Earlier this year, Airtree partnered with Blackbird Ventures to develop a Respect@Work Toolkit for the Australia and New Zealand tech ecosystem. This new guide helps startups and scale-ups, and their board members, understand their legal obligations and how to put in place best practices to build a respectful workplace.

With the change in Australian legislation creating a positive duty to prevent and respond to workplace sexual harassment and discrimination, we recognised the unique and important opportunity to support our portfolio companies and wider startup ecosystem to get it right. 

We engaged Grapevine co-founder Lucy Wark to help us create this toolkit. Together, we consulted portfolio companies of various sizes and maturity to make sure it fit the needs of early-stage companies. The reception has been resoundingly positive with feedback from Founders and People & Culture leads of companies with head counts as small as 5 people up to several thousand.

Get access to the toolkit here

This toolkit was launched in a staged roll-out, to our respective portfolio companies first for feedback and testing, and we are now making it publicly available. 

For the Airtree portfolio, we also ran an adjacent session with Prabha Nandagopal, senior legal advisor to the Respect@Work National Inquiry, and Founder of Elevate Consulting Partners. This offered our founders and their teams an opportunity to engage an expert who helped shape the legislation itself.

By equipping the broader tech and startup industry with practical guidance, tools, and templates to foster respectful, safe and inclusive workplace cultures, we hope this has wide, positive ripple effects. The toolkit is a living asset, and we welcome your feedback.

Creating the conditions for inclusion

Sexual discrimination and harassment at work is harmful and unless addressed swiftly and appropriately, persists and can even escalate. It is worth noting that it can happen to anyone, though there is a much higher prevalence against women, LGBTQI+, and other minority groups, particularly when there are intersecting social identities, and in male-dominated industries. 

This is backed up by the Tech Council of Australia’s recent Women in Highly Technical Occupations report that found women are 5x more likely to experience harassment and gender discrimination in the STEM workforce than men.

Leadership commitment to setting cultural standards is so important. Simply ‘hiring well’ does not create the conditions for an inclusive workplace, and actually places a burden on individuals to address disrespect. By offering resources such as the toolkit and partnering with tech startups, Airtree seeks to help founders set their trajectory and get it right, early.

The toolkit itself is composed of an overview of the Respect@Work legislation, a self-audit checklist, myth-busters, templates for policies, processes and training materials, as well as scenarios to demonstrate pathways to resolution, and links to external support available.

One support link that isn’t listed in the toolkit, given its intended use for the wider ecosystem, we would like to highlight here: Airtree’s reporting pathway for our portfolio companies. If you work at, or have concerns about an Airtree portfolio company, you can reach out to us. We are here to help and deeply committed to making our industry the best place to work.

As startups grow, they set the tone and contribute to a wider industry reputation. This sounds like a big responsibility—and it is—yet it’s one to carry with care and pride because it will influence how our industry grows, and who is a part of it. 

We hope this toolkit contributes to creating those conditions for inclusion and welcome further collaboration in this space.