The events of the past few weeks, both the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent use of force, actual and proposed, against peaceful demonstrators have shocked us and given us grave concern for the physical safety and Constitutional rights of our fellow citizens and especially our employees, in particular our employees of color.
Humility is a core value of ours; we don’t pretend to possess any greater authority than others in solving this wider problem. We do, however, hold to these truths:
- Black lives matter
- Feeling safe in your community is a necessity to be able to thrive as a person
- Violent crimes should be prosecuted fully, especially when perpetrated by officers of the public trust
- We all have the right to due process, and that is not being observed for all of us
- We accept far too little accountability or justice from our institutions
As an organization, we don’t know the precise path for us as a society to get to a place where these truths aren’t violated. However we have a duty to every one of our current and future employees to take concrete action to ensure their safety, wellbeing, and inclusion.
We therefore commit that we shall take action to ensure the following becomes true in our business with all reasonable speed:
- Employees within our business have no fear of facing harassment or discrimination at ProdPerfect
- Employees’ voices are always encouraged to speak, and not suppressed, or silenced
- We will maintain space for open dialogue about social issues that our employees face, free from constraining influence, suppression, or repercussion by ProdPerfect leadership
- Our employees will be free from influence, suppression, or repercussion by any member of ProdPerfect for their social advocacy, or for using PTO for social advocacy
- Our hiring pipeline will have a meaningful, measured, and tracked body of diverse candidates for every role we open
- We will enact research-backed procedures and training to minimize the risk of demographic bias in our hiring decisions
- Our benefits will always be sufficient such that if any of our employees are victims of violence or brutality of any sort, they shall receive excellent medical care without any fear of financial distress
- If any of our employees believes their physical well-being is at risk, ProdPerfect will pay for their evacuation without questions asked
- All of our employees participate in improving all aspects of our culture, and that special attention is paid to constantly improve our diversity and inclusiveness
- Our employees’ efforts and initiatives to improve our culture, diversity, and inclusiveness will always have a direct channel to ProdPerfect leadership, who will encourage, support, and within reason provide resources for these initiatives
- We will refuse to do business with people who harass, intimidate, bully or abuse our people. Our people will be encouraged to speak up about misconduct without fear of repercussion and with every expectation of the full support of ProdPerfect leadership to prevent any future misconduct
These commitments are not exhaustive. We will in the next weeks open and maintain dialogue as a community to improve upon, expand, and refine them to best serve everyone our company touches.
We ask anyone and everyone to hold us accountable to these commitments.
–Dan Widing, CEO, on behalf of ProdPerfect