Thank you all for joining us today. Really excited to see someone. Today, we'll be talking about impact of women communities in tech organizations. I am Priti Mahapatra.I am a senior data analyst in the ecom department in Accardo. My journey in the women in tech community has been from the day I joined Accardo. I've seen the community grow from a group of passionate women meeting over lunch and conducting lunch and learn sessions to having a 16 member leadership team driving all great initiatives for the women community over the last five years. Currently, I'm the cochair of a woman in tech community along with Stefana. Over to you, Stefana.

Thanks, Preeti. Hi, everyone. I am Stefana. I'm an engineering manager at Ocado Technology. I've been in Ocado for around seven years, out of which for the last two years, I've been involved with our Women in Tech community. And then for the last more or less one year, I've been a cochair together with Priti. And before we get into the topic of the presentation, I want to just give you a little bit of context about Ocado. I'm not gonna get into details, but just enough for you to set the stage and understand the nature of our woman community. So Ocado technology is in the online grocery sector. And it has an end to end solution from placing the order to getting it delivered to your house.

So we follow this whole process and we make optimizations for which process. We have, like, software, hardware. I'm not gonna get into the details of that. But you can see one example on the screen. This is one of our automated warehouses where we have robots that are moving on a grid, and they are, like, automatically picking and packing the order. One thing that is important is our, office distribution. We have offices in various locations around the world. We have over 4,000 employees, out of which around 23% are female. And this is important in the context of our woman community Because it means our woman community has to be distributed across all these locations as well. But before we move on, just to get everybody energised and ready for the presentation, we want to do a very quick icebreaker.

So if you could please go to menti.com and put this code on the screen or also, Priti will share a link. So if you could go to that link and answer the question, what you want it to be when you grew up? And if you could please try thinking of just the very first dream. So the very the earliest answer you can remember to this question. Okay. In case it's not working for anybody, don't worry. Just go ahead and paste the answer in the in the chat. But we wanted to see a bit, like, what the different people think and look at the word cloud. I think pilot is a big team. We have some nurses, doctors, teachers. Okay. Teachers taking over. I'm just gonna give everybody a few a few more seconds. Okay. Pilot is winning again.

A lot of pilots here. Okay. It keeps on changing. I'm waiting to see I'm trying to give everybody the chance to answer. But pilot pilot seems to still be the lead the lead aspiration followed by teacher or quite close to teacher. Quite interesting. It's very interesting to see astronaut is also here. We have doctor, architect, dentist. A bit of everything, really. I see an engineer, so that that person was spot on, managed to actually follow that initial dream. Okay. Let's let's move on. Over to you, Preeti.

Thank you. Thank you for engaging with our word cloud. With this icebreaker, we wanted to bring home the concept of dream gap. It amplifies the impact of stereotypical roles that sets boundaries to what a young girl aspires to become growing up. Young girls begin to doubt their intelligence, abilities, or attention often as early as age five. Over time, this can contribute to fewer women in STEM fields. To test this theory, we ran a short survey in Accardo and asked some of our colleagues, both men and women, to share what was their first ever dream. The top three roles that men listed were engineer, astronaut, scientist. Any guesses for the top three roles? A woman were yes. Designer, teacher as a lot of you also came across, and astronaut. The theme of stereotypical roles only reinforces with football player, driver, mathematician, popular among men.

Women listed roles like doctor, pediatrician, ballerina, journalist. So overall, men have a tendency towards technically higher paying jobs. Girls have a tendency for a job related to more caretaking. Today, you and me have the opportunity to change this to showcase to the future generation that a woman can get into the field of STEM and more other fields, and they can increase their spectrum of options and nurture their full potential with competence, which brings us beautifully to the next topic, Stefano.

Thank you, Preeti. Be before we go on, I just want you to take a moment and just reflect back to the ice breaker and on your own answer to this question of what you wanted to be when you grew up. And ask yourself whether your answer also had or maybe didn't have the stereotypical lens to it. And what we wanted to show really with this exercise is that unconscious bias starts at an early age. And from early ages, women are conditioned to doubt their own potential. So later, this doubting obviously impacts us in all the different aspects of our life, including the workplace. And in the workplace, that's why it's great to have woman communities that help support each other. But what exactly are woman community? And also what are communities?

This is a different concept that I want to introduce that will help us later. So communities are groups of people that come together to support, empower, and advocate for gender equity within the company. And these groups include both women and include their allies. On the other side, the committee is a subset of this group. And it's the leadership team that is organizing and running initiatives for the community. So they are also they are technically the leadership team overlooking the community. But why? Why do we need to have such a leadership team? Why is this important? Well, there are a few different reasons. The first one is that it provides a clear point of contact. So you know who to get in touch with no matter what you need to talk about related to the community.

You have a face and a name that you can sort of contact. The second one is that it gives clear roles and clear responsibilities. If you're interested in an initiative, you can know who is responsible for it. If on the opposite, like, some sort of initiative has to be organized, there's sort of somebody that is by default assigned to that. The next one is that it sparks connections across silos. So it sparks connections across the different business units with different stakeholders in the company. And then lately last but not least, it connect as a talent incubator. So for the members of the committee, it's a safe space where they can start practicing their leadership skills and they can start their leadership journeys.

And we wanted to give you an example of what the potential structure of a committee can be like. This is not the only way to structure it. This is how we structure it at Ocado. This is what works for us. But the different companies might be using different things. So just take it as an example, not as a rule. But the way we structure it is that we have chairs. So we saw before that me and Preeti are the chairs of our our committee, and chairs are the ones that sort of oversee the activity of the committee. They work closely with the members of the people team. They work closely with senior leaders. And they just manage everything about around making sure that the committee is running smoothly. Then the rest of the committee is organized in four groups.

