Diana Schweiger is the COO, Managing Partner and Chief Operations Officer for Cactus and head of the Eastern Europe region. With over 15 years of experience in business and digital projects, she has been instrumental in guiding the company to success and paving the way for sustainable growth. Diana is passionate about leading the company’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, advocating for a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace for all employees. Her commitment to these values aims to cement CactusSoft’s status as an employer of choice. She also leads the #WomanInTech initiatives at CactusSoft, providing training and resources to empower female employees to reach their full potential.
How is Cactus performing on diversity & inclusion and what are still the biggest challenges in improving this in our workplace?
At Cactus we have a unique and diverse team. With over more than 13 different nationalities, one can say we are a true multinational. I am proud of this rich team and believe it makes us a better company. I am convinced that if people from different backgrounds work together, they come up with more diverse ideas and approaches. Another major benefit of having a diverse team is that it enables us to attract better talent, which is crucial as we are growing quickly.
In the future, we additionally target more diversity based on gender. We wish our company to reflect society and show that there is a place for women in ICT. Currently, 30% of our team members are female, knowing that women only make up 17% of all ICT jobs in the European Union we are doing very well. But we are ambitious and want more female developers, where we only have 15% female developers.
Another challenge is the diversity based on age. The average age within the company is x years and to be true the leadership team increases this average a lot. Of course, this is also because we are still quite a young company, especially in Spain. This means not a lot of Cacti have aged together with us. So, we hope we can celebrate a lot of birthdays within the company!
“I am convinced that if people from different backgrounds work together, they come up with more diverse ideas and approaches.”
What initiatives would you suggest increasing diversity and inclusion in our company?
My new year resolution was to focus more on these topics within the company. I was glad to find some team members that were very motivated to work together with me. I attend external events where women in ICT are put in the spotlight and internally, we have developed a program.
With this team of CactusSoft team members, we create attention and awareness inside the company. We communicate on our social media, organize internal learnings and start working out different policies. Next, we will define specific objectives and start measuring our results to ensure we fulfil our commitment.
We do this not just because of the fun of having a diverse team, but because we believe it is our duty to create a work environment where everyone feels valued, respected, and supported.
What are the most effective ways to measure the success of our D&I efforts?
We can look at our team’s demographic indicators such as gender, nationality and age, which are good but insufficient indicators.
But we also measure diversity in the recruitment process. Additionally, we ask employees for their opinion and capture feedback from exit interviews.
For those, we create PD (Professional Development) plans to measure personal development and monitor the results of all efforts.
Although we know that creating time and focus to measure and report is a challenge, our ambition and commitment will lead us towards success.
Banner image: Israel Andrade
