Embracing and showcasing support for Pride on your digital workplace platforms sets a powerful tone of acceptance and unity. This article recommends practical ways to infuse the vibrant spirit of Pride into the heart of your digital workspace.
You probably have an exciting agenda of events and activities planned to make this Pride Month a meaningful one that reinforces belonging, but don’t forget to extend the vibe into your digital workplace. Research shows that many in the LGBTQ+ community still fear bringing their full selves to work, so for that reason, its important to celebrate and promote inclusion and awareness across your entire workplace.
Why it’s important to celebrate Pride in the digital workplace
Thinking beyond in-person activities and events is essential when we consider that not all employees have the opportunity to participate in physical Pride events due to geographical or logistical reasons.
Supporting Pride in your digital workplace ensures that all employees, regardless of location or circumstances, feel included and valued. Planning virtual events and discussions, and ensuring resources can be easily accessed from anywhere with an internet connection will further foster a sense of belonging for all employees.
Even a simple gesture such as theming your internal branding across your digital workplace can serve as a daily reminder that your organization is partipacting in Pride Month – however (and this is a big however), meaningful participation requires more than simply adding the colours of the Pride flag to your company logo and should include a roster of relevant and purposeful activities and events.
How to mark a celebration with an intranet makeover
As the digital home of your organization, you can use your intranet not just to highlight how your events schedule is engaging with commemorative or celebratory events, but to create and distribute themed content and activities. Even more importantly, it’s a perfect way to share the love.
A thematic intranet makeover is one great way to use design and content to embed a theme like DE&I recognition within your organization. This isn’t just true for events like Pride Month, but for so many other important dates such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPI).
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You may also have dates that are especially important to your organization, such as a landmark anniversary since the business was founded. Whatever you choose to celebrate, these are our tips for placing that theme front and center on your employee experience platform (EXP).
Update your intranet theme
A great place to start is by updating the look and feel of your intranet by making use of the theme editor, if your intranet has one. Here you have control over many of the design elements that make your intranet site appealing and have the ability to upload new themed versions of your logo, wallpaper for your sign-in landing page, and even the bookmark and responsive web app icons for your intranet.
We recommend that you have a backup of any logos and wallpapers before making a change to help you revert back in the future.
Themed backgrounds for Zoom or Teams
You can extend your theme to your organization’s online interactions by providing themed and branded video backgrounds for employees to use. If your intranet has an image gallery that your employees can access, you can store these images there so your people can browse, like, and comment on them, and save their favorites to use as they wish.
You can also help people to find and use these themed backgrounds by posting an article on your intranet homepage feed, complete with download links, or attaching to a dedicated page that they can download them from.
If you don’t have internal design resources, your design team is too busy to help out, or you just need inspiration to get started, free-to-use visual content creation sites can be a great help. Canva has all the tools and images you need to create themed backgrounds.
Listen to employee ideas for celebrating Pride
By actively seeking input from LGBTQ+ employees and allies, you can demonstrate a genuine commitment to honoring diverse perspectives and experiences. This ensures that events and initiatives are meaningful and reflective of the community you’re supporting.
Establishing a Pride Month committee and use Idea Management technology to gather thoughts and suggestions from across your organization. This will ensure that all voices are heard, regardless of hierarchy or location, and that Pride Month initiatives are truly representative of the diverse perspectives within the workforce.
Community Book Corner or Club
Why not celebrate your theme on your intranet by sharing and asking for some relevant reading recommendations? You can generate engagement by asking employees to share their favourite titles and authors on an open intranet forum which could be used all year round, or by creating a dedicated intranet page with a call to action for people to share their contributions in the comments section. Both options will surely get your employees engaging and sharing with one another.
Boost LGBTQ+ voices
While you may have put a lot of effort into organizing Pride Month celebrations, it’s important