Bunch was designed to help teams thrive and be the best they can be. Highperformance
teams balance diverse backgrounds with complementary skillsets, while maintaining a high level of alignment of common goals and clear team norms. Cultural alignment does not mean that teams become more homogenous, on the contrary, it allows teams to include even the most disparate team members efficiently by carving out a very clear overlap in values and norms
that all team members share.
Bunch helps reduce bias in selection
Bunch measures your preferred work styles and norms. In other words, we assess how people prefer to work. Traditionally candidates are assessed and selected based on hard skills, degrees, interview performance, etc. This system proliferates homogeneity in teams because it is rooted in biases. Let’s say for instance you studied at an Ivy League school. You might then, intentionally or otherwise, dismiss candidates who did not attend Ivy League schools as not hard-working or goal-oriented, when perhaps they chose to go to a school closer to home to help with family issues, or attended part-time while starting a small business. The point is, when using Bunch you’re able to assess the cultural preferences of a candidate (i.e. their values and norms). This means you’re empowered to not focus as much on judging someone by his race, gender, or school. Instead you can focus on selecting people based on what they bring to your team. In the future we’ll be releasing a diversity-feature that allows our users to hide personal information from the profile of candidates entirely (e.g. name & degree/ school) and thus strengthen the focus on their norms instead of their demographics.
Diversity of skills in the team
Cultural alignment does not lead to a homogenous workforce comprised of identical skillsets and backgrounds. In fact, our advice is to hire for diversity in everything except your top cultural values. And we’re aligned with Brian Chesky, CEO and founder of AirB’nB there: “Somebody asked me ‘what’s the job of a CEO’, and there’s a number of things a CEO does. What you mostly do is articulate the vision, develop the strategy, and you gotta hire people to fit the culture. If you do those three things, you basically have a company.” -Brian Chesky
Why? Because that ensures variety in experience, styles and skills and that gives you a better chance of tackling hard problems while at the same time keeping every team member pushing in the same direction. All of this without losing momentum to unnecessary friction about principles, priorities, or core values. Accepting differences in education, demographics or personality, while building on commonalities in values and norms, leads to better inclusion, as well as a more cohesive and stronger culture. Make sense? This way you help build stronger teams comprised of highly diverse individuals. When you don’t use Bunch and don’t align on your core cultural norms, there is a chance that your team is unable to utilize diversity and can’t manage differences effectively, which means lack of shared motivation and identity within the team. In this case your team won’t be able to live up to its full potential and will lose important opportunities. For more on this check out Lindred Greer’s work on diversity here.
Demographical Diversity
We measure work style attitudes without attention to any external factor such as race, sex, nationality, etc. Because of this, Bunch helps companies significantly reduce bias when hiring. Ranking candidates by cultural alignment enables both HR business partners and hiring managers to focus on candidates that match your current team’s top 1-2 norms, rather than on finding the familiar profile (mid-thirties, male, ivy league educated, etc.) that a company usually hires. This is especially important for creating diverse leadership teams.
Bonus: Bringing the importance of team culture up in the interview process is a great way to show new hires that your company cares about how they fit into the team as a whole, which most find to be a very positive attribute in a potential workplace.
