It’s about that time and that time is a new comundo conversation. 

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This month we talk to Jessie Scheepers (she/her), Belonging & Impact Lead at Pleo, a Danish fintech scaleup. If you’re remotely interested in fintech, you probably know them. On the flip side, if you’re interested in diversity and belonging in the workplace, you might also know them. 

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It’s an interesting mix, granted, but therein lies the beauty. And the intrigue. Which is precisely why we wanted to pick Jessie’s brains and learn more about why Pleo went all in on DEI&B and how all this work has impacted the company and team. 

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Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin. 

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Hello Jessie! Tell us a bit about who you are and what you do. 

Sure! I’m from South Africa, which is where I studied law and was very involved in social justice tackling challenging issues, so diversity and equal opportunities have always been a part of my life. When I was offered the opportunity to be Head of People at Pleo, it felt like an exciting chance to do something distinctive. 

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As the first People hire, I built the strategy and team, and ran it until the company was about 550 people. At that point, I changed my focus towards ESG, and dug into what we knew about diversity, equality, inclusion and belonging – which wasn’t much, as it turns out! 

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Luckily, our leadership team recognised the importance of this area and the strategic advantage it would give us, so agreed that I would move into a new role and figure out build authentic Impact work for Pleo.

We dug into what we knew about diversity, equality, inclusion and belonging – which wasn’t much, as it turns out!

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Initially, we were very curious as to how you build good belonging in a company. So we ran four months of quantitative and qualitative research to better understand what an underrepresented group looks like. What are their experiences? What do they struggle with? And that gave us a really good overview of Belonging and also the gaps and the challenges we face at Pleo.

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From that, we learnt a couple of things. First of all, at the time Pleo was known internally as having a great culture and being a highly engaged company, and honestly, the results of the research were a lesson in humility to realise that this was not a consistent experience that everyone felt.

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That was a surprise. We thought we were better but we never measured it before. So how could we know?

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That's when we decided that we needed to address this head-on. At the same time, we reached the category of being a large company, so it became even more relevant for us to have a proper ESG strategy. 

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So that led to the conversation of what the strategy’s focus should be. Should we do all ESG areas or double down on one, and eventually we decided to double down on Belonging and make the S, Social, the part we go ‘beyond on’, while also meeting the obligations for environment and governance. 

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Shortly after this, we went through a restructure, like so many tech companies in 2022, and everything changed. Understandably, culture and engagement were hit hard. People’s buy-in to us building Belonging really dipped and we spent a lot of the year recovering from that. 

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To help us recover, we moved the ESG team out of the people and culture team to have more independence and impact, and now we’re at a really good place – but still at a pretty basic level when it comes to where we want to be. We’ve done compulsory conduct and inclusion training for a couple of years, we’ve got a lot of internal data, and senior leadership are committed to compulsory Belonging coaching.

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Next year, we have a compulsory external course for the whole company, and we’re sending our people and culture team through six months of intensive studying and exercises to get them to the point where they can lead and have an impact because it’s hard to build belonging when the skill sets aren’t there. 

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So would it be fair to say there’s always been some kind of focus on DEI&B?

It was always there but indirectly. We’ve always been very aware of who we hired and ended up with 19 nationalities very early on. I think out of the first 12 people hired, 10 weren’t Danish, so we were in a way forced, due to different nationalities and cultures, to think about DEI&B even if we weren’t calling it that then. So we got a lot of it for free in the early days because we had so much curiosity about each other. 

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We’re constantly listening, learning and improving.

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We’ve definitely got it wrong in some areas, and just like any startup we were late to the party on some things, so we’ve always been learning on a day-to-day basis. 

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If I look at what we did back then with all the knowledge that I have now there are definitely things we should have done differently, but we’re constantly listening, learning and improving.

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Something I’m really curious about is the type of talent we’ve never been able to hire or never given the chance to hire because we haven’t had the right set up. The untapped potential will be so interesting to explore now we’re more equipped to. 

