Our people
Xero actively supports representation, inclusion and belonging in the workplace. We want our people to belong, grow and thrive at work.
Representation, inclusion, and belonging at Xero
Xero serves customers in 180 countries around the world. Our customers represent many different cultures, walks of life, and personal circumstances. We consider building an open and inclusive workforce that reflects the customers and communities we serve to be critical to delivering our purpose and strategy.
Our aim is to create a workplace where top talent can do the best work of their lives. We believe a representative workforce, upheld by a culture where everyone feels included, is critical to successfully achieving our strategy, enhancing our purpose, and driving high performance. In support of this aspiration, we actively attract, develop and retain exceptional talent for a high-performance culture.
Our strategic focus
Through our strategic focus on representation, inclusion, and belonging, we:
- proactively seek to understand every employee’s experience to continuously cultivate a culture of inclusion and belonging
- apply an inclusion lens to everything we do to support the unique perspectives and needs of our customers to create the best experience with Xero
- use data to understand the composition of our workforce so we can create accessible pathways that reflect our customers and communities
Key representation, inclusion and belonging principles
Our approach to ensure representation and inclusion is thriving at Xero is operationalized through several key practices, including:
- We are all accountable to create an inclusive culture;
- We are committed to attracting diverse talent and fair hiring practices;
- We support flexible ways of working;
- We are committed to equal pay for equal work;
- We have an obligation to champion representation and inclusion in the community.
- Further to the first objective, Xero has outlined Workplace Inclusion Principles for all Xeros to use when navigating interpersonal conversations and engagements. We take these expectations seriously and anyone found to have breached them will be subject to appropriate disciplinary action, which may include dismissal
Along with prioritising reporting on representation, we focus on driving a culture of inclusion that enables everyone to tap into the potential and power of our differences. Inclusion means all Xeros have a sense of belonging and fairness, feel valued and respected, and can play their part in doing the most beautiful work of their lives.
We’ve received the following recognitions in 2025 as a result of our efforts and workforce practices:
- Xero has ranked 41st in Equileap’s Top 100 ranking of companies in global markets for gender equality
- Our US offices have been ranked as one of the 100 best places to work by Built In
- Xero has been included in the Top 10 Global Healthy Workplaces (multinational enterprises) by the Global Centre for Healthy Workplaces
Our global representation, inclusion, and belonging program is led by our Head of Representation, Inclusion and Belonging. We report annually on our progress against the measurable objectives for representation approved by the Xero Board. For information about our progress against our objectives, see our FY25 Sustainability Report.
We are also proud to be a member of Diversity Council of Australia and DiversityWorks NZ.
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Employee resource groups at Xero
In 2021 we formally launched our global Employee Resource Group (ERG) programme to provide an opportunity to foster a representative and inclusive workplace aligned with our mission, values, goals, business practices, and objectives.
ERGs may be built upon shared characteristics or life experiences that are focused on encouraging an exchange of ideas, promoting a greater sense of belonging and enhancing career and personal development of employees in the workplace.
Since the inception of the ERGs, we have several across all regions Xero operates within:
- Neurodiversity (US, Canada, UK, NZ, Australia, and Asia)
- LGBTQIA+ (US, Canada, UK, NZ, Australia, and Asia)
- Women of Xero (US, Canada, UK, NZ, Australia, and Asia)
- Māori & Pasifika (NZ)
- Indigenous (US & Canada), as well as a Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) working group in Australia
- Families (US, Canada, UK, NZ, Australia, and Asia)
- Los Xeros (Hispanic/Latinx in the US and Canada)
- Black Xero (US & Canada)
- Asian and Pacific Islander (US & Canada)
- Ethnicities (UK & EMEA)
ERG initiatives and events
Our ERGs both lead and participate in internal and external events to build community, increase allyship through Xero, and support community partners.
- Our ERGs celebrated significant cultural, religious and representation days over the past year, including Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Chinese New Year, Diwali, ANZAC Day, Remembrance Sunday, Matariki, AAPI Month, Black History Month, Pride Month, International Women’s Day, Samoan Language Week, NAIDOC Week, and Neurodiversity Celebration Week
- Highlights from the UK Veterans ERG include Xero being presented with the Armed Forces Covenant Award and. internally, introducing special leave for all Xeros who are required to participate in reservist duties or training
- Our Women of Xero (WOX) US ERG celebrated International Women’s Day (IWD) by hosting a panel conversation with northern hemisphere leaders, where they granted their annual IWD awards to peer-nominated Xeros who were exemplary in their work to support women at work
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Supporting gender equality at Xero
At Xero, focusing on gender equality has always been a priority for us as we’re keen to get more women into the tech sector, ensure we have good female representation across our management levels, and remove any roadblocks to gender equality in all aspects of life at Xero. We know this drives better business outcomes not only for Xero but for our small business partners and customers.