And each one of these four groups has set responsibilities and is that are related to specific initiatives. For example, we have one group that is mainly involved in passing communications to the community. Then we have one for organizing events. We have one that is related to liaising with the rest of the business and connecting us to the business. And then we have one that mainly focuses on initiatives related to learning and to personal development. And then one other part of the structure that is very important are the sponsors. So the sponsors are members of senior leadership that we work very closely with. We normally have around two free sponsors. And they're senior leaders that support the community. They offer advice. They come to our events.

They get involved in our events and initiatives. And one of the main things they do is that they help us, like, promote and spread our message. So these are people with influence that have, like, wide networks, and they can really help us with visibility. So now that we've introduced the concept, we saw what the community is and we saw why it's important to have a committee. Let's dig deeper into the topic of today's presentation and see which exactly is the impact that Wollong communities have on the organization. So over to you Preeti.

Thank you, Stefano. So there are many ways a community can impact an individual in an organization and the organization itself. I'm going to point out some common experiences. First being helping connect people. It could be a one off networking events, small scale coffee chats, lean in sessions, webinars. It benefits both ways. Women get the visibility by showcasing what they are doing, who they are, and also women get a platform from where they know about what roles and opportunities are available in the organization. Next is providing a great platform for learning by hosting workshops, knowledge sharing sessions, personal development sessions, and then sharing learning materials in the channels. And for an effective choice of content, it's recommended to gather feedback and conduct polls to understand what the community needs, where the gap is. Next is, keeping people informed. When women analyze across different departments join a community, it gives everyone a platform to share what is happening in each craft, team, business units via Slack channels, posters, or messaging around the offices.

People sharing resources and celebrating achievements keeps everyone aware of where the business is heading towards and what success looks like. Next is creating role models. Again, bringing in the theory of dream app. We see women in leadership roles sharing success stories, sharing their journey, giving tips. This gives confidence to women to aspire and be ambitious. Sometimes we all need that woman empowered to see it, to make it possible for us. And last but not least, promoting a leadership. It's worth calling out that an underrepresented group cannot change the experiences of the underrepresented group. You have to onboard the majority too into the vision and goals of the community. So allyship is very important for the impact to be sustainable and far reaching. It is a journey and not something that can be done overnight. Next slide, please. Please, It's important that initiatives within the community has a wider impact.

Here are some examples of how our community kind of created a ripple effect as a community. We can try to have a vision that is not only beneficial to the committee, but also the organization as a whole. So you will need people's team and DNI team's help as well in bringing them on board. Some examples are community's goals was to improve the experiences of women. Today, it's aligned with the organizational goal of Accardo improving women experience in the company. We launched an allyship program in 2024. And over the time, communities like Pride, Black at the top Black at Accardo, they joined forces, to bring our lives together in general, and people's team are helping them. Try before you apply is a very noble idea by women community. It was designed to explore career opportunities before applying within a couple.

It was appreciated by learning and development and people's team, and now the organization has taken up the project to make it work. This will not only benefit women, but in general, everyone. I'm Remarkable Sessions, I'm hoping some of you may be aware of it. It's a program that empowers to celebrate success confidently. It's an external provider program, and it was piloted by a woman community, and it is now available across all communities and departments and even locations within Accar. It's worth reinstating here that as a community, we can try to have a vision that is beneficial for the organization as a whole while bringing in the women aspect of it and their aspirations into it as well. Next slide, please. Thank you. And no story is complete without numbers.

Bringing in the data analyst in me out, we have to track progress to help us define goals, to help us come up with compelling pitches to executives on why we should be invested in communities and their initiatives. Help us to see what we have improved, what has suffered, what is the gap. So, like, measuring and tracking community growth, attendance tracking for events, scope from employee management platforms like Beacon, making sure that CCU and SLD engagement is tracked, and then asking for feedback and doing annual surveys. So this one is very important so that we are taking data driven decisions. Over to you, Stefana, for wrapping up.

Thank you, Preeti. So before we end, we wanted to give you some some tips and some tricks of what to take into account if you want to create or maybe you just want to consolidate a similar community in your organization. And the the first piece of advice is to have a structured committee that is leading the community. So this is what we've talked about before. A structured committee is sort of helping give direction, give clarity, a clear point of contact. The second one is to look for sponsors and involve senior leaders. Everything just gets much easier. And if you can if you can get that, like, top down level support and those influential people to sort of promote and spread your message.

The next piece of advice is to stick to it. Involvement, especially in the beginning, it can be low. It could happen that you organize an event. You spend, like, long time organizing it, and then maybe five, six people only turn up. But just keep on pushing. It does get better with time. And the typical thing you can do here to sort of improve it is to sort of bribe people, bringing food. But this can actually be good because even though people come for the food, they they stay for the message, and they can leave the events, sort of talk with other people. So over time, they sort of just attracts more people. So food can be a bit of a future investment as well. The next one is celebrate your successes, celebrate your achievements no matter how small. And then finally and this one is very important.

So if there's just one action that you take away from today's presentation, then just let it be this one. But that is join your woman community if your organization has one or if there is no woman community. Just look into how you can start one yourself. So thank you. That's all we had for you today. We hope you enjoyed the presentation. We hope you learned something new. And we still have around two, three minutes in case anybody has question. You can write them in the chat or if you want to tell us whether do you have an a woman community at your organization or I don't know. Do you have any specific great things you do and you wanna share? Okay. It looks like there's nothing coming up in that case. Thank you.

Thank you so much for your time. Oh, there's somebody building a woman community in in her company. Yeah. Good luck. And if you want to connect with us and maybe we can give some advice or maybe you can share some learning and some insights, we we would be happy to do so. Thanks, everyone.