International Business

Implementing Inclusive
Global Organization Policies Across a
by Nataly Kelly
March 02, 2021

Cactus Creative Studio/Stocksy

Summary.   As more and more U.S. companies commit to supporting diversity,

inclusion, and belonging in the workplace, one component that often gets left
behind is the extension of those initiatives across an organization’s global offices.
On the one hand, policies informed by... more

While issues surrounding diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DI&B)

have increasingly taken center stage in corporate America, many
U.S.-based companies struggle to extend new policies across their
global teams. That’s no surprise. Their DI&B initiatives are often
largely informed by American social, legal, and political
considerations — and that context seldom maps perfectly to every
country in which a company operates. Given these challenges, what
does it take for multinational companies to stay true to their DI&B
values around the world while acknowledging differences in local
cultural contexts?
As the VP of Localization for HubSpot, this is a question I’ve thought
a lot about. And while there are no perfect solutions, I’ve identified
three key opportunities for companies to step up and live their values
when expanding internationally.
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Choose
Values Office Locations That Align with Your DI&B
This topic first came up for me in 2018, when HubSpot was planning
an expansion into Latin America and my team was tasked with
determining the best place for our regional headquarters. We had
already set up a number of international offices, including in Dublin,
Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo, and Berlin, and so there were a number of
business factors that we knew were important when conducting a
city-by-city comparison.
First and foremost, we looked at talent availability for the types of
roles we wanted to hire, as well as educational institutions that would
ensure a future talent supply. We ran detailed financial forecasts to
understand the costs of employing people in each location, and we
analyzed facilities costs, internet access, infrastructure dependability,
and even socioeconomic factors and currency stability. And of course,
we heavily weighted the size of existing and potential customer bases
in each location and the availability of potential partners.
In all these analyses, access to talent had always been the main focus.
DI&B considerations were important to us but had remained largely
disconnected from the international expansion process. As a result, it
hadn’t occurred to me to take a close look at how a new office
location would align with HubSpot’s values of diversity and inclusion.
But one day I happened to mention the Latin American office project
to a male coworker, and he immediately responded, “I hope you
choose a country where my husband and I will be safe to travel.”
This caught me off guard. I hadn’t thought of legal protections for the
LGBT community as a key factor in our location selection process. I
also hadn’t considered this international expansion as a broader
opportunity for HubSpot to proactively align our business decisions
with our values by supporting marginalized groups around the world.
But this interaction helped me realize that those factors were highly
relevant to the task of setting up and running an international office.
That realization led us down a new path, in which we complemented
talent and market viability analyses for each potential location with
an explicit examination of how each country’s laws and cultural
environment would align with our commitment to inclusion. We
partnered with our People Operations team to develop a new
framework that looked at a number of key considerations in each
candidate country, including LGBT rights and women’s rights.
Among the factors we explored:
Does the country have strong legislation on sexual harassment in
general?
Does the country have strong legislation on sexual harassment in
the workplace?
Does the country have legislation mandating equal compensation
for work of equal value?
Is paid maternity leave mandated by law?
Is paid paternity leave mandated by law? /
For each factor, we conducted a thorough analysis using World Bank
data and other sources. This meant that in some cases, we were
holding candidate countries to a higher standard than in our home
location. For example, the United States does not have federal
legislation mandating paid parental leave.
On the basis of this analysis, we settled on Colombia, which scored
highest on support for both LGBT and women’s rights. And when my
coworker visited our new office the following year, he told me he
appreciated our choice of a more inclusive location.
Of course, DI&B wasn’t the only factor in our decision-making
process — but it was an important one. Choosing an office location
may seem like a fairly tactical project, but it was a vital opportunity to
hold ourselves accountable to our stated values, to ensure that our
global locations would offer an inclusive and supportive environment
consistent with that of our home location, and to demonstrate to our
