Your plan for the post-Pride months

Your plan for the post-Pride month

By Mikolaj Piskorski

Now that Pride month has come to a close, it’s good to take stock of where you are as an ally for LGBTQ+ people. Did you organize or participate in Pride events in your company?  Was there a rainbow flag on your desk? Did you add your pronouns to your online profiles? If yes, that’s great! Now, it’s time to extend these celebratory actions into everyday practice. If you missed the Pride month events, do not worry! There are still six months in 2021 for you to become an ally.

So, what can you do in July? Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

Take an LGBTQ+ colleague out to lunch. So much of how included we feel depends on social interaction, so it’s a good idea to include your LGBTQ+ colleagues in informal get-togethers to keep up with how things are going.

Expand that lunch. Connections and inclusivity rely on making bonds. So, if you noticed someone on the sidelines of Pride month or suspect they aren’t comfortable with LGBTQ+ colleagues, maybe invite them with you and an LGBTQ+ colleague to lunch. When we start to know each other in more informal, collegial ways, we understand each other better. This might be a graceful way to help someone else figure out how to be an ally.

Commit to one or two actions. Everybody has spent the last month talking and brainstorming about inclusion in the workplace, now it is time to walk the walk. The best way to do this is to get your team together and identify one or two things that you can do to build a more inclusive workplace. Then get together at the end of the month to see if you can actually start implementing them.

Check your recruitment process. One very powerful thing you can do to build inclusion is to make sure that LGBTQ+ people are not excluded at any point during the recruiting process. Check with your leaders to see how they phrase their recruitment announcements and maybe run some of these announcements by your LGBTQ+ colleagues to see how they sound. Then check how candidates are selected, interviewed and hired, and what salaries they are offered.

Encourage a culture of speaking up. Speaking up about feeling like the workplace isn’t inclusive can be very scary for people. One never knows when they could experience retaliation, so while it may seem that only one or two people giving you negative feedback indicates you are doing well, you need to take those small bits very seriously. Not everyone is comfortable telling hard truths, so when you hear some, tackle it with the belief that those people may represent a silent contingent.