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Nathalia Sandoval

In my first interview with Courier, when my now-boss was telling me about the company, he stopped and said, “I see your display name is not the same as the name on your application. Are there any other pronouns that I should be using?” It was a small gesture, but it made an impact on me. The moment hinted at a company culture built around treating people with respect and appreciating authenticity. Courier is still a very small company building the foundation of a diverse team, but even as we grow, I’m confident that this will remain a priority for us in the future. 

Encouraging employees to be their true selves in big and little ways is important because it’s the right thing to do—it also happens to be the best way to recruit a diverse team of employees. And increasing diversity improves many facets of an organization: Productivity, profits, employee retention, and even the ability to navigate conflict.

In honor of Pride month, let’s talk about the power of diversity and how tech companies should improve inclusion in their organizations.

## Diverse Teams Make More Money
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about racial diversity, gender diversity, or other forms of diversity—people with different experiences often come up with different ideas from each other. Those unique insights drive innovation and better decision making, which, in turn, increases profits.

When looking at your demographics, it’s important to consider power and hierarchies. If most of your diversity is at the entry-level while management and leadership remain primarily white, cis, able-bodied, and male, you aren’t going to see the same results as companies with diversity at every level. [Organizations with above-average diversity in management see 19% higher innovation revenue](https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2018/how-diverse-leadership-teams-boost-innovation) than companies with below-average diversity in management. The same study found that teams with above-average diversity in management also had [EBIT](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/ebit.asp) (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) margins that were 9% higher than organizations with below-average diversity in management.

Studies that zero in on the results of increased diversity when it comes to specific demographics see interesting results too. A study that compared two genders (men and women) found that companies where [30% or more of their executives were women](https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-wins-how-inclusion-matters), outperform their peers. Unfortunately, the study didn’t acknowledge or account for other genders.
Available research indicates these results apply to LGBTQ+ diversity as well. A study of the LGBTQ+ inclusivity at 657 publicly-traded U.S. companies found strong evidence that “[more LGBT-friendly firms have higher profitability](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acfi.12787) and higher stock market valuations.” Diversity makes sound commercial sense.

## Differences Improve Collaboration and Innovation
Diversity also affects how teams collaborate and innovate in complex ways. Overall, the more diverse a team is, the more creative and innovative they’ll be. Mixed-gender teams can [better manage group conflict](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749597816302205) compared to homogenous teams and can better maximize creativity among team members.

But some situations can thwart the benefits diversity brings. For instance, [stress makes people in groups start leaning back into homogenous thinking](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/job.2630?af=R). In turn, this can discourage employees who belong to marginalized groups from speaking up. Because these insights are no longer being shared, the benefits of diversity are lost, while employees feel detached and alienated. 

It’s also important to remember that employees who experience oppression are more likely to burn out. Glassdoor reviewed 209,112 workplace reviews and found that [LGBTQ+ employees are 51% more likely to report burnout](https://www.glassdoor.com/research/pride-month-2022/) than their coworkers. A 2021 McKinsey report shared that LGBTQ+ women, disabled women, and Black women [experienced more microaggressions](https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace) than their peers and noted that, “Women who regularly experience microaggressions are…almost three times as likely to say that in the past few months they have struggled to concentrate at work as a result of stress.”

In other words, if you want to experience the benefits of diversity, you must create a place where people can genuinely let their guard down and be themselves. That means increasing diversity in your team so employees don’t feel tokenized. This also means making your workplace a safe place to be a marginalized person. How do you do that? By making it an unsafe place for discrimination and harassment. For instance, leadership and management need to step in and say something when they see a microaggression happening. They need to make it an uncomfortable place to foster exclusion and hate.

Harvard Business Review and Glassdoor partnered up for a series of [studies on diversity in the workplace](https://hbr.org/2020/01/the-new-analytics-of-culture) and published an article on their findings in 2021. The author recommends “encouraging diverse cultural ideas while fostering agreement among employees about the importance of a common set of organizational norms and beliefs.” 

## Inclusivity is a Major Factor in Employee Retention
Organizations looking to reduce employee turnover should consider that the level of inclusion employees feel at work greatly influences their career decisions. Whether or not your employees decide to take another job could come down to how comfortable they feel at work.