Does the work you’re doing have a positive impact on hiring?

The thing is, we haven't shared that much externally in terms of claiming that we're great for certain groups, like neurodivergent talent, because I don't believe that that's true.

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Belonging should be embedded in everything, and people need to feel that before we can claim it.  

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I don't think we're great yet. I think we care and we're trying – but we mess things up and I think people still feel a lower sense of Belonging based on who they are. 

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Once the community itself says this is an incredible place for neurodivergent people to work – then we will be proud to share this externally. But until that day, I don't think we have the right to. 

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Becoming brilliant at Belonging is a huge task. It’s taking a full employee lifecycle and auditing it and making changes from how people send meeting requests to noise and light levels in offices around the world. It’s so much more than addressing a gender pay gap (which is a hard enough challenge in itself!), which is why we’ve set a very high ambition for what we want Belonging to look like at Pleo.

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Belonging should be embedded in everything, and people need to feel that before we can claim it.  

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It seems like Pleo is a very welcoming workplace. 

We’ve come a long way, and have established communities, known as Active Communities, like Scatterbrains for Neurodiverse people, Pride for LGBTQIA+, Heritage and Power for people from the global majority [everyone who’s not white], a Disabled Active Community and Women in Pleo. 

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An example of how we’re learning here is that we like to share pre-reads in the form of videos, but they can be inaccessible for neurodivergent people so now we recommend adding transcripts for their videos. We’re constantly learning! 

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Sometimes when you solve a problem for one group you might exclude another group, so we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can make a company inclusive for all but recognise that for every second step we make, we’re probably going to make a misstep. 

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To help with this, we try to make sure we always include a feedback loop in the design, so we can be sure we don’t overlook something that can be quite emotional and painful for people. 

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But there’s always a do-more attitude internally. We try to stay humble and while we know we’re quite far ahead of many Danish startups, we don’t want that to be our benchmark; we want to be distinctive globally at Belonging.

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Everything we do is very much employee-led. We want to help make people’s experience so great that your employees say ‘if other LGBTQIA+ people knew about this, they would want to work here and they would love it.’ 

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We take the backseat. We do the work internally, change the culture for the better and then when people are ready, we can explore it in ways that are authentic to each group. 

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I’ve seen some articles discussing DEI&B fatigue. What are your thoughts on that?

Well, I’m an optimist, so I think it’s the same as hybrid working. Even if there are dips in the progression, the overall trend is going one way. 

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In 2025 the workplace will be 75% Gen Z and Gen Z wants this. There’s no getting around it. And on top of that, in the EU at least, there’s more and more legislation coming in that demands this kind of commitment. So you can get ahead of the curve and act now, or be a straggler and do it later. Either way; you will do it. 

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You can get ahead of the curve and act now, or be a straggler and do it later. Either way; you will do it. 

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We’re all changing. People are becoming so much more self-aware, exploring their mental health, learning about themselves, identifying as LGBTQIA+ or realising that they’re neurodivergent. We’re not talking about a tiny subset of society anymore. Gen Z is so aware of this and like it or not companies will have to be able to support them to get the best out of them. And why wouldn’t you want to get the best out of your people? 

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And, for the dominant groups, it’s important to help them see the benefits for them. Focusing on underrepresented groups doesn’t take anything away from them – making a more inclusive workplace makes it better for all.

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What would your advice be to other companies looking to improve their DEI&B programmes?

There is an absolute gold mine of resources in our Belonging Zine. That’s where we’ve laid everything on the table, the good and the bad, so that people and companies curious about DEI&B can see what we did, where it went wrong and where it went right, and, hopefully, employ some of what we learnt in their workplaces. 

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We want to be fully transparent with no posturing because the only way you can improve is by admitting where you’ve gone wrong and working to fix that with the people wronged. 

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People first, community-driven and complete transparency. It sounds like the right approach to us.

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Curious about Pleo? Get to know more about them right here.