Chasing Rainbows - Why Creating a Noisy Culture of Allyship Is Critical for Effective Community Monitoring

Paul Phillips, Strategy Director & Board Member at OMD UK and Co-Chair of OMG UK’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Group, discusses statistics revealing the thoughts and feelings of LGBTQ+ people in the workplace, and what businesses must do to tackle any negative rhetoric surrounding them. Tackling topics like anxiety and self-identification, this research indicates that authentic allyship is the way forward to achieving workplace equality.

The Global DEI Census by the World Federation of Advertisers revealed that 35% of LGBTQ+ marketers report feeling ‘constantly anxious’ in their jobs. This will be having a hugely negative impact on their performance and creating genuine flight risks – unhelpful in this burgeoning climate of quiet quitting. Clearly, to assuage these anxieties, businesses need to make our LGBTQ+ colleagues feel comfortable in bringing their whole selves to work, allowing them to be seen and heard, and empowering them to define and shape the initiatives that will provide the critical support they need.

However, sensitive and accurate monitoring of the size and profile of our LGBTQ+ communities is not without its challenges.

The latest report from The Deloitte University Leadership Center for Inclusion reveals that 61% of all employees ‘cover’ their identities in some way – “not necessarily hiding something, but downplaying it for fear of drawing unwanted attention or making others uncomfortable”. Compounding this reluctance to openly badge oneself is the much younger age profile of our category: the IPA Agency Census in 2020 gave the average employee age in a UK media agency as 32 (compared to 36.4 in creative and other non-media agencies). The higher volume of assistants and execs in our businesses will make the median age even younger. And we know from abundant research, including this Time magazine article, that younger cohorts simply refuse to be defined, badged, siloed in a binary way, preferring to embrace their gender and sexual fluidity. They may simply refuse to self-identify.

If we are to design for more accurate, and more sensitive, monitoring of our LGBTQ+ employee size and profile, we must first create an environment of noisy acceptance and support. We must move, in our recruitment and appraisal of people, from a ‘Culture Fit’ mentality – in which we expect prospects and colleagues to align with our company values – to creating a culture based predominantly on allyship, asking people what wonderful difference they can add. The dividends for such a culture shift aren’t just warm and fluffy feels; McKinsey’s ‘Diversity Wins’ report shows empirically that a business that is truly and openly nationally-representative are 25% more likely to outperform the competition. There is gold in those hills.

At OMG UK the first stage of this culture-shift is underway. In partnership with We Are Utopia we have developed a DEI Playbook, with accompanying 90-minute workshop, designed with 3 key objectives: to build understanding of the core concepts of inclusion and OMG’s inclusion strategy; to identify immediate ways to behave more inclusively (e.g., how best to serve as an active bystander, by intervening sensitively when witnessing even innocent acts of micro-aggression) and the resources you can access to support to this end; and to stimulate curiosity of diverse lived experiences (because the first steps to becoming an ally is to educate oneself, to put yourself into another’s shoes and garner authentic understanding of the challenges they face).

Every OMG UK employee is required to participate in the workshop, to ensure that there is universal understanding of the challenges faced by marginalized groups and the behaviour changes required to make them feel comfortable in the working environment.

Once all the workshops have been undertaken, we will then move to encourage open declarations of allyship that we can externalize, to reflect a welcoming working community. One of the options we’re considering is a formal allyship pledge program, in which colleagues post commitment in their social channels to educate themselves about the challenges faced by a specific marginalized group and sharing the resources with their network to encourage the same. (Such a program will not just serve the LGBTQ+ community – inclusivity should never be exclusive). We could look to schedule a day/week when all pledges are posted to create a thunderclap of network allyship noise, templated for consistency, and those pledges could be housed on an internal portal so that colleagues can access the resources and see the strength of allyship within the network at any given time.

Only then will we feel comfortable asking our colleagues to self-identify on our HR portal, given the assurance that they have an army of allies on their side. When encouraging our people to self-identify we will make clear that it’s not a simple badging exercise. It’s being done with a view to understanding their discrete challenges and needs, empowering them to step up and help shape initiatives to service those needs, and to keep us right in our engagement of their communities on our clients’ behalf.

Everyone wins.

Success should be easy to discern: participation in an Allyship Pledge Program and the resulting social noise and industry coverage engendered by that initiative will be a clear measure. In the longer-term our employee surveys should track uplifts in sentiment that ‘I’m working for a company that reflects my values’ and intent to stay and advocate. We will also track that we’re attracting and retaining an unfair share of top diverse talent, particularly from the LGBTQ+ community.

Our priority, of course, is to service our people – to send a clear message to LGBTQ+ prospects, and allies, that we’re a business that serves and represents them.

And, given that 86% of UK Gen Z are now saying that they will only work for a company that represents their values, that’s critical for future-proofing our talent pipeline.