A survey of 1,789 full-time U.S. employees and 2,000 live participant experiments found “high belonging was linked to a [whopping 56% increase in job performance](https://hbr.org/2019/12/the-value-of-belonging-at-work), a 50% drop in turnover risk, and a 75% reduction in sick days. For a 10,000-person company, this would result in annual savings of more than $52M.”

A 2020 Catalyst survey of 2,100 employees at large corporations found that [35% of an employee’s emotional engagement in their job](https://www.catalyst.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Getting-Real-About-Inclusive-Leadership-Report-2020update.pdf) and 20% of an employee’s decision to stay or leave their current organization is determined by inclusivity.

That’s not  surprising, given that feeling included at work is likely to make people happier, and happier employees are more likely to stay. What’s more interesting is that the retention benefits go beyond the demographics most affected. Workplaces with more gender diversity [may see lower turnover](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0170840619875480) in women and men. (Unfortunately, the research on inclusion didn’t include nonbinary employees.)

## 4 Tips for Increasing Employee Diversity 
To get these benefits, organizations need to clarify where they stand on diversity at every stage of the hiring process. Candidates who are most likely to improve the diversity of your organization will also be looking most carefully at how you talk about and approach diversity.

### 1. Assume many of your LGBTQ+ employees aren’t out at work
The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law surveyed 935 adults who identified as “LGBT” in May 2021. They reported that [50% of LGBT employees aren’t out to their supervisor](https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-workplace-discrimination/), and 25% aren’t out to anyone at work. That’s likely because 45% of LGBT employees have already experienced unfair treatment at work at some point in their lives. Keep in mind that many employees will be reluctant to be themselves due to past experiences.

It’s your job to make your organization's culture so welcoming and authentic that employees feel comfortable enough to be themselves. Have leadership and management start putting pronouns in their bios. Don’t invest in anti-LGBTQ+ companies or donate money to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians. Bring in diversity and inclusion educators from the communities they teach about. Never stop actively working to improve your organization’s diversity and inclusion.

### 2. Understand no marginalized communities are a monolith
 Oppression and inclusivity are not simple things. Especially at work. A Catalyst report on inclusivity put it well: “[Employees' work lives are often affected by their experiences as people with intersectional identities](https://www.catalyst.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Getting-Real-About-Inclusive-Leadership-Report-2020update.pdf) such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, LGBTQ+ identity, etc. More granular views of employee experiences of inclusion are needed to truly make an impact.” The report advises organizations to avoid tokenizing employees and build inclusivity into the company culture so it goes beyond policies.
Review your diversity and inclusion strategy and tactics. How is intersectionality addressed in the way you approach diversity and inclusion? If you don’t know the answer, bring in a dedicated diversity and inclusion educator to help you learn more and build intersectionality into your approach.

### 3. Don’t justify why diversity is vital to your organization
Organizations that trip over themselves to explain they’re inclusive because it’s good for business risk alienating potential employees. Research shows employees are more likely to view an organization favorably if they make it clear to potential employees that [honoring diversity is at the core of the business](https://hbr.org/2022/06/stop-making-the-business-case-for-diversity) and avoid any urge to explain why. For example, instead of saying. “We value diversity because it benefits us as well as our employees,” you could say something like, “Honoring and respecting employee diversity is and will continue to be a core value here.”

### 4. Take action
To impact future and current employees, you need to do more than learn and communicate; you’ll also need to take action. Think in big and small ways, such as ensuring health insurance covers gender-affirming care and encouraging employees to add pronouns to bios and email signatures. Ultimately each decision adds up to a culture that either helps employees thrive or holds them (and you) back.

You should prioritize diversity for your organization because it’s the right thing to do. If you can build an inclusive environment where employees like me can be their real selves, every part of the business will benefit, too.
All this is not to say that Courier has mastered building a diverse LGBTQ+ team (or will be able to do so in the near future), but we’re definitely taking a whack at it and I feel confident that we’ll get pretty close. To be a part of this mission, come [join the team](https://jobs.lever.co/trycourier)!


Courier is a notification service that centralizes all of your templates and messaging channels in one place which increases visibility and reduces engineering time. 

