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We are All-Inclusive: Our Current D&I Approach and Status Quo
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We are All-Inclusive: Our Current D&I Approach and Status Quo
How our history shaped our D&I approach
Our approach to Diversity and Inclusion is based on our purpose to “Empower people to get more out of life”. With people, we refer to everyone. As a metasearch, we empower a broad range of travelers to find their ideal accommodation and representing the diversity of our users around the world in our talent force enables us to create a meaningful product. Offering an inclusive environment to our talents maximizes our potential for innovation and value creation. We believe in building the best teams, and we know the best teams are diverse.
Since its foundation in 2006, trivago grew from being a German travel community website to a global hotel and accommodation search platform. trivago’s expansion over the years has been largely due to the internationalization and localization of its products (websites and apps). To provide our website to users worldwide in their languages, we started to hire international talents very early, in preparation of the launch of our first international websites in 2007 which established the base for a diverse and inclusive mindset at trivago. Today, our talent force consists of about 800 people from around 80 nationalities working across all types of job functions, from software engineering to marketing including human resources and finance.
The overall representation at trivago as of 01.01.2022 is as follows (click through to see all dimensions):
Based on trivago’s historical development through a majority share of international talents, we’ve worked on several initiatives to empower a diverse workforce over the years. For example, the practice of self–determined holidays was initiated as early as 2011 and allows employees to take more holidays than the contractual 25 holidays/year. This is an appreciated benefit especially for employees who relocated from far away and for travel enthusiasts. It’s also helpful when one simply need a self-care day and therefore supports general well-being as well. In addition, since 2020, two annual leaves of about 1 week are granted to all during summer (trivacation) and around Christmas (trismas) to allow everyone to disconnect at the same time.
We also offer in-house German classes to support talents who wish to learn the language with the goal of feeling comfortable in everyday conversations in German.
Celebrating our different cultures has also always been important to us – whether it’s Saint Patrick’s Day or Brazilian Carnival. In 2019, trivago talents also came together to organize trivago’s participation in Cologne Pride. The motto for this event was “We are All-Inclusive”. Since then, it has shaped our overall approach to Diversity and Inclusion which has become more conscious and strategic inside the Talents & Culture department in the past few years.
How is D&I lived at trivago?
The meaning of our motto “We are All-Inclusive” is two-fold: On one side, it means that we commit to provide an inclusive experience to all talents regardless of nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, beliefs, age, abilities, or backgrounds. On the other side, it means that we aim to have an approach to Diversity & Inclusion embracing all aspects of a talent’s experience at trivago based on three drivers:
Cultivating an inclusive mindset
There is always room to learn and get better as individuals and as a team by connecting different perspectives, raising awareness and through education. We do this for example through our affinity & diversity groups like Parents@trivago, LGBTQ or our numerous country and regional groups such as Egyptians@trivago or US Americans@trivago.
For the second consecutive year in 2022, we celebrated International Women’s Day with dedicated live events such as a panel discussion with “Women at trivago” last year and with an inspiring guest speaker this year on the topic of women in Tech.
We also provide formal education to trivago’s team leads on the topic of unconscious bias to ensure our leadership is able to not only recruit, but also successfully retain talent effectively by eliminating biases.
Finally, raising awareness also means to provide transparency on our D&I status quo to trivago’s talents and initiating dialogue which we do through the publication of our annual Diversity & Inclusion report.
Embedding D&I in our daily practices and processes
We believe that Diversity and Inclusion is most impactful when it is integrated into everything we do. Our internal processes and practices highly contribute to the experience each of us have in the organization. Our objective is to provide equal opportunities by implementing new formats through a Diversity & Inclusion lens, but also continuously improving those that already exist. This is applicable to simple things such as the timing of company all-hands allowing highest possible attendance of all trivago talents as well as to more complex processes such as recruiting where we put extra attention to training interviewers, the language in our job ads and diversity of interview panels to name few key aspects.
This also applies to our hybrid work model which aims to combine the best of in-person and remote work models, but also includes additional flexibility for talents wanting to work from abroad, parents of young children and talents with severe disabilities or health conditions. Last but not least, our on-campus Culture Kitchen serves all tastes from Europe to Asia including vegan options.
Recognizing and addressing differences
Besides initiatives aiming to attend to all, we recognize that there is a need to focus our efforts on certain areas to drive stronger progress. These areas are defined both based on data and feedback from talents. Last year, we decided to get a better understanding of how different genders are represented and develop at trivago. This choice was based on the observations that around 25% of trivago’s team leads and talents in tech were female. Furthermore, the D&I improvement areas that came up most in our in-house Officevibe survey (our company pulse tool) conducted end of 2020 were “women in leadership” and “women in tech”.
During the last year, we primarily worked on better understanding the reasons for the current gender representation at trivago to be able to set further initiatives and objectives. We dug deeper into available gender data and worked on closing data gaps. In that context, we implemented the collection of gender data in our application forms, this closing our main data gap. Following our research and analysis we see opportunities and are committed to improving gender diversity in the following areas: Leadership and tech.
Gender representation at trivago in leadership and in tech (engineering, data, product, design) as of 01.01.2022 is as follows:
Ultimately, we aspire to have talents in leadership roles that are representative of the overall population in the company. This means a gender balance of 40%-60% among trivago’s team leads. To support this goal, we particularly focus first on ensuring representative shares in future leads and providing more opportunities to develop leadership skills to diverse talents.
In tech, we mainly focus our efforts on recruiting to make sure to attract female talents. As a first step, we commit to reach a minimum of 30% female talents across our tech teams by end 2024. We believe in role modelling and want to contribute to a more gender-diverse tech industry by ensuring more female representation in public appearances and sharing our experiences with young talents engaging in a tech career or talents reconverting into tech for example. For this purpose, we have started the F.A.M.E initiative, Female Ambassadors and Mentors in Engineering who are a group of female engineers at trivago who will be dedicated to sharing their expertise and passion for their jobs.
We also support initiatives such as the *ReDI School of Integration and the **Digital Career Institute who are committed to opening the tech industry to more people.
By focusing on these areas, we see interesting discussions arise in the organization and we see these actions having a positive impact on all of us as more inclusive behaviors are to the benefit of all. Stay tuned for further updates on the initiatives mentioned and others to come or find out more about D&I at trivago here.
By Laureen Roesch-Ahrens, D&I specialist at trivago.
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*ReDI School of Integration is a non-profit tech school for locals and newcomers without access to digital education.
**The Digital Career Institute is committed to train anyone who wants to pursue a tech career.