For Sovos, a tax software firm with 2,400 employees around the world and an executive team mostly based in Atlanta, growth has become both increasingly global and driven by acquisitions.
But when a company that got its start in New England begins to integrate teams south of the equator, cultural clashes become exponentially more likely.
Sovos entered Atlanta, in fact, in a bid to expand market share in South America. It acquired Atlanta-born Invoiceware International in 2016 to take advantage of the considerable inroads it had made in simplifying tax compliance in markets like Brazil, a land known for prolific bureaucratic hoops. In the last three years, Sovos has acquired 16 brands in 11 countries.
But as the company seeks to unify its own approach to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across jurisdictions, it’s running into its own set of hurdles: varying reporting requirements, diverse religious views and divergent conceptions of race and gender roles that make it challenging to install a monolithic culture of welcome from afar.
Implementing these plans flexibly in new countries while remaining faithful to Sovos’s core values is Nina Fleming’s job. The Atlanta-based vice president of DEI was hired nine months ago, after spending 18 years working for Honda in the United States, mostly in marketing. She also spent the last six on the auto maker’s diversity council.
Coming from the business side of the house, she says, is an advantage, given how integral it is for companies to institute DEI initiatives across their entire operations — and how important it has become both to the bottom line and to a global company’s ability to recruit talent — especially in the wake of widespread racial justice protests in the United States following the killings of George Floyd and Black victims of police violence.
“In 2020-21, more companies hire diversity officers to be able to lead that charge through the organization, because the most progressive companies understand that DEI deserves a role at the top of the organizational chart, reporting in with the C-suite,” Ms. Fleming told Global Atlanta. “And it’s not a nice-to-have: It’s a business imperative. When DEI is working correctly, then companies will see higher profits, higher customer service and higher employee engagement, and those are initiatives that every company is striving for.”
Her job, as she sees it, is to work across silos within the company to ensure DEI “belongs to all” — not just one department like human resources.
That’s easier said than done when you’re integrating a newly acquired company from outside the U.S., she said. For starters, Sovos may have little visibility into what is already being done on the DEI front, since there may be no equivalent to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forcing reporting on ethnicity and gender data in their country.
“We don’t have that documented, so we really don’t know what diversity we have, versus what we don’t have; it’s hard to know what diversity means in a localized fashion,” Ms. Fleming said, noting the importance of performing “cultural due diligence” on acquisition targets.
Sovos’s solution so far has been to hire DEI heads in-market. One has been named in Chile with responsibility for the Spanish-speaking Americas, and others are soon to be brought in for Europe and the Middle East.
“It’s important for people to understand the localized customs areas and traditions in addition to understanding Sovos and being able to implement that message of DEI in a strategic way in a country, and every country is different.”
One thing has become clear over and over: Race is a factor, but not the only one. In some countries, for instance, class can be a hurdle, as Sovos has found in the disparity in employees’ English proficiency across socioeconomic backgrounds. Sovos has activated translation function in Microsoft Teams calls to ensure no one misses out on critical content.
That’s one way of fostering inclusivity, which Ms. Fleming defines as an environment where “every employee feels that they can bring their authentic self to work and be valued and be appreciated, and we strive for that constantly.”
She added that firms may be missing out on team members that can challenge stale perspectives, she said, if they are not making efforts to reach out to employees with disabilities or members of the LGBTQ communities. And she gave a bit of insight about how companies lacking a dedicated executive like her can get started on this journey: tackle “unconscious bias.”
“Bias in and of itself is not a dirty word. I think all of us have by some level of bias, and all of us have some level of privilege. And so we’ve got to take the defensiveness about those two words out of circulation.”
With that addressed, firms can start to build a diverse talent pipeline, building innovative teams and creating equitable growth and succession scenarios.
That’s what Sovos is doing in Atlanta, a “mecca of diversity” where the company plans to add to an 85-member team that includes most of the C-suite. More than 30 Atlanta-based positions are open on its website. Sovos employs people across 14 countries, and could add more soon with its next cross-border deal.
“Our latest acquisitions were Germany and California. So we’re looking both in the U.S. and externally; we’re looking at the globe. The world is our oyster.”