Start Routing Notifications Today!

Mother duck swimming with her pride colorful babies in a pond surrounded by tall grass and a setting sun

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In honor of Pride month, let’s talk about the power of queer diversity and how tech companies should improve inclusion in their organizations.

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How LGBTQ+ Diversity Builds Better Companies

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Troy Goode

We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $35M to provide engineering teams with fantastic notification infrastructure! The round was led by GV with participation from our existing investors at Bessemer Venture Partners and Matrix Partners.

*“Courier is building the future of notification infrastructure. The company has a fast-growing set of customers with a need to provide the best possible notification experience. GV is thrilled to lead Courier's Series B and partner with Troy Goode and the entire executive team as they deliver on an unparalleled approach to software notifications."* - Sangeen Zeb, GV

Courier’s vision is to be a single source of truth of all of the end-user’s notifications. We aim to bring together all notifications, whether they may be from mobile, email, Slack, or any other channel, to a single point of easy access to lift the burden of improving the notification experience from the end-user. 

The next incremental step on this road is to begin to improve mobile notifications. According to a Courier survey of 157 notification recipients, respondents are more likely to engage with a smartphone notification than a text, email, push, or in-app notification. Our first goal for our Series B, therefore, is to improve the user experience of mobile notifications and we are starting down this path today by announcing new advanced mobile notification capabilities for our platform.  Check out the video below to learn more about our new mobile offerings!

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tPB2wFI7u0I" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

## A new category of software: Notification Infrastructure
Every piece of software in the world sends notifications, and just about every software team has had to build the infrastructure needed to deliver those notifications in-house. This ubiquitous need for notification infrastructure demands its own category of software, which gives developers the option to use a third party API instead of building an entirely new notification system from scratch. 

As a former engineer and engineering executive, I’ve experienced the pain involved with building and scaling notification infrastructure too many times. Every time I was tasked with building a new notification system for a new product, I wished there was a service I could reach for to free up my engineering team and avoid the future headache that I knew would follow.

The lack of this type of solution is what drove me to found Courier. 

Courier delivers notification infrastructure to our customers as SaaS. At the center of our product is an API designed for engineering teams. This API allows developers to send notifications across any channel as well as manage user data, preferences, notification workflows, and more. In addition to the API, we provide a web Studio that allows our customers to easily design omni-channel notifications, view logs across notification channels, and providers, as well as visually build out notification workflows.  

We’ve come a long way over the last three years, both as a company and a product, thanks in large part to our customers. Courier is used by hundreds of fantastic software companies such as New Relic, LaunchDarkly, Lattice, and Uservoice. These companies have partnered with Courier to deliver a better product experience to their users while dramatically reducing the amount of time and money spent on building and maintaining their own internal notification infrastructure.

*“Before Courier, we were spending tons of time integrating with every delivery platform every time a customer requested a new connection from us. But now it’s as easy as making an API call. So, so excited about this launch. Huge congratulations to the Courier team!”*  - Eric Koslow, CEO, Lattice

## What’s next: notifications that delight, not distract 
Product notifications are one of the rare parts of software that affect nearly everyone on earth. If you use the internet for work, to buy flights, to network, or to do just about anything else, you receive notifications from that software. 

At their worst, product notifications are annoying, distracting, and anxiety inducing. They can come through different channels from text to email to mobile notifications - or from all of them at the same time, acting as a constant disrupter in the user’s life. At their best, product notifications deliver a delightful experience and make sure that we’re aware of key events that might help catch a flight, meet a deadline at work, or connect with a loved one. In other words, they provide useful interruptions that improve the user’s life.

We will use this new capital to continue to invest in our core mission of making all product notifications delightful, starting now with mobile. What that means today is delivering an amazing toolset to the builders, product and engineering teams, who are in charge of developing product notification systems for their apps. We believe that just about everyone in these roles wants to deliver great notifications with excellent user experience, and that the better the tools and resources at their disposal are, the more able they will be to accomplish this. 

## Introducing Courier’s new mobile capabilities
Today, we’re announcing a new set of two tools and resources for product builders to deliver delightful notifications for their mobile applications. Mobile notifications are the most ubiquitous type of notifications and the one with most potential to annoy users. One annoying notification experience can result in a user turning off notifications altogether, which greatly reduces both the utility and engagement of any mobile application.

