““I have seen transformation and behavioral change happen even in the first hour of the session.””
Happy Clients
I met Oana via a referral just after we had three failed programs on Diversity and Inclusion. We we’re really looking for someone that knew the subject well but could also facilitate the learning effectively for our diverse audiences in a culturally appropriate way.
Soon after we met, she shared examples of the types of programs she’s run in the past. She asked lots of questions to really understand our organization, our context and why we wanted to do this training. After having a few conversations Oana came back to us with a very clear understanding of our organization, our needs, the business case for the program we wanted to run as well as a proposal for us to consider. She showcased her great and thorough understanding of what we needed and what we we’re asking for and this also reflected in her proposed learning program she proposed for us.
When we ran our pilots, she ran those successfully. She continually asked for input, feedback and was really great in asking for any constructive criticism and anything which she could do differently to ensure the learning landed with our very diverse audience. She was great in a multicultural context and setting and was able to connect with audiences of various cultures, countries, and a multitude of diverse characteristics.
We are now working with Firefly across the world and are extremely excited to be working with a team of absolute professionals who give more than 100% to their work and deliver in an outstanding way every time they show up to a session. We look forward to our continued partnership and the amazing work they are doing for our group of companies.
— Global Head of Learning at Prosus Group
PayU partners with Firefly to help us build a more inclusive workplace. So far Oana has supported us through consulting and training. I’ve been impressed by the thought leadership and holistic approach Oana brings to our D&I challenges. On top of this she’s taken a lot of workload from me by bringing detail and rigour to her project management and by ensuring that all initiatives interconnect, and progress as agreed.
Oana brings a transformational training facilitation style which is a perfect blend of storytelling, data sharing and experiential learning. She knows how to connect with participants from different backgrounds and what is needed to help people increase their levels of self-awareness. I have seen transformation and behavioral change happen even in the first hour of the session.
After spending a day in the training room with Oana you will be ready to make those critical changes, both in yourself as well as in the organization that you work for!
— Head of Talent and Leadership Development at Payu
We have been working with Firefly over the last two years to deploy and accelerate our diversity and inclusion strategy. Oana and her team have been critical to help us articulate leadership interventions and trainings for Top 300 across the Group.
I really appreciated Oana’s capability to bring concept to life and help people understand how they can make a huge difference regarding inclusion on day-to-day basis. We started in the real world and face to face interventions, and when COVID crisis started, I was particularly impressed by Firefly’s capability to transform everything in a live digital format. We have now a set of meaningful interventions that we can deploy across the group in all our geographic locations without having to jump on planes to make it happen.
Oana has a very balanced communication style that allows her to deal with difficult conversations with calm and assertiveness while not avoiding any hard topic and keeping the room engaged.
— VP Talent and Development at Prosus Group
I had the opportunity to work with Oana Amaria on a company-wide diversity and inclusion (D&I) learning initiative for Progressive Insurance over several months. We were developing a learning program designed to enhance the skillset around inclusive leadership. This program had to be intertwined and embedded with other aspects of leadership development such as core competencies.
As I worked with Oana, I found that she was not only one of the most knowledgeable consultants in the D&I space I have worked with over the years, but also brought a very high level of design creativity, detail orientation and business expertise. The product she developed exceeded my expectations in terms of quality and has since been utilized by over 4000 managers to great acclaim. I have witnessed the transformation of leaders' inclusive skillsets in large part due to what Oana designed and developed in this program.
Her work not only raised the bar for future D&I learning solutions at our company, but also for learning assets overall - no matter what topic. It has become a model of what transformational learning can be in the D&I space.
— director of Diversity & Inclusion at Progressive Insurance
As our organization was navigating a difficult time, Oana partnered with us to design and implement strategy, learning programs and practices to support we got our culture rooted back in the values we believed in most. During the discovery period, I found Oana to be a collaborative partner and an engaged and astute listener. She quickly grasped our needs and was able to offer thoughtful solution sets that could be adapted, custom crafted and specially tailored to our needs.
For us, we needed to implement a variety of strategies to ensure the positive cultural changes we wanted to see could take root at all levels of our organization. That meant specially-designed, private sessions with our most senior executives, in-person group learning workshops with company directors, and spectacular virtual live-sessions for all of our employees across the globe. With scale in mind, we were able to convert the virtual sessions into a video course that all team members can now access.
Another incredibly valuable facet of our partnership with Oana included creation of a facilitator guide and train-the-trainer workshop to certify our own staff could run live workshops focused on inclusive management and mitigating unconscious bias at key touchpoints in the talent lifecycle. Oana’s experience as a diversity and inclusion practitioner and her skill as an empathetic coach were both essential in making this a success. Beyond learning the custom curriculum, this was a true development experience for our team members as facilitators.
The benefits to our team extended far beyond our contract. If the solutions you’re seeking extend beyond “one off” trainings or diversity and inclusion as an opportunity to check a box, Oana is the right partner. She’s focused on helping you make lasting changes in your leaders and teams that will impact them in profoundly positive ways for years to come.”
