Patty Nishimura Dingle: Driving Belonging & Diversity at Workday

At Workday, we’re honored to be recognized as an innovative technology company and a great place to work. The secret? It’s our people. Fostering a diverse culture that values different views and approaches has helped us create applications relevant to our customers’ needs and ultimately improve how people work.

Workday views diversity as a business imperative and our efforts have been recognized with a number of related workplace awards in the past year, including the ranking of #6 on Fortune’s Best Workplaces for Diversity and #23 on Fortune’s Best Workplaces for Women. To further our efforts, Workday recently hired Patty Nishimura Dingle as director of Belonging & Diversity. Dingle focuses on strengthening Workday through hiring, developing, and retaining a diverse global workforce, and on finding new ways to encourage the culture of belonging at Workday.

“Workday has done a great job at being inclusive and recognizing the importance of belonging, but we can always do more,” says Dingle. “My goal is to bring people together to uncover ways we can enrich our culture of bringing one’s whole self to work each day.”

This week in Houston, Dingle and more than 70 Workday employees are attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. Workday is proud to be a Gold Sponsor of the event, produced by the Anita Borg Institute and in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery. The event aligns with the Workday view that a truly diverse workforce creates and delivers the most innovative solutions. That includes bringing even more focus to the diversity recruiting strategy at Workday, and partnering with Workday product teams and industry organizations to leverage technology to achieve diversity and inclusion objectives.

Dingle recognizes that the products Workday delivers to customers can also be critical drivers in the process of inclusion. “Our finance and HR applications are helping more companies around the world better understand their people,” says Dingle. “Some of the tech industry’s best-known diversity champions, including Adobe, Netflix, and Salesforce, use Workday to support and grow their workforces.”

Dingle began her career as a researcher for the ABC television network affiliate in San Francisco, a job that evolved into producing community programming. The next stop was at American Automobile Association (AAA) where Dingle created a role that was a hybrid of corporate giving and diversity. It was there that she designed and delivered a comprehensive program for training, hiring, and inclusion. Her work was recognized when the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index gave AAA a 100 percent rating as a best place to work for LGBT employees.

Before joining Workday in May, Dingle spent two years at Visa, where she helped implement an Unconscious Bias Training program for executives, established a diversity council in Visa’s Asia Pacific region, and executed a company-wide International Women’s Day effort, with more than 27 offices participating through various events.

She’s excited to bring all that great experience to Workday. “Our Belonging & Diversity function is critical in terms of helping define the kind of company we are,” she says. “Workday is such a great place for someone in my role because of our special culture—there is a noticeable desire by every Workmate I meet to help advance these efforts.”

“I want Workday to be the company everyone wants to go work for because they’ve heard about our great culture of belonging,” Dingle says. “I want to help educate our Workmates that diversity isn’t just gender and ethnicity—we are all a part of diversity. When you’re a software company, things are constantly evolving and you can’t evolve by remaining the same. Our products evolve, our people evolve, and that is how we’ll stay dynamic and successful as a company.”