It may come as no surprise that a former Girl Scout became head of corporate sustainability and ESG at a major employer. Kami Hoskins, who is also GoDaddy’s senior director of legal, oversees her company’s social impact programming and employee volunteerism, she told HR Dive.
“Probably as early as junior high — being in the Girl Scouts — I’ve been super focused on giving back to my community,” Hoskins said.
How GoDaddy seeks to give back is outlined in its 2023 sustainability report: from operations, to customers, to employees.
“A lot of companies focus on environmental sustainability and that is incredibly important to us. But we actually think about sustainability more broadly, to also look at the impacts that we’re making on people,” Hoskins said, emphasizing both people within the company and the communities her employer is serving.
How giving back can intersect with EX and CX
Kami Hoskins, head of corporate sustainability and ESG and senior director of legal at GoDaddy
One of the people-focused initiatives Hoskins highlighted was its empowering entrepreneurs program, where employees volunteer to give budding business owners, to use Hoskins’ words, “a vitamin B12 shot at the beginning of their entrepreneurship journey, to get them up and running.”
GoDaddy matches up employees with certain subject matter expertise, such as SEO skills, to teach upskilling webinars.
“They say that it’s one of their favorite things that they get to do: Work directly with those participants to help level up their experience on their entrepreneurship journey,” Hoskins said.
Key takeaways from the ESG report? Accountability is everything
Representation of women and nonbinary people, while minorities in GoDaddy’s workforce, have held steady; while there’s work to go regarding diversity, GoDaddy has reportedly reached pay parity.
- In 2023, women in executive positions at GoDaddy made $0.97 for their male colleagues’ $1.00.
- Women in technical roles made $0.99 for their male counterparts’ $1.00.
- Women in nontechnical roles made $1.00 for their male co-workers’ $1.00.
- Nonbinary people across the company, who make up 0.3% of GoDaddy’s workforce, made $1.01 for their male colleagues’ $1.00.
“Our culture is about ensuring that everybody can show up to work and be their whole selves,” Hoskins said. But accountability is the name of the game, she added, and looking at quantitative metrics, not just qualitative information, is crucial.
“That’s why we do pay attention to our pay parity results,” she said. “It’s important to keep ourselves honest and to make sure we’re making a positive influence — again, circling back to sustainability making positive impacts on our employees and on our communities.”
Doing the work is a lifelong journey
Hoskins path to heading up GoDaddy’s sustainability initiatives at an executive level was nonlinear. “This job is a constellation of a lot of areas in my life that have crystallized in an amazing way,” Hoskins said. Prior to working at GoDaddy, Hoskins worked as a private practice attorney for more than a decade. She joined the company four years ago as a member of the legal department.
“This opportunity presented itself and I said ‘yes.’ It ended up being this really just great fit. Having this legal background is really helpful with respect to the ESG regulations and rules that are popping up all over the globe,” she said.
Hoskins, who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, recalled her initial civic engagement experiences with Girl Scouts in middle school. She remembers selling the cookies. (Her favorites are Samoas, the gooey coconut and chocolate ones.)
“And I really loved camp: I really loved being outdoors and the games we would play, and again, the community service,” she said.
The outdoors have come full circle in Hoskins’ life. “There’s obviously a huge aspect [of the job] related to environmentalism. To me, that’s been something that is the biggest part of my learning — how we talk about sustainability with respect to like greenhouse gas accounting and our carbon footprint. I’m delighted to learn,” she said. “It’s really fun to get up to speed.”
But, she added, “I’ve been very much a lover of the planet for my whole life.”
Hoskins also told HR Dive that DEI has long been a part of her life.
“It’s been really interesting to watch the evolution of the work over these last 27 years. But to me some things, I think, will always be true, because it’s sort of just fundamental to being human,” Hoskins said.
“We always need to learn how other people see the world and continuously do that better because we have our own framework,” she continued. “It takes energy and it takes conscious intention to open up our minds and see the world from another’s vantage point — regardless of what our social identity might be.”