The first is our new mobile SDK. This SDK makes it easier for developers to manage push tokens across devices and operating systems. This gives developers better control and visibility, making it easy for them to deliver a more consistent and customized experience for their users based on the best way to reach and engage their users for their specific app. Here’s an example:

``` json
// Register multiple devices for a given user. Notifications will be delivered to each 
// device in a single send call.

{
  "tokens": [
    {
      "token": "abc123",
      "provider_key": "apn",
      "properties": {
        "test": true
      },
      "device": {
        "app_id": "com.my.app",
        "platform": "iOS",
        "model": "iPhone 13"
      }
    },
    {
      "token": "cba321",
      "provider_key": "firebase-fcm",
      "tracking": {
        "ip": "127.0.0.1",
        "lat": "0.0",
        "long": "123"
      }
    }
  ]
}

```

The second is our new mobile notification inbox. This inbox can be easily integrated with any mobile application, and gives the user a central place to view notifications, even if they have disabled push notifications. This gives the end user the ability to better customize their experience using an app by deciding when to access notifications, thereby reducing the number of interruptions mobile notifications cause in their daily lives while increasing engagement with the notifications developers deem necessary to use the product properly.

Visit this page to learn more about this new mobile functionality and request a demo and checkout this video of me demoing them below.

## Conclusion: The work is just beginning
Our mission to make notifications delightful is a big one and there’s still a ton of work to do. We could not have made it to where we are today without all of our fantastic customers, New Relic,  LaunchDarkly, Lattice, Color Health, and many others who share our belief in the value of delivering a great product notification experience. This new funding presents a great opportunity to achieve this ultimate goal. Get a demo [here](https://www.courier.com/features/mobile/) to learn more about Courier’s goals for mobile notifications!

If you are interested in helping to build the future of notification technology starting with mobile channels, we are [hiring](https://jobs.lever.co/trycourier)!


A Courier pigeon is propelled forward by the energy from a rocket labeled GV.

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We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $35M to provide engineering teams with fantastic notification infrastructure! Read this to learn all about it!

Courier.com raised a 34 million dollar series b fundraising round to make notification infrastructure services a reality

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Courier Raised a $35M Series B to Make Notifications Delightful

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Aman Kandola

Last fall, we published [a post](https://www.courier.com/blog/why-remote-work-is-not-here-to-stay/) on how despite the ongoing impact of Covid-19, Courier would remain committed to keeping our office in San Francisco and focusing our hiring efforts on local talent in the Bay Area. As the company has evolved, we’ve decided to shift our approach to a remote-first model. Although we had good reasons to choose not to go remote earlier, this eventual change in mindset led to several new initiatives during the hiring process and to maintain company culture in a remote-first environment. This blog post will highlight some of these initiatives and why we chose them.

## Why weren’t we already remote?
There were a few reasons we didn’t move to remote-first sooner. Firstly, we believed it would be easier and quicker to onboard new employees in-person vs. remote. When you’re a small team, every single hire changes the entire dynamic of the company so it’s really important to make sure they have a great understanding of the company’s culture, strategy, product, tools, and customers. People generally tend to be less hesitant to ask questions when they see people in-person than over Slack, especially if they’ve never met them before. When speed is critical, poor communication can become a bottleneck and we thought focusing on in-person hires would shorten the onboarding process. Secondly, we believed that certain kinds of collaboration were not feasible in a remote environment - especially in scenarios that call for creativity and quick decisions such as product design, marketing campaign construction, and deal strategy. Third, we also believed that maintaining a physical presence as an early-stage startup would actually serve as a differentiator since we saw many other similar startups shift to remote-only and we had a handful of people join the team citing our office and the in-person experience we offered as motivating factors. We believed there were many other similar candidates who specifically sought out an in-person experience after over a year of remote-only work and we would be well-positioned to compete for their talent.

We’ve since learned that, while these assumptions were not completely unfounded, we overestimated the negative impact of shifting to remote-first. We had also always intended to eventually hire outside of the Bay Area as the company grew, but after another year of learning about the benefits of remote vs. in-person work, we decided to rapidly accelerate our timeline and immediately shift to a remote-first approach. 

