Six Ways Your Organization Can Show Their Pride Every Day

Synechron's Mihir Shah, Managing Director – Head of Europe, Middle East & APAC, and Christin Spigai, Chief Human Resources Officer - offer their tips on how to support the LGBTQ+ community every day.

For organizations and businesses who wish to truly show their genuine support for, and inclusion of, members of the LGBTQ+ community all year long, there are several steps they can take to demonstrate their allyship. Programs can include the following:

1. Focus on Education – Education of your employees, leaders, managers and executives of a company can go a long way toward helping everyone understand what the LGBTQ+ community represents, and what are simply falsehoods. Encourage your employees to help develop an engaging education program, such as one that unravels the elements of Unconscious Bias – what it is, what biases are, and how they can be finally shed. Another training we instituted last year centered on LGBTQ+ 101 & Allyship at the workplace.
2. Embrace Inclusive Language – Recognizing and understanding that individuals may have pronoun preferences they wish to use, or may not desire to be placed into a category of ‘ladies’ or ‘gentlemen’, is a start. This carries over to personal greetings as well as digital communications such as your company’s email. Business leaders can refrain from generalizing and can, instead, use more inclusive language when referring to employees. Because individuality is an important component of inclusion and acceptance of all, maintaining a culture of ‘safety’ where individuals can be free to identify as they wish is a winning corporate strategy.
3. Practice Allyship – As a business or organization, just saying that your firm supports and encourages all members of the LGBTQ+ community and actually practicing allyship can be very different. Does your business actively partner with a carefully vetted selection of worthy LGBTQ+ organizations, such as myGwork, to further help their members’ goals and initiatives? Do you and your employees offer and encourage participation in inclusionary events, webinars, programs and other supportive initiatives? Employees can then be free to choose to take part or not, without ridicule or negative comments.
4. Embrace new and different experiences – As an organization, encourage your team members at all levels to be open to immersing themselves in different and varied cultures, and styles, including events, celebrations, native food recipe exchanges, music concerts and more. By experiencing the worldly variances that exist around us, we each get a taste of, and can better develop an appreciation for, cultural differences across the world. If you listen carefully, you can often hear minds opening.
5. Become both a mentor, and a mentee – As an organization, be open to establishing a mentor/mentee program – for example, pairing up a junior associate with a mentor who has a higher level, more established/significant and possibly different role at your company. Deeper experience often emanates from maturity, which breeds wisdom that can then be shared. Encourage mentees to seek guidance on how to best handle issues and situations – perhaps personal as well as professional -- that are important to them. This can precipitate one-on-one discussions relevant to understanding of cultural, lifestyle, and societal differences that impact our workplace as well as our broader universe. On the flip side, as an individual be open to becoming a mentor to others to help them understand and learn empathy and tolerance for persons who may be ‘different’ from society’s accepted norms but undoubtedly deserve equal respect and the opportunity to be themselves.  
6. Hold yourself and others accountable for actions and words – If you see something, say something. Be that individual who quietly takes aside a team member if you hear them disparage a group of persons or an individual for being their genuine selves. Respectfully explain why their approach is not acceptable at your company, and how they can shift their mindset toward respect for all. Tact is an important element to embrace and teach. Remember to similarly practice what you preach. If you misspeak, admit your error, apologize and be more enlightened going forward.

Organizations can and should conduct their own introspection and self-analysis, and determine what steps to take, programs to deploy and future-looking actions to make to ensure their workplace takes PRIDE in their workers 365 days a year.