaries, and The Juggle is Real.

Continuous learning

Research shows diverse teams are great for teams; they are a driver of innovation and help improve the decision making playing-field. Our goal is for everyone at Canva to know why DE&I matters to them and adopt inclusive daily habits by embedding D&I as a core part of our learning and development programs.

• A good place to start is by identifying areas your team wants to excel in, possibly through a survey. Then develop programs or partnerships in those areas that the team can choose to take part in. Some programs we developed are Leadership Development, Coach Essentials for first-time coaches/managers, and Unstoppable Me;
• We formed a partnership with Project F to help us audit and improve our processes to achieve more equal and gender-diverse teams across all levels;
• As part of the Canva team onboarding, we have an Introduction to DE&I session to ensure everyone who joins the team has the same access to information on the importance of DE&I from week 1;
• We have recently shifted to a big focus on process documentation, avoiding reliance on casual knowledge to accommodate different learning styles for everyone to do their best work; and
• We have Fix-It and Diversity-Ideas forms for our team to voice ideas for improvements across Canva:

Our Celebration of Diversity working group has 15 sub-groups of DE&I focuses, but we thought it could be helpful to share some specific ideas in a few of these areas. These lists are not exhaustive but give an idea of some of the work we’re doing in 2 of the 15 areas. More to come on the other focus areas in another blog!

Supporting the LGBTQIA+ community

Belonging is a commitment we take seriously. If you’d like to learn about how we support the LGBTQIA+ community, Canva’s Hugo Welke wrote a piece, Out at Work and #proudtobe. A few we hear are impactful:

• To ensure we use correct pronouns, we give space to identify these in applications, on Slack and our internal intranet, aiming to normalise sharing and the importance of using the correct pronouns;
• We use Zoom backgrounds with pronoun visibility options, and share backgrounds for our team to show support of LGBTQIA+ events like Wear It Purple or IDAHOBIT;
• Our #diversity-inclusion and #lgbtqia-pride-club Slack channels have been really helpful for everyone to discover resources, support, events and posts, and get involved;

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• Celebrating Pride is an important time to authentically support our team by raising awareness, organising educational sessions, and listening to how we can all best support professionally and interpersonally. A sneak peek of Pride Week at Canva;

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• We encourage our team to bring their full selves to work; respecting and valuing everyone for who they are, not by their gender identity. In our Sydney offices, bathrooms are all gender-neutral and fully stocked with free menstruation products to make everyone feel comfortable; and
• We believe in empowering others through education, providing a safe environment for discussion. Canva’s previous topics have included:

1. Key definitions and concepts of sex, gender and sexuality
2. Out at Work: Q&A panellist with Canva’s LGBTQIA+ community
3. Common barriers LGBTQIA+ people face at work and how we can all listen and help
4. Tips on supporting LGBTQIA+ people interpersonally and professionally

Supporting parents and carers

Providing parents and caregivers with a supportive workplace that can adapt to their individual family needs is important to creating a truly diverse workplace. We recently refreshed our parental leave policy to be more inclusive of all family constructs. Some of the things parents and caregivers told us that they valued:

• Equal leave is a great accelerator for gender equality. We want to normalise parents taking leave and equal roles in caregiving. We removed carer labels (eg Primary, Secondary) and offer parents 18 weeks paid parental leave for AU, NZ & US, with no tenure threshold and fully flexible across 2 years, with superannuation paid throughout;
• We offer a flexible Return To Work policy, including keeping in touch days throughout leave periods, and working 3 days for the first 4 weeks following leave and receiving full-time pay; and
• We offer sessions with our external EAP/wellbeing providers as well as our internal coaching team throughout pregnancies or in the lead up to adoption, and return to work, to help with the transition.

For lots of helpful tips on supporting parents at work, this blog by Canvanaut and parent Hannah Heffernan has a wealth of great ideas.