Currently, 63% of our Xero leadership team (Xero CEO and direct reports) and 44% of our employees are women, and we have three female and five male directors on our Board.
As part of Xero’s continuing commitment to gender equality, we are proud to have consistently been included in the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index every year since 2020. This inclusion recognises our investment in fostering a more inclusive and equitable workplace.
Gender pay equity
We regularly track our gender data for internal monitoring and accountability. As part of this work, we conduct an annual organisation-wide pay equity review at Xero and communicate results to employees. At the time of our last analysis in February 2022, looking at Xero overall, like for like male and female pay was the same when compared to market remuneration.
Our median gender pay gap is 7.4% which has decreased year-on-year between FY24 and FY25. Note: To calculate our gender pay gap, we review actual total earnings of employees over the past 12 months. We then take the median actual earnings of males, minus the median actual earnings of females, divided by the median actual earnings of males. A weighted average is then used across each region to get to a Xero overall figure.
We also think it’s important to shine a spotlight on and celebrate our female Xero customers and partners who are shaping the world of small business across the globe.
In the UK and Australia, we are required to submit annual gender pay gap metrics to the UK and Australian governments respectively. You can read our most recent UK Gender Pay Gap Report which covers the period 5 April 2023 to 5 April 2024 here, and consult our reported gender data in Australia here.
Increasing female representation at Xero
We are committed to getting more women into the tech sector through a number of initiatives including:
- supporting organisations that are working to attract and develop a gender-balanced workforce, including Code Like a Girl, Tech Girls Movement, PowerSuit, and the Ada Lovelace Foundation
- championing the development of STEM careers through initiatives including Xero’s graduate and intern programs
- shining a spotlight on the importance of gender equality through International Women’s Day, running events across our offices.
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Read more in the Xero blog
Strengthening belonging and understanding
We recognise that building a culture of inclusion is not a stagnant moment, but a journey for all to participate in.
We offer multiple avenues for learning opportunities for our people and people leaders to participate in, increasing the capability for everyone to drive a culture of inclusion within their teams. Below are some of the learning opportunities we offer at Xero to help build inclusion and belonging:
Online training
We offer several learnings through our online learning portal, including:
- Disability confidence @ Xero
- Pride in diversity: LGBTQIA+ awareness
- Unconscious bias
- Worldviews and religion
Other learning opportunities
Along with our online learning opportunities, we offer several facilitated courses for our people to participate in:
- Xero’s global inclusive communities, which touches on multiple aspects of building an inclusive community, including awareness of our own identities, our RISE inclusion model, understanding covering/code switching, bias in language, and behavioural shifts based on neuroscience leading to a culture of inclusion.
- Through our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), we offer regional and global offerings based on the focus area. These have included neurodiversity inclusion through our UK Inclusion Forum, awareness on truth and reconciliation day in Canada through the Indigenous ERG, confidence in leadership through Women of Xero, and more.
Inclusion in talent selection
We use a range of channels to hire staff that promote representation and inclusion in hiring.
In previous years, we have:
- piloted an internship with Specialisterne, an organisation which supports employment of people on the autism spectrum.
- hired through non traditional pathways including the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre in Australia and the New Zealand Red Cross’s Pathways to Employment program.
- participated in the TupuToa internship program in New Zealand.
We're proud to be a member of the Australian Network on Disability (AND). We're also proud to be a Level 2 Disability Confident Employer in the United Kingdom.
We're proud to be a member of the Australian Network on Disability (AND). We're also proud to be a Level 2 Disability Confident Employer in the United Kingdom
Along with goals focused on the representation of our candidate pool, we want to ensure all participants experience inclusion throughout the hiring process. This has included continuation of practices including an Inclusive Hiring Toolkit, Unconscious Bias training for our recruiting team, and using data to understand where barriers may exist for candidates.
Check out the Xero careers page for more information about working at Xero.
Increasing LGBTQIA+ inclusion and awareness
At Xero, we want to create a culture of belonging, where differences not only exist but where they are respected, supported and fully celebrated. It’s about ensuring our people can be their authentic self, and flourish in an environment where they feel accepted and know they belong. LGBTQIA+ awareness and support is an important part of creating an inclusive culture at Xero.
