small unstructured agency, focus on technical growth of staff to enable innovation - Anonymous employee Black Swan Data Employee Review

We strongly felt the need to respond to this review, as whilst we take on board all feedback and welcome constructive comments on the employee experience at Black Swan we wish to address some of the assertions raised here as we believe them to be categorically untrue. This individual was employed by Black Swan Data as a contractor for a period of three weeks, of which around 10 days were spent in the office working with the team. After he submitted his resignation we took time to speak at length with this individual and we queried the incidents of racial bias which he had raised in his resignation letter and refers to again in this review. These comments had not been raised previously either directly with the team or with HR. Black Swan takes allegations of this kind incredibly seriously and the HR team were keen to understand the context behind these accusations. However, in discussing these claims with this individual we established that there were no specific incidents or observed behaviours to support these claims, but that this was more of an impression that he had of being isolated from communications with the team. He ventured that there was perhaps an unconscious bias within the team, which is feedback we take on board and have already taken active steps to address. There was no suggestion though that any actions occurred with any malicious intent, and we are satisfied from our discussions with both this individual and the wider team that this is not the case. It is possible that the frustrations felt by this employee that he was being singled out in some way could be as he was the last member of the team to join the project, so people were automatically gravitating towards team members who had been there longer, and thus knew more about the project. The complainant’s statements that ‘you will feel the pinch of discrimination, racial bias, on an everyday basis at work’ and ‘it is almost like they think you have sprouted out of a desert’ are wholly inaccurate and unfair and we refute these entirely. The suggestion that our employees ‘do not interact or have a multicultural group of friends outside of work’ is also entirely speculative and unfounded. Black Swan has always prided itself on (and been known for) being a unique and accepting community and this continues to be the case across all our offices. We have politely asked the individual involved to reconsider his comments given the context of our conversation. Based on our investigations since these allegations were made we believe the root cause of this individuals’ complaint is down to communication challenges in the team due to a period of change. We apologise for any such feeling of isolation that occurred as a result and we will look to improve this in the future, along with re-examining the onboarding process for contractors. To address the advice to management to ‘have a budget for employees to attend conferences, workshops, hackathons and summits’ – Black Swan Data has a training budget available to all permanent employees.