Building an Inclusive and Diverse Workplace

We want Block to be a place where everyone feels like they belong — and celebrating diversity and operating with fairness and equality are some of the ways we’re working to make it happen.

Block Communities — aka employee resource groups (ERGs) — are central to our workplace culture. Our host of Communities include groups for gender and racial diversity, interfaith community, neurodiversity, and LGBTQ+ inclusion. They have formal leadership and representation around the world.

We embed checks within our system to combat bias and advance fairness in promotion and compensation. Our approach includes prompts to help managers consider their full bench of talent, checklists to reduce the influence of bias, and an audit for evidence of bias before decisions are finalized.

Inclusion is essential to building a diverse workforce. Tools we use to measure inclusion include our biannual engagement survey, which helps us track employee sentiment — we analyze the survey results to spot any gaps in scores along age, gender, and race/ethnicity (all self-reported by employees). And we use statistical modeling to compare turnover rates and identify long-term retention trends among different demographic groups.

Block is an early partner of Next Chapter, providing paid software engineering apprenticeships to formerly incarcerated people. Access is at the heart of our purpose and we want to create new pathways for those who face barriers to employment in the tech world.

2022 Workforce Diversity Report

Representation matters, and so does transparency about where we stand. Take a look at our 2022 report for an overview of Block’s workforce diversity.