TL;DR: Filling up our pride month calendar with activities that commemorate pride was a task we took to heart many months ago. From decisions around our hiring processes to several meetings with our Executive Team and many brainstorming sessions with our Marketing Team, we’ve had lots to learn on Diversity and Inclusion. Our idea was to face Pride Month in a way that honors our day-to-day values of treating everyone respectfully, so this article unveils the bits and pieces driving change from the background.  

While we know that “having an inclusive workplace is beneficial to a company’s success” in accordance to the Human Rights Campaign latest Corporate Equality Index, the motivation behind our group efforts at Blankfactor has not been guided by the ways in which “an LGBTQ+ inclusive employer positively impacts recruitment, retention, engagement and, overall, total revenue.” On the contrary, the considerations on our back-end have so far always been driven by the mere human aspect of what’s now the first of our current company values; to treat everyone well. 

Or perhaps it’s been something a lot more personal than that, which has had a quick ripple effect into a collective, global focus. In either case, this note will unveil the reasons and choices that define how and why Blankfactor is filling its pride month calendar this year. Here’s a quick read to detail what’s been happening behind the scenes to celebrate Pride in ways that exceed just this month’s particular hype on the topic. 

It all starts with a question, or maybe the need

This might be too similar to the chicken and the egg dilemma. What came first? The question, or the need? From an internal standpoint, and as a transgender, sexually fluid pansexual who identifies as non-binary sitting in the content creation corner of Blankfactor’s Marketing Team, the progression of events that has taken us this far isn’t clear-cut nor fixed on a single motive for doing what we’re invested in achieving. 

The conversations started somewhere around February, when we first came out with our Women’s Month commemoration. Back then, we included a couple of posts on black female rights out of a guiding principle for inclusion. Though pride-filled, the experience of putting this content together left us with a few concerns. Are we truly inclusive with the expected diversity we can only imagine throughout the globe for all of our leading talent? Or are we chasing after the ideal of inclusion with pending work to ascertain it in the background? 

So, maybe the question came first. Yet, that dialog unveiled the real need behind our inclusion efforts. The Marketing Team sincerely ran ideas back and forth over team meetings of diverse timeframes and compositions. And the exchange was clear: we need to step up and ensure we’re treating everyone equally. 

The difference peer and leadership support makes 

The vast difference I’ve experienced first-hand at Blankfactor as a company has been the active support that the simplest forms of verbalization get going. In my 20-year experience working for the private sector, when most company leadership teams hear a statement that calls for considerable internal improvement, those processes are followed up in a very “bottom-up” structure. The common feedback talent gets to hear are “higher-up” decisions that are presented. Those come out ready to go into effect a certain period after issues come up. At Blankfactor, our collective needs become personal. 

Any setbacks here have had to do with the extent to which we can honestly guarantee that we’re driving a safe place to work for everyone. So we’re doing our homework. 

Making sure we know what we’re doing

Our huddles are real. So, we’ve needed to seek where we go for advice. Which pillars do we need to set? How often do we engage in action? And how do we set near-term and long-term initiatives that ensure we can proudly say we’re diverse and inclusive?

From Human Resource leadership to discussions with our Learning and Development sector, we’re asking all of the uncomfortable questions and going after meaningful actions of change. 

From pursuing guidance from leading organizations, such as what’s been named as “the largest gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, plus queer (LGBTQ) civil rights group in the USA”, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRC), to working on the inclusion of pronouns via our internal communication channels, we’re taking action to align as best as we can. 

We’re working on the way new hires and current team members are able to identify via our Human Resource platforms. And we’re scheduling activities throughout the year to bring us closer to each other from a perspective of diversity and inclusion. We’re also getting to know our identities better every day and generating safe spaces to have these conversations. And these are all workings going on behind the scenes of the new logo design for Pride Month, for example. 

Our pride month calendar is full of our personal investments

Our Social Media content this month is coming from collective discussion, as usual. A spark from an ally turned into our best design to ensure we keep LGBTQIA+ rights at the forefront of this month’s efforts and commemoration. 

From the Marketing and Executive sides, we’re making sure we cut errors down to a minimum in the process of our learning. We respect that we’re learning, however. And we’re building each other up in the process. This is how we’re finding out about our diverse ways of identification, for instance. 

And we’re getting better informed about our needs in multiple languages. We’re even going in-person to shoot our video content ourselves! That’s meaningful insofar our talent is still very much working remote since COVID at this particular location. So we’re putting our own teams at the forefront of what we give our world offices as much as our clients. In the process, we’re connecting with each other. Together, we’re solving how we can all get along in a respectful and inclusive working environment year-round. 

But, please let us know what comes through out of our pride month calendar

We certainly hope you enjoy this month’s inclusion initiative as our carousels come out via Instagram. We’ll be sharing related content on LinkedIn. And our logo has got a new look that goes beyond just that update this month alone. We’ll also be publishing a couple of webinars this month on the importance of the use of pronouns and how to be a good ally at an internal level. And we’ll have a keynote speaker joining us.

The hope is all these internal and external measures will move us further into creating a safe place to work within our company culture. And we’ve certainly grown, already, from coming up with this pride month calendar fillings.

We sincerely hope you can see through the best of our intentions to foster an inclusive culture worldwide. Yet, do let us know how these come through. 

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