# Pride Month in the workplace - **Episode:** [103](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/103.md) (2024-06-04) - **Type:** news-roundup - **Tags:** pride-month, workplace, diversity - **Time:** 1:48–7:29 (start 108s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/103?t=108](https://truthliesandwork.com/103?t=108) --- [1:48] Al Elliott: Okay, Lee, so what have you seen this week? [1:51] Leanne Elliott: It is Pride Month. Happy Pride to all of our LGBTQ+ listeners, friends, family, colleagues. Happy, happy Pride. Pride Month, it's such an important month. It's such a joyous month. It's such a colorful month, and it celebrates everything to do with self-identity and inclusivity and equality and love. Love is love, and it brings me so much joy. Of course, it is going to raise some awareness and education around the discrimination that still exists in society and quite rightly influence key policy changes both in government and within organizations. Um, and I'm just really enjoying at the moment my newsfeed brimming with so many wonderful colorful articles and resources. Um, that it's, it's just bringing me a lot of joy at the moment. Even was it Saturday Kitchen last weekend? [2:39] Al Elliott: Yeah, Saturday Kitchen in the UK. I'm sure you have something in America, Canada, Australia. Bangalore, you have the similar kind of thing. But yeah, it was, it was a, it was a big celebration. You know what's quite funny though is that in my Twitter feed, I haven't seen one single post about it [2:54] Leanne Elliott: Twitter quite straight, or maybe just people you follow [2:58] Al Elliott: Well, there's potentially that, but I think it's just, it does just remind us that this is so important [3:03] Leanne Elliott: It really is important. So I mean, one article that, that I want to draw your attention to today was actually from a website called GBT Speaker. They specialize in, um, finding like keynote speakers from the community, um, and they talked about 5 different ways that you can celebrate Pride in your organization. If your question is, why would I want to? Um, perhaps you're new here. Um, I'll put some of the episodes in, in the links. We are huge allies of the LGBTQ+ community. We believe in inclusion. We believe in celebrating all— everything that it means to be human. And it is just simply the decent human thing to do to create organizations in which everyone feels sense of belonging and in which everyone can thrive. If you want to be commercial about it, it's also really good for business. Again, I will leave some links in the show notes because that's not why we're here today. I'm assuming that you do want to celebrate Pride because you want to show that your business is worthy of investment from employees and customers. So here are 5 ways. Al, would you like me to list them for you? [4:04] Al Elliott: Yes, please [4:04] Leanne Elliott: So the first one they suggest is to organize a charity fundraiser, and it's just one of the best ways support the Pride initiative, um, and actually put your money where your mouth is and take some action. I think a lot of things what we're going to see over the next few weeks are brands changing their social media icons to include the rainbow flags, and that is a very positive public stance. But also, I think we need some action in there with some genuine impact. So organizing a charity fundraiser, or even, I know, taking a percentage of your profits in Pride Month and putting them towards one of these charities, organizations, it could be a really great way, um, to, to support them. Alternatively, if you don't have the financial means, you might have the time. Think about volunteering opportunities, raising awareness. We need to do an episode on volunteering because it is increasingly becoming a very interesting topic of research and one that is showing incredible benefits both for organizations and individual well-being. Um, so there you go, that's, that's the first one. Second, book a speaker. Hiring, you know, an external speaker to discuss their experiences as a member of the community, um, to, to educate your staff on some of the challenges that the community faces can be really positive. There are some phenomenal speakers out there. Of course, I'm going to recommend Danielle and Sophie Wood at Belonging Base. They were on the podcast quite recently talking about how, um, oh, about their own transgender love story and how they're now helping organizations create awesome workplace cultures where people belong. They are launching Belonging Bite-Sized tomorrow, the 5th of June, which is a series, a free series A video is going to be sharing lots of advice and experiences about creating these cultures that foster belonging, so do check that out. Tip number 3, similar theme, a workshop could be something nice to include in your June calendar. So this could be some training sessions, it could be how to improve inclusive language within your organisation. There's a whole, whole load of things that, that we can do, and again, I would recommend checking out Belonging Base for a starting point for those. And I guess on that same theme, something really simple you can do, and the 4th tip from this article, is to evaluate your equality, diversity policies within your organisation. Do they need updating? Are you representing the various races, genders, and sexualities that exist today? What are you doing to reduce bias within your organisation? We talked quite a lot about that over the last couple of episodes, didn't we, with our episode 100? [6:40] Al Elliott: Yes [6:41] Leanne Elliott: And particularly Katherine Garrard. So that is another resource worth checking out. And finally, something really simple that I think we can all do. What if you just decorate your office a bit? You know, hang a rainbow flag, some banners. It is celebrating Pride, but also shows members of your team, members of your organisation, that you are an ally, that you stand for equality. And such, you know, visual representation can actually make a really, a really big difference, particularly if it's something you've never celebrated before. Something really simple, but showing that you are supporting the cause and supporting the celebration and the education that June is dedicated to. So there you go. That's what I thought I'd, I'd bring up, our little Pride Month awareness. I'm sure we'll talk about that a bit more as June goes on. But tell me, what have you seen this week?