A look at our strive toward a diverse culture and how we plan to expand
In this blog, Humaira, MPG’s Director of Corporate Operations and Organizational Development, will go through some of MindPoint Group’s employee diversity statistics and how they compare to national averages for our industry. As an expert in hiring and retaining a diverse workforce, Humaira will also outline our plans and what opportunities we have for improvement in a follow-up to this post all about where we are today.
MindPoint Group History
Over 11 years ago, the partners, Patti, Marc, Mariam, and Matt, came together because they saw an opportunity to create a business that focused on a common challenge shared by an ever-increasing number of teams and organizations: cybersecurity. Our partners were drawn together out of a desire to provide innovation and excellence to customers, but also to build a diverse and inclusive company for employees, a point that we frequently talk about through our beliefs and core values.
Today, MindPoint Group has grown to a thriving cybersecurity services firm, helping public sector and commercial customers overcome the multitude of security challenges, and ultimately adapt to the growing demands of today’s world.
We believe our success with customers comes not just from our collective capabilities, but also our immense diversity: in ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, backgrounds, skills, and experiences. Ultimately, effective cybersecurity is a mixture of people and technology. To be successful, teams need a strong emotional IQ. Our diversity helps drive this intelligence and ability to work well with customer teams of all kinds.
Even with our immense commitment to diversity, recent events have caused us to take another look at our own business. Are we doing enough to eliminate barriers to diversity and inclusion? Even if we are doing well with diverse hiring, what more can we do to make sure we continue to hire the best and most diverse people possible? And then what can we do to make sure that everyone on team MPG feels welcome, included, and safe?
While there is no mandate to share our diversity information, we’ve not been shy in the past (D&I and MindPoint Group, Our Core Values) talking openly about this subject. Effective D&I programs, however, rely on us all getting out of our comfort zones. They rely on the opposite of complacency. They rely on complete transparency.
Our Demographics
To look at how we compare to other similar firms, we used the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) under the “Professional & Business Services - Computer Systems “category, since we felt that it most aligned with our business. When appropriate data were not available, we relied on the 2019 McKinsey and Company Women in the Workplace report.
In these metrics, you will see some differences in the way the BLS reports, vs., the way that we would typically standardize our data, such as:
- This BLS data does not include Native Hawaiian, Alaskan Native, or separate data for two or more races. MPG does include this in our data.
- To align with federal reporting requirements, we have used EEO-1 categories. This categorization limits gender to male or female, which does not reflect our opinion. We believe gender is non-binary.
We are not going to offer a running commentary on our data at this time, as we believe it speaks for itself, especially when compared to our peers.
Ethnicity
Gender
Non-White Leadership
Women in Leadership
The future of MPG
We will continue to focus on diversity and inclusion within MPG. This means looking at our hiring practices, how we’re focused on helping our community, and ways that we continue to engage our employees and make sure they feel comfortable bringing their “whole self” to work every day.
Although we’re already quite diverse, we know we can do better. We hired Intersections Diversity and Inclusion to review our existing practices and programs. They will help us collectively improve a number of our skills, such as how to talk to one another effectively and how to make a difference. They will also conduct a deep-dive to understand precisely what our team thinks about where we are today as an organization and what more our employees want from our company.
We are looking forward to continuing a culture of transparency and will be sharing more in the next few months and for the years to come.