— Head of Diversity & Inclusion Strategy at Uber
Our partnership with Firefly Inclusion Solutions was exactly that - a partnership. Oana and Jason worked with our us to ensure that the session fit our culture, our needs, and where our teams were at in their learning journeys, instead of pushing “one-size-fits-all” sessions with our teams.
Workshops around diversity, equity, and inclusion can often be awkward, but Jason did a great job facilitating interactive conversations and encouraging participation from the entire group. Our leaders left the session feeling energized about their roles as facilitators and guardians of diversity and inclusion across On.
— Head of Diversity and Inclusion at on
Thank you, Oana.
The session yesterday was fantastic. I have heard multiple participants/leaders comment about comping to the session almost dreading the day and how it was a completely different experience (quote: it was relevant, engaging, eye opening and very much needed). I personally watched leaders experience ‘ah-ha’ and deep reflective moments. This is a tough crowd, full of smart (engineering types) and skeptics. Your ability to facilitate through this in an engaging, composed, pointed way was magnificent.
Today we have a live Q&A with a quarter of our studio and our CEO referenced the workshop in response to questions about how we continue to evolve our culture. Thank you for setting us up as we begin our journey towards a more inclusive culture in a compelling and relevant (and engaging) way!
— Chief People Officer at Bungie
We have been so grateful for the leadership and support of the Firefly team. Firefly supported Peloton with unique learning journeys designed to up-skill our leaders around Allyship, Inclusive Leadership and a transformation journey with our Exec team to help us self-interrogate as well as uncover biases, blind spots and mitigate harmful behaviors that may get in the way of innovation, growth, and our desire to be an anti-racist organization.
Oana and her team are highly skilled facilitators with incredibly thoughtful approaches that create safe spaces for our leaders to engage in dialogue on very difficult topics such as race in white supremacy behaviors. These topics aren’t easy!
Firefly has also been instrumental in helping us launch our brave conversations speaker series by providing coaching and support on procuring well known authors, speakers, professors, and athletes who are able to command the room as they engage our team members on topics such as anti-racism.
We are better leaders, because we’ve partnered with Firefly.
— SVP, Diversity, Equity + Inclusion at Peloton
We were introduced to Firefly Inclusion Solutions by a colleague from our parent company and I very quickly realised that Oana truly means business when it comes to her subject matter expertise.
The topic of diversity, equity and inclusion is already well embedded in our organisation but we knew we needed to do more, and the key was to create personal moments of insights and powerful self-realisations for key senior leaders. The program we are running globally with Firefly Inclusion Solutions is meant to create these moments and prompt change in micro behaviours that shape the future of our company, for the benefit of our employees and our customers.
Oana helped me understand and prioritise the topic on our global HR and leadership development agenda, she was persistently kind and focused and never lost sight of the end game we were setting up for ourselves. To date, over 150 of our most senior leaders have participated in the inclusive leadership program, with participants rating the experience highly valuable and important to their work.
We serve over 300m active users on our platforms every single month and Oana is challenging us how we can continually improve our services and products for them, as well as how we can create a workplace experience where no one is left out and everyone's uniqueness is truly celebrated. Thank you Oana for your ongoing positive challenge and encouragement.
— Global Talent Development Director at olx Group
I was fortunate enough to work with Oana as part of our unconscious bias program at JetBlue. As a respected DEI subject matter expert, I can’t say enough great things about partnering with Oana. Not only did she provide sound, sincere insight that helped to shape our program design, but she also fearlessly delivered several unconscious bias training sessions to our senior leader community, including our president and CEO. Participants were consistent in their praise of Oana’s knowledge and facilitation style. I truly appreciate what she brought to our diversity strategy and would welcome the opportunity to work with her again.
— Head of Diversity & Inclusion and Talent at JetBlue Airways
I met Oana in 2018 when we partnered with her to design “The Unstereotype Bootcamp”, a 4-hour immersion designed for intact teams with the objective of sensitizing leaders, increasing their awareness on unconscious bias and building inclusion. Oana is a true business partner with her E2E involvement in a project (from the design to actual delivery) to make sure it is a success. She is very collaborative, but at the same time professional and impactful.
I have especially been impressed by her expertise in the diversity and inclusion space. She knows the science behind unconscious bias and is able to translate this into practical/real-life workplace environment and business challenges. She also has great facilitation skills. Being an expert plus a good facilitator increases her reliability and credibility within the eyes of the most senior leaders who can be very tough to influence.
Furthermore, she is very flexible. She does not stick to a one size fits all approach; listens to each and every team to understand their challenges and come with solutions that are tailored to their needs. We were trying to roll-out a global program and the challenge was to make it relevant to all the different countries or functions. Oana, while keeping the philosophy the same, came with ideas and interventions to the program to make sure that it is delivering the highest value for each and every team. I am looking forward to continuing my partnership with her.