We have formal LGBTQIA+ Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Asia. These groups also support activities across Xero globally.
Here are some of the ways that we promote LGBTQIA+ awareness and inclusion at Xero:
- We provide LGBTQIA+ awareness and education across some of our offices.
- We provide options in our human resources system for employees to self-identify as non-binary or gender diverse.
- We also encourage our people to indicate their pronouns in our internal IT systems and in their email signatures.
- We recently installed all-gender bathroom signage in our Wellington headquarters to create a more inclusive and welcoming environment for trans, gender diverse and non-binary employees and guests. We plan to extend this initiative wherever possible in our offices globally.
- Xero supports employee participation in local Pride parades under the Xero banner.
Read more in the Xero blog
Supporting families and carers
In 2022, we launched a new program of inclusive benefits to support our people when they are starting or growing their family. Our support for parents is available to all permanent employees globally, regardless of their gender identity, how they become a parent, or how long they’ve been with Xero. Since we introduced our gender-neutral parenting benefits, 10% of employees taking up parental leave have been men.
We also provide support for Xeros who have caring responsibilities through paid carer’s leave, which they can use to care for sick children, older parents or any other family members who require support. This is in addition to flexible and remote working arrangements, which help our people to balance work and family responsibilities.
Doing the best work of our lives
At Xero, we create an environment where people want to work in our team and love what they do.
Xero’s culture and the way in which we live our values every day are something for which we are widely known. We’ve received the following recognitions in 2025 as a result of our efforts and workforce practices:
- Xero has ranked 41st in Equileap’s Top 100 ranking of companies in global markets for gender equality
- Our US offices have been ranked as one of the 100 best places to work by Built In
- Xero has been included in the Top 10 Global Healthy Workplaces (multinational enterprises) by the Global Centre for Healthy Workplaces
We provide our people with the freedom to shape their career and do the best work of their lives. And we’re proud of the work we do to help small businesses succeed.
If this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you. Find out more about working at Xero at our careers page.
Developing our people
Great leadership is essential to getting the best out of our people and we invest in our people leaders' continuous development as leaders, from laying the foundations as aspiring leaders through to programs for established leaders and ongoing cohort programs at all levels.
As peers and leaders, we know that feedback and challenge help us do the best work of our lives so we invest in offering training and team development activities such as our Crucial Conversations workshops to help make challenging conversations more useful and less intimidating.
We’re committed to supporting our people to achieve their career goals. To support this, we have developed learning pathways to help individual employees and their leaders plan their development and growth.
We know that it can be hard to find time for learning, so we have an internal learning channel packed with bite-sized learning modules to help our people fit learning into their everyday life. This allows our people to participate in continuous development even if it's a busy season of the year.
Mental health and wellbeing
At Xero, we’ve long championed the benefits of mental health and wellbeing to our people, our customers and our partners. Our people leaders continue to share their experiences authentically, creating an environment where talking about mental health and wellbeing is normalised. Some of the ways in which we do this include:
- provision of a free, confidential Employee Assistance Program (EAP) to our people and their families
- including psychological wellbeing sessions in Xero people leader events
- designing and rolling out a mental wellbeing e-learning module for all our people.
Our first annual wellbeing climate survey in 2021 identified clear links between wellbeing and the performance of individuals and teams. It also provided an evidence-based way of understanding how to create the workplace conditions that foster wellbeing at Xero and what interventions will deliver this.
Our global wellbeing program
Under the stewardship of our Global Head of Wellbeing, we’re committed to putting wellbeing at the heart of how we operate. We’re exploring how we can make changes to the way work is designed in order to improve our people’s experience of work, such as introducing designated meeting-free ‘focus time’ for deep, concentrated work. Our data demonstrates that the same workplace factors that are good for our people’s wellbeing are also good for performance, reducing the chance of burnout. We have close to 80 wellbeing champions across our global offices.
Our 2022 research continued to put wellbeing at the heart of our sustainability as a fast growth company, linking our wellbeing climate with individual factors such as burnout and organisational factors such as attrition.
We’re partnering with two leading cognitive neuroscientists from the University of Berkeley to help optimise how we spend our mental energy and our time to maximise performance and wellbeing. This programme, called Time Well Spent, is a company-wide reset on how we approach meetings, prioritise focus time and get clear on our daily priorities so we can be deliberate about how we spend these precious resources of our time, energy and attention.
More information
For more information on our sustainability work and performance, see Xero's FY25 Sustainability Report (PDF) and FY25 Databook (XLSX).
For anything else, please email us at sustainability@xero.com