We visited the London HQ of Puppet to shoot a series of films looking at how businesses can achieve agility through diversity. The first in the series – organised by DiversityQ and Information Age – looks at the advantages of diversity for tech businesses. Guests included Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO for Puppet, Marianne Calder, VP & MD for Puppet EMEA and Dayo Akinrinade, partnerships lead and cofounder YSYS. We asked them:

• Why is diversity important to you and your business?
• What are the ideal candidates people are looking for in tech right now?
• If you could change one thing in the tech industry to have a bigger impact on diversity what would that be?

You can watch the first of our Agility through Diversity film above, and we’ll be publishing the rest of the series over the course of the Summer. To give you a flavour of the discussion and some examples of the advantages of diversity, we’ve pulled some insights from the film that were offered by our panel.

>See also: Diversifying and embracing geekness

The core to innovation

Diversity and inclusion are cornerstones of how we build our workforce, how we engage with our customers. Diversity of ideas is core at us being a company that innovates. If we had a uniform sort of way of thinking about things we wouldn’t really innovate. We have development centres in Seattle, in Portland, in Belfast, Ireland and Australia. We build code around the world and we have an open-source community that contributes to our product. So we are, by definition, diverse. Very diverse. A lot of what we do is working with our customers and we have to reflect what our customer base looks like. We have to reflect the way they work, the way they want us to work. We need people who are adaptable and can do things not just in one way, but in the ways that are needed to be effective.

Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO for Puppet

War for talent

I think there’s been a shift over the years where young people in tech – or millennials – want to see ourselves represented in the companies that we might work for. I think the big pull now is that there is this “war for talent”, so more organisations need to be more diverse and assure candidates that this is somewhere where you can come and authentically be yourself, and in turn bring out your best work. That’s really key.

Dayo Akinrinade partnerships lead and cofounder YSYS

>See also: Puppet exec on the gender gap within the tech industry

Communication and collaboration is key

When we think about IT becoming more agile, it’s really about making sure that we have candidates coming in that are able to move fast and learn fast and, actually, in some ways as well, fail fast. That means people that come in with great confidence but also with a strong open mind, an ability to communicate very well and more importantly collaborate very well. So, to collaborate and innovate is a big theme for most of our IT organisations, and I would say that is the case for us as well.

Marianne Calder, VP & MD for Puppet EMEA

Our next film will look at Diversity in IT and DevOps and features Marianne Calder, VP & MD for Puppet EMEA, Alberta Bosco, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Puppet and Kate Self, Degree Apprentice BT.

This feature is sponsored by Puppet