OREANDA-NEWS. April 18, 2016. Achieving an inclusive workplace is key to creating a culture of innovation, NVIDIA’s CEO co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang told a roomful of attendees at a session on inclusion at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference.

With workplace diversity in high tech a hot topic, the event highlighted how bringing ideas from different groups within a company are important for broadening its culture, and good for business.

At NVIDIA, we focus on supporting all our employees. Among our goals is keeping women working in tech and supporting women and minorities working in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.

We’re also focused on youth education. We invited students from Technovation and Black Girls Code to attend sessions at GTC and check out the Hands-On Labs.

We also invited three panelists to the session, moderated by Lisen Stromberg of PrismWork, to share their ideas about workplace inclusion.

Rich Goldberg, a fellow of Stanford University’s Distinguished Careers Institute and former Cisco Systems executive, said companies must recruit broadly because of fierce competition for the best talent.

“Leadership of companies have committed to making change, and younger generations are demanding change,” he said.

Panelist Sabeen Ali, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based AngelHack, a global hacker community, ensures she fosters an inclusive environment for her developers by encouraging conversation and focusing on marketing such as “Anyone Can Code.”

“Starting to talk, it’s the first step,” Ali said.

Panelists suggested other key factors to building an inclusive environment: ensuring work environments that are family, not just women, friendly; presenting female role models for others to see; using appropriate language when recruiting, and encouraging mentoring programs.