Team Diversity – Interview with Christine Sommers from ePACT
Photo: The ePACT team combing work with some leisure
The innovation community has some serious problems with diversity. This is true in Silicon Valley, and if you wander around Vancouver’s incubators and accelerators you can see it is just as true here. So it was great to see that the three top companies at the 2015 Canadian Financing Forum are all led by women.
Kindoma, CEO Carly Shuler
ePACT, CEO Christine Sommers
Neurio, CEO Janice Cheam
A couple of weeks ago we had a conversation with Kindoma CEO Carl Shuler about building a distributed team. This week we feature ePACT CEO Christine Sommers.
ePACT has a platform that could help to save your life, or your child’s life. They provide a place to keep all of those ‘who to contact in case of emergency forms’ and help you to build a social network to provide care in case of emergency. Pretty important stuff.
As you can see from the above photo, the ePACT team is pretty diverse. It is led by two very capable woman (Christine works closely with her co-founder Kirsten Koppang Telford) and includes people with many different backgrounds (as any Vancouver company should).
How do you think about teams at ePACT? What role do teams play in your organization?
We think of ePACT as one group working together to be successful and drive growth. We cannot do this without collaboration. Most of our work is done as a team and not by the individual working alone. We are a SaaS company so we have to move fast but every piece has to fit together. Our three key teams are Product Development, Customer Success and Sales & Marketing. Each team has its specific responsibilities but they all have to fit together.
How do you go about finding people for teams?
What do you take into consideration as you build your teams?
It is critical to find the people who will fit into our teams and culture and not just to hire for the role.
We have for sure had some mis-hires along the way. It is a painful experience for the person who does not fit onto the team, and really tough on the team in when trying to fit a round peg into a square hole.
We’ve tried recruiters and job websites, but have found that – once we have resumes for good candidates – the only way to find the right people is to have more and more interviews with team members.
Unfortunately in such a competitive market as Vancouver though, sometimes this means we lose opportunities for candidates as other companies move quickly to snap up good folks. We’re committed to reducing churn and keeping our team in sync though, and have had some great learnings as more team members participate in the interview and selection process. We maybe just need to be a bit faster so we don’t lose out to others also hiring at the same time in Vancouver!
How important is diversity at ePACT? What does diversity mean to an early-stage company?
We are about fifty-fifty women and men, and have a fairly diverse mix of backgrounds and cultures on our staff that we really love. This is not just for the great conversations we have over beers. The differing perspectives actually help us as we address the different cultures and types of users we have in our system. It is hard to build a solution for people if you don’t understand them and diversity really helps with empathy.
Diversity has been a great advantage for us over our first three years and we believe will continue to help our company as we expand across Canada and into the US!
It is great to see Vancouver companies like ePACT leveraging the potential of Vancouver’s diversity. And we hope to see a trend in tech companies to a greater diversity of all kinds – not just gender and culture but emotional and cognitive styles, social background and beliefs.
“From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Charles Darwin