employees around the world that we were committed to living our
DI&B values.
Help Global Teams
and Inclusion Understand Locally Driven Diversity
Priorities
Choosing a location that aligned with our values was an important
first step in ensuring that those values would be consistently upheld,
but it was far from the last. Once our international offices were
established, it was essential to ensure that our U.S.-based DI&B
initiatives were being effectively translated abroad.
For example, the past year saw a wave of action against racism among
U.S.-based companies. While discrimination (and the importance of
combating it) is universal, we found that the specifics of the Black
Lives Matter movement and systemic racism toward Black Americans
were confusing to many of our employees outside of the United
States, who didn’t necessarily have the context to understand the
nuances of the issues or HubSpot’s responses to them. To address
those gaps, we needed to provide cultural and historical context
aimed at making our DI&B programs more actionable and impactful
worldwide.
Specifically, when we rolled out a companywide mandatory anti-
racism training, we made sure to include information about the
history of systemic oppression of the Black community in America,
written in clear, accessible language. While it might not be
immediately obvious why an employee in Tokyo should learn about
the history of slavery in the United States, if we want our global
teams to work together, they need to understand one another’s
realities.
In addition, while the details of a country’s local context are unique,
there are often parallels that can be drawn to boost cross-cultural
understanding and communication — and best practices for
combating discrimination against underrepresented groups in one
country may well be applicable to combating different forms of
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discrimination in another country. Marginalized groups exist all
around the world, whether based on race, gender, sexuality, or other
identities. To ensure that both the letter and the spirit of DI&B
interventions are applied consistently across a multinational
organization, it’s important to thoughtfully and proactively translate
these initiatives into their local contexts.
Broaden Inclusive Language Initiatives Beyond English
Finally, another component of DI&B that is often overlooked when
companies expand globally is inclusive language policies. The
language we use can make a big difference in ensuring that people
from diverse backgrounds feel seen and appreciated. That’s why many
companies are working toward identifying and eliminating
problematic terms from both their external and internal content.
For example, in 2020 Google Chrome and Android replaced the terms
“blacklist” and “whitelist” with “blocklist” and “allowlist” across all
their platforms, removing what had been a subtle yet impactful form
of racism. Similar efforts have been made to address terms that (often
inadvertently) imply gendered assumptions: Some organizations now
use the phrase “work hours” instead of “man hours” and “police
officer” instead of “policeman.”
These initiatives represent real progress. But global companies often
forget that similarly charged terms exist in other languages, and those
terms aren’t always direct translations of equivalent words in English.
To address this, when we were developing an inclusive language
guide for our English-language content, we pursued parallel efforts
for all the other languages in which we operate, making sure to work
with native speakers to identify terms that could unintentionally
exclude or offend our international customers, partners, or
employees.
For instance, as an English speaker, when I log into my HubSpot
Academy portal to learn about marketing and sales, I’m greeted with
a screen that reads, “Ready to jump back in, Nataly?” In English, this
phrase does not assume any gender. But until recently, if I were to log
in as a Spanish speaker, the same screen would read, “Listo/a para
volver, Nataly?” This is an accurate translation, but because Spanish
(like many Romance languages) requires adjectives to be gendered,
the message unintentionally implies a binary construct of gender that
may leave nonbinary users feeling excluded. So we updated the
Spanish version to “Nataly, hola otra vez,” which means, “Nataly,
hello again” — a construction that serves the same function of
greeting a returning visitor but omits a gendered adjective. Subtle
changes like that may seem insignificant, but they’re an important
way of making our platform more inclusive for people of all identities
in every language.
***

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 Research shows that a commitment to inclusion is increasingly
important to employees, customers, and shareholders — and more to
the point, it’s the right thing to do. But to demonstrate a genuine,
consistent commitment to these principles, global companies must
implement value-driven policies not just at home but wherever they
operate.

Nataly Kelly is the VP of Localization at HubSpot.

Her latest book is Found in Translation (Penguin)
and her blog is Born to Be Global.