Irdeto announces initiatives to increase diversity, inclusion and belonging

At Irdeto, we understand the importance of building an inclusive and respectful workplace where everybody can have the same opportunities to grow, contribute to our success and feel part of the organization. With nearly 1,000 colleagues from 65+ nationalities in 14 offices around the world, Irdeto’s biggest strength is our people who represent many diverse backgrounds, experiences and orientations. It is our people that bring diversity of thought and the ability to have insightful conversations and unique ways of problem-solving that drives the innovation that Irdeto is known for.

Irdeto has made the conscious decision to embark on a journey of increasing our diversity and inclusion systematically and programmatically, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is a business driver. As we empower our customers to connect with confidence, we will need diversity of thought to engineer the solutions of today and tomorrow, and to deliver and support our customers around the world.  D&I is a multifaceted topic, but at Irdeto we’re starting the journey with a few key elements. In 2021, Irdeto assessed which dimensions would strengthen our business, and we believe that diversity of age, gender, and nationality will have the biggest positive impact on our business today.

As leaders in cybersecurity, approximately 70% of our company is comprised of R&D colleagues, and data and tracking are critical to everything we do. As such, we have spent months reviewing anonymized employee data to see who is entering, moving through, and exiting the company, and we have benchmarked that against industry standards.

Here are our findings:

• Irdeto sits at the average benchmark for age across our employee segments. We have exciting programs to attract the best new talent fresh out of school, and we do a great job of nurturing all of our talent through their career paths.
• Irdeto is really proud of our people’s diverse backgrounds and currently we have more than 65 nationalities at our company. Indeed, it’s a unique differentiator that we really and truly do live and operate globally, which is greatly appreciated by our customers. We have noticed however that our senior leadership tends to homogenize into a profile that is not representative of our entire company, and we’re addressing that by creating diverse succession plans, and actively nurturing those candidates to become impactful and exceptional leaders.
• The main area of work for Irdeto is increasing gender representation – specifically female – throughout our employee segments. We are below industry benchmark and have goals to increase the number of female employees by 3.3% by the end of March 2023.
• Irdeto will continue to provide training, cultural awareness programs, quarterly reviews, diversity referral bonuses, mentorships, integrated communications campaigns, and a rigorous learning and development curriculum among many other initiatives to continue our commitment to provide a diverse and inclusive workplace.

Equally important, Irdeto is measuring the inclusivity sentiment across our company, to understand our colleagues’ sense of belonging.

We have created a Belonging Index to see how we are performing on the following elements:

• Diversity – Is our company working to attract, develop, and retain people with diverse backgrounds?
• Fairness – Are people from all backgrounds treated fairly at Irdeto?
• Flexibility – Do employees have flexible working arrangements and are able to take time off when needed?
• Inclusion – Do employees feel part of the Irdeto team? Can they have open discussions in which everyone’s opinions count?
• Respect – Are employees treated and do they treat others with respect?
• Safety – Do employees feel physically safe and comfortable being themselves with their peers?

As of April 1, 2022, we have benchmarked the following and our aim is to achieve a score of at least 85% by 31 March 2023.

With these objectives, we are now able to create robust programs to build and retain diverse talent, as well as create more programs to ensure our employees feel included. By collecting and analyzing data, we have created dashboards to track trends and measure progress with the ability to create or modify in real time our programs to ensure we drive towards our goals.

Irdeto is committed to reporting externally on an annual basis … and we encourage you to share your own journey! If you like what we are doing, or if you have initiatives that are working at your company, we’d like to continue the conversation!  Please contact us and together, we can build a better and more inclusive world!

Check out Irdeto’s D&I initiatives more in depth here and do not hesitate to get in touch to continue the conversation with us!