Tegus built a winning DEI program with Ethena training at its foundation
Updated: Mar 10
In this article
The Challenge: Scaling DEI during rapid startup growth
The Solution: Automating DEI core delivery
The Results: Prioritizing core values over legal requirements
About Tegus
Tegus is modernizing how investors and companies do research. The Chicago-based startup streamlines access to company and industry insights offering a 360-degree view using public financials. Tegus focuses on capturing the right perspectives, filings, and public documents in less time by removing tedious blockers.
It’s a focus that’s proving successful internally too.
Tegus’ passion for removing blockers and focusing on relevant content is what drew the qualitative research company to Ethena to expand its diversity, equity, and inclusion training.
Now the employee-built DEI program spans two continents with an 85% completion rate.
The Challenge: Scaling DEI during rapid startup growth
The results are even more impressive when you consider where Tegus’ DEI journey began in 2020.
Tegus Vice President of People Araceli Ortiz Steger joined the self-described “scrappy startup” as a marketing manager. Within two-short years, Tegus earned the trust of 2,500+ investment managers and business, expanded to Ireland, and added 300 employees.
Growth brought the challenge of needing to scale a completely home-grown people team and DEI strategy. The expanding workforce highlighted the importance of DEI training for the modern team and a need for a platform like Ethena.
Tegus was a young company supported by a core of employees under the age of 30.
“We're still scrappy and that's one of our values in a way,” explained Araceli who knew that DEI was important for Tegus and employees to mature together.
The scrappy nature inspired Araceli to start building a people team with a DEI focus from the ground up. However, she didn’t define Tegus’ core DEI values alone.
A volunteer group of employees collaborated for ten weeks to build Tegus’ foundational values and set goals for the startup’s diversity, equity, and inclusion vision. Next, was finding a way to deliver measurable, long-term goals that actually educated their workforce with relevant lessons.
The Solution: Automating DEI core delivery
“Honestly, what sold us on Ethena was the time and culturally relevant content,” explained Araceli who found the compliance training platform thanks to a referral from a peer. “I was introduced to Ethena and it seemed to layer in really nicely with what we were doing.”
Ethena’s convenient, responsive, and automatic workflow offered Tegus harassment prevention training that actually worked and scaled as the company grew.
Ethena helped ensure that Tegus had the legally required harassment prevention training while simultaneously helping them promote their DEI goals.
Goal #1: Employees need to understand the importance of DEI
It was important to Araceli that Tegus was doing more than checking a legal compliance box.
“I wanted people to understand why it's important to us. Not to shove it down people's throats,” said Araceli who appreciates Ethena’s modern and engaging approach.
Araceli even sprinkles in quarterly DEI events to add emphasis to Ethena’s content. The Tegus events include external experts to expand upon recent compliance training. Overcoming Racism CEO Matthew Kincaid offered a workshop on systematic racism during Black History Month.
Goal #2: Moving forward professionally
Online compliance training with Ethena can be a career builder. Courses are often tailored or branded to fit each companies’ needs. However, core content like inclusive hiring and interviewing, anti-bribery training, and HIPPA for tech teams can be important stepping stones toward future career goals.
Goal #3: Inclusion
Simply put, one of Tegus’s core values is allowing employees to be authentically themselves in the professional space.
“If you're able to bring your full self, you're able to bring your best self and that's good for the business,” added Araceli.
Goal #4: Increasing underrepresented groups in tech
Tegus is focusing on improving diversity in the tech industry by making sure there’s a balance in hiring black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). The company’s goal is 30% by 2025.
As of 2022, Tegus’ was reporting 23.5% BIPOC.
The Results: Prioritizing core values over legal requirements
Tegus needed four key deliverables from a compliance platform and found all of them with Ethena:
Scalable content and delivery
Relevant, timely, and relatable DEI content
Satisfy legal requirements
Saving employees time
Streamlined onboarding helped Tegus quickly add employees to the Ethena platform. Integrations like Slack, help keep employees engaged in the continuous DEI conversation by offering reminders for employees to complete their training. It’s a feature that saves employers time by connecting with employees in their natural workspace.
“It’s another way we can make sure that we're helping everyone learn all this as quickly, but also as thoroughly as possible,” said Araceli.
As a result, Tegus sees 85% of the employees complete their training within 90 days. 92% of those employees gave Ethena’s modern compliance content a positive rating.
“I'm honestly just excited to see what content you continue to add to it. Its timeliness and relevance has continued to impress me.”
Ethena is a compliance training platform with intuitive and powerful admin tools, built to make training easy, engaging, and effective.
Looking for a more inclusive option for annual sexual harassment training? Check out our Harassment Prevention and Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion courses. And if you're interested in exploring Ethena’s training solution, talk to a member of our team.
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