Communication

🙌 Making decisions

There are a variety of paths for making decisions, the group could put things to a larger vote, have working groups with specific focus areas, or key decision makers. You may want to follow your company's general guide to making decisions, but if you find this isn't inclusive or doesn't work for your group, picking another avenue may be the right choice for your group.

Early on in our journey, Gender Equity at Coda started using a voting system in Coda for making decisions. This was something ingrained in our culture as a company in general which ended up lending itself well to our group. We use an unbiased voting table to add ideas and each member upvotes the ideas they're a fan of. We leave room for notes as well so we can discuss any questions/comments around the idea.

See

Strategies and Tactics Voting⁠

to adapt it for your own needs.

📄 Documenting Decisions

Documentation is a key aspect of decision making. This helps the team look at key decisions for things like upcoming meetings, retrospectives, and catching up folks who may be just be joining the ERG or missed a meeting. Documentation can be approached in a few different ways, such as having a dedicated note taker, or using a rotating system.

Gender Equity at Coda settled on a rotating system as mentioned in "Meetings." This way the burden is distributed amongst the team and the same person isn't taking notes every time.

🗣 Communicating Decisions

Another important aspect of decision making is communicating those decisions to the broader group. It may be that you've chosen to go with focus groups and each group needs to communicate back to the ERG, or perhaps you're communicating to folks who couldn't attend the last meeting. Either way, having clear and concise communication around decisions is important.

Some ideas for communicating these decisions could be:

Sending out an email to the broader team about key decisions

Keeping clear documentation for the team about the decisions and letting folks know where to find it

Running through new decisions at the start of each meeting

For Gender Equity at Coda, one way in which we communicate key decisions is through keeping clear documentation in our Gender Equity at Coda doc. This way it's easy for new and existing members to read through the key decisions we've made. We also tend to run through important decisions at the beginning of our meetings.

👥 Sharing information with folks outside of the ERG

One important aspect to think about is sharing information with non-ERG members. There are a variety of ways to tackle this. Do you have an internal and an external Slack channel? Perhaps there's a quarterly meeting with non-members about what the ERG is working on. There's no one “right” answer and it really comes down to what your ERG is comfortable with.

At this point in time the way Gender Equity at Coda has communicated with the rest of the company is with a writeup we've shared with the team as well as an announcement at one of our company meetings. We're still figuring out continued communications and will update this guide as we make a decision!

🙌 Making decisions

📄 Documenting Decisions

🗣 Communicating Decisions

👥 Sharing information with folks outside of the ERG

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