Adobe Celebrates Sydney Mardi Gras

Diversity and inclusion helps us value and benefit from all voices.

Fill your organisation with diverse teams and you’re in for a serious business boost — companies with the most diversity are financially outperforming their peers by as much as 33 percent.

And it doesn’t stop there. Companies with the most ethnically and culturally diverse boards of directors are 43 percent more likely to record above-average profits. It’s simple — diversity and inclusion are good business.

But it’s also just good for humanity. Resulting from the back-and-forth, the idea-challenging, and the unique points-of-view in diverse teams, convention gets challenged and innovation thrives. That’s what we strive for at Adobe every single day. Our goal is an overarching equity that ensures everyone has the support they need for long-term growth.

#AdobeForAll

Sydney Mardi Gras is one of Australia’s most famous and well-loved events, bringing thousands of visitors to Sydney to join in celebrating and commemorating the histories, contributions and triumphs of the LGBTQI community. At Adobe we invest in building something similar – a diverse and inclusive environment for our employees, customers, partners and the overall technology industry. It’s something we call Adobe For All, a vision of equal treatment, employee fulfillment and opportunities for all that we work towards every day.

Our employees come from all over the world and are diverse in gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, age, and culture — and we want every single one of them to feel they have a voice and that it’s heard and valued. We could not think of a better time to celebrate Adobe For All in Sydney than during Mardi Gras, with festivities in our office and through the voices of our ANZ employees across our social media channels.

We put this vision into action at our recent Adobe For All Summit. Bringing together 1,200 attendees learned the value of not only prioritising diversity but embracing the friction this infuses into group work. They learned how to encourage participation so all can feel welcome to participate equally.

As part of the larger #AdobeForAll initiative, Adobe’s Senior Director of Diversity and Inclusion Katie Juran created a five-part video series, “Adobe For All In Action,” that addresses key dimensions to increasing inclusivity in the workplace. In this series, Katie talks about valuing difference, amplifying others’ voices, enhancing your team with new perspectives, rethinking routine events to promote equity, and speaking up for what you need.

What a diverse workforce looks like — and what they deliver

Because diverse teams are more innovative and make more accurate decisions in half the time, the results of our diversity and inclusion initiatives speak for themselves. Here are some of the ways we’ve focused our efforts across Adobe.

Pay parity. We want our employees to be paid equally for an equal day’s work. Late last year, we celebrated our achievement of closing the gender pay gap throughout our company. As an organization we no longer ask salary history during the application process to avoid perpetuating salary gaps.

Equal benefits regardless of gender. We’ve also introduced an enhanced parental leave policy that provides primary caregivers with 26 weeks of paid time off, regardless of gender. This eliminates the notion of being “Mommy Tracked” for taking time off to care for a child.

Opportunity parity. This year, we’re dedicated to looking at gaps in “opportunity parity” — equity in how employees are able to move internally and advance in their careers. We want to ensure the best talent has a compelling reason to join and grow their career at Adobe.

Adapting and evolving as we go

While these are positive moves in the right direction, we also know that creating a culture of diversity and inclusion isn’t simply a task on a to-do list — there’s no finish line, no period at the end of the sentence, and no moment where we say, “mission complete.” As times change, we’ll continue to evolve, ensuring we’re always empowering our employees, and that we’re bringing diverse voices to every table, every time.

These initiatives have created a unique environment for all Adobe employees and stakeholders. Workplace diversity is one reason that Glassdoor ranked Adobe as one of the top five best AI companies to work for in 2018 and a driver behind our number two spot on Indeed’s list of top-rated workplaces in tech.

This recognition, though, is just the beginning. As we continue to grow and evolve as a workforce, we want diverse employees to think of us first — to think about our hiring practices, our culture of inclusion, and how, at Adobe, they can and will make a difference. To us, that’s powerful — and that’s how we want to do business.

We know that our world is diverse and that a spirit of inclusion is central to the success of our organisation. See what diversity and inclusion means to Adobe employees by following #AdobeForAll.