Defining Opportunities and Addressing Inequities — With Steve Gregos of Willowtree

Steve Gregos was a Senior Software Engineer at WillowTree at the time of this interview, with several years of ERG leadership experience across two employee resource groups: Trees Without Degrees, which he co-founded to support software engineers who came to the field without a traditional computer science background, and Trees with Different Needs, which he chaired to advocate for employees navigating substance recovery, ADHD, and mental health challenges in the workplace. He also co-developed WillowTree's corporate apprenticeship program during his tenure.

This conversation, part of the AllVoices Culture Champions series, was originally published in 2022. The structural questions Gregos addresses: how to build an ERG that changes policy, how to measure impact honestly, and how to create space for non-traditional talent: remain among the most practically useful in the series.

How Steve Gregos came to lead two ERGs at WillowTree

Gregos' path into ERG leadership came from recognizing a gap no existing program addressed: the specific experience of engineers who built their skills outside a university computer science curriculum. What began as a peer connection between colleagues with shared experiences became a vehicle for institutional change.

What prepared you most for ERG leadership?

Gregos draws a direct connection between his day-to-day technical work and the skills ERG leadership requires.

For founding Trees without Degrees — There had been a few other people at the company that I had gravitated towards and we would always tell each other that we feel like we understand things better when we explain things to each other and often it was in a simpler and less-technical way. One person might not have known what an inner class was, but if we used concepts that were easier to understand by describing how it worked or where it lived in the codebase? Then we'd be speaking the same language. So we spent lots of time together and came to find out we all also didn't come from a CIS background, which is largely why we used different terminology than a lot of our peers. That was the seed of the ERG.

For chairing Trees with Different Needs — I'd just spoken at a conference called Heartifacts that focuses on the humans that work in technology. The talk was called Your ADHD Symptoms May Include and talked about the struggle for sobriety after developing an addiction to my medication. In that, becoming sober meant that I developed an aversion to pills for a while. Now I had to accept myself and my ADHD symptoms, while trying to learn how to change my life to live sober from stimulants. I didn't like the narrative that existed around ADHD, and that talk challenges that narrative in a way that shows why some ADHD symptoms are worthy of conservation. After the talk, the DMs came pouring in with stories about people's kids who were on their journey to sobriety, people sharing their own journeys with sobriety. A few months after giving this talk, the Chair position opened up, and I decided that the next step for me was to advocate for more than just ADHD and supportive recovery practices in the workplace.

Both paths share a pattern: a personal experience of navigating a system not designed for you, followed by a decision to build something that makes that navigation easier for everyone who follows. That is the origin story of most effective ERGs.

What Trees Without Degrees set out to change

The ERG was built around a specific inequity in tech hiring: the degree requirement that disproportionately excludes people who learned through bootcamps, self-study, or apprenticeship, and that disproportionately affects communities of color.

Why did you start Trees Without Degrees specifically?

When you enter software engineering without a degree, there are challenges that come with it from the beginning. Technical terminology that computer science programs treat as foundational vocabulary is not part of your background. The knowledge is often present: the ability to complete the task, to write the code, to solve the problem: but the formal vocabulary and credentialing are not. And the industry has largely built its hiring filters around that vocabulary and those credentials, not the underlying capability.

As Gregos described it, the degree filter in software engineering creates an invisible barrier that is compounding: it affects access, it affects the job search, and it concentrates that disadvantage on communities of color, where the path to a CS degree is already harder to access. Trees Without Degrees was built to address that barrier from the inside: by creating a community within WillowTree, and then using that community to create a real structural alternative through the company's apprenticeship program.

What did Trees Without Degrees accomplish?

The ERG partnered with WillowTree to build the company's apprenticeship program from the ground up: policy, starting benefits, learning content, and onboarding support for apprentices from the first cohort. That is the work that separates ERGs that create community from ERGs that create change. The program gave people an actual path into the organization that did not depend on a computer science degree.

For HR leaders thinking about intersectionality in the workplace, Trees Without Degrees represents what happens when an ERG has both community buy-in and organizational access: it can redesign the conditions rather than just supporting people navigating them.

How Gregos built Trees with Different Needs as an ERG that goes beyond awareness

Chairing Trees with Different Needs required a different kind of ERG leadership. The community was organized around mental health, ADHD, substance recovery, and neurodivergence: topics that carry stigma in many workplace contexts and that require genuine safety to discuss openly.

How did you structure the ERG for sustainability?

Gregos based the ERG structure on Catalyst's ERG Guidebook, a resource that addresses the specific challenge of building an organization that can outlast any individual leader. The approach involved defining each role clearly: what each position owns, what authority it has, and what skills it develops: so that future leaders inherit a legible structure rather than an ad hoc set of relationships.

The two leaders he describes specifically: Courtney Oakes and Ashley Gibson: each took ownership of distinct organizational challenges. Courtney built the ERG's external partnerships and defined its relationship with HR. Ashley designed the leadership transition process, solving the problem of how an ERG replaces its leadership in a way that is fair, clear, and accessible to members at all stages of their career.

How are ERG leaders recognized and compensated at WillowTree?

Gregos describes one of the more complete forms of ERG recognition available in the industry at the time.

ERG leadership work comes up on promotion rubrics and is acknowledged as leadership experience. For me, becoming an ERG lead gave me access to opportunities that I wouldn't have otherwise had. I started my work with ERGs when I was very early on in my career. When you're early in your career you don't typically get access to activities like building teams, building mentorship programs, or building relationships with influencers across the organization.

Being able to engage in ERG leadership early on in my career gave me additional time building skills that I use now as a Senior Engineer and will rely on even more as a Director of Engineering. I'm celebrated with things like shoutouts, kudos, DMs, and just people saying "I saw your ADHD talk. It was awesome".

The promotion rubric recognition is meaningful. It signals that ERG leadership is professional development, not volunteerism done outside of career advancement. Most organizations acknowledge ERG work without formally crediting it. WillowTree built it into the framework that determines who advances. The power of employee resource groups in creating equity depends on whether the organization is willing to make ERG leadership count in its actual talent systems, not just its communications.

2025 and 2026 update: where ERG leadership for equity stands now

The work Gregos describes in 2022 has become more widely recognized as best practice, but the structural challenges he names: burnout, limited budgets, volunteer labor: remain common.

ERG impact data has strengthened

90% of Fortune 500 companies now have ERGs, and the research on their outcomes has become more specific. According to MentorCliq's 2024 ERG research, employees actively involved in ERGs are 70% more likely to be promoted within their organizations, and 85% of ERG members report gaining new skills including leadership, project management, and public speaking. These are outcomes Gregos described in 2022 from his own experience. The data has since caught up with what he knew from practice. Building a culture of listening inside an organization creates the conditions where ERG insights are acted on rather than noted and filed away.

The resource gap persists

Despite the evidence for ERG impact, only 40% of ERGs receive dedicated budgets, according to MentorCliq's research. The rest operate on volunteer hours and whatever organizational support individual leaders can secure through relationships. Gregos' observation about ERG leadership creating career access for early-career employees is accurate and consistent with the data. But that access requires the organization to make the ERG investment viable: which starts with whether the ERG has a budget, dedicated time, and formal credit in the talent system. AllVoices is a leading employee relations platform that helps HR teams track employee experience data across demographics and ERG participation, making the connection between ERG investment and workforce outcomes visible. See how AllVoices supports HR teams building more accountable ERG programs.