There were two primary factors that led to our decision. The first is that even though we were ostensibly an in-person company, after March 2020, we never mandated office attendance even after many of the in-person restrictions were no longer legally enforced. The result was that we had many employees who, while based in the Bay Area, rarely came in person and who had onboarded and operated 100% remote since the day they joined. We found that they were just as effective as employees who were coming in regularly and we had not sacrificed any operational velocity or our existing company culture. Second, we also found that even though there were candidates who did indeed appreciate our commitment to maintaining a physical presence, there were many more who wanted the flexibility afforded by remote work. By shifting to a remote-first approach, we could actually offer an attractive work environment to both of those types of candidates and, after experimenting with this approach for a few of our open roles, we saw a large increase in our inbound talent pipeline for those roles. We simply could not move fast enough on hiring if we focused only on Bay Area talent. So if we had nothing to lose and lots to gain, it seemed like shifting to remote-first was a pretty obvious decision.

## Compensation and leveling philosophy
Of course, shifting to remote-first isn’t as simple as making an announcement and writing a post - we had to consider the long-term impact this would have on the company and how best we could support the growing percentage of our team that would be permanently remote. Firstly, we had to decide how we would compensate remote employees. We’ll be writing a separate post detailing our compensation and leveling philosophy, but ultimately, we decided it made the most sense to pay everyone the same amount regardless of where they were based (within the U.S.) and to make compensation and leveling information completely transparent internally and in all external job postings. This would be the fairest approach for all team members and would minimize the associated administrative overhead while also making expectations clear to any prospective candidates. 

## Cultural and communication expectations
We also decided to make our cultural and communication expectations more explicit in the recruiting and onboarding process for new hires. Some examples of the kind of communication behavior we now explicitly outline for all employees include: preferring public Slack channels to DMs, encouraging asynchronous communication over synchronous, and sharing notes from in-person meetings with context in Slack. We also introduced a handful of new ongoing company activities to help remote employees get to know everyone on the team such as monthly virtual hangouts (escape rooms, games, etc.), quarterly in-person events where we bring the entire team in for some fun, and starting new employees in cohorts when possible instead of by themselves and encouraging them to come in-person for at least a few days in their first few weeks (travel expenses all covered by Courier). 

## Reviews for new hires
Lastly, in an effort to help us better identify how we as a company could support new employees when they first join, we are instituting a 30 day review process for all new hires when they hit 30 days from their start date. Instead of focusing exclusively on performance indicators as most review processes do, we are going to be emphasizing behavioral indicators of success at Courier via peer reviews. Some examples of indicators that we believe will be correlated with success are “proactively asking questions”, “offering feedback”, “taking ownership”, and “proactively suggesting improvements”. The goal of this process is to help reinforce the work philosophy at Courier for new hires (and reviewers - they’ll have to be on the lookout for these behaviors) and help us think about what we should be looking for in the hiring process to make sure there is a mutual great fit with all candidates. 

## The impact of this decision
Since we announced this change to the team a few months ago, we’ve seen a largely positive reaction. Ultimately, this change allowed existing team members more flexibility since they can now live anywhere in the U.S. without any changes to their compensation or they can keep coming into the office as they already were. We’ve also noticed a significant increase in our inbound talent pipeline across all roles from candidates who want a primarily remote experience. It’s worth noting that even among the non Bay Area hires we’ve made, they’ve all come and visited at least once already and our Head of Developer Relations, Nočnica, who is based in Portland, actually cited her experience having lunch with the team in the office during the interview process as a primary factor in her decision to join Courier. We’re excited to see that this has been received well by our existing team members and potential candidates alike and will be continuing to think of improvements we can make to build a world-class workplace at Courier. 

If you’re interested in learning more about opportunities at Courier, check out our open roles [here](https://jobs.lever.co/trycourier/).


Several people sit on blue clouds away from each other with their office in a cloud at the back, but are working together remotely

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We wrote a blog post about why Courier would never be permanently remote. This post covers why we changed our minds and Courier is now a remote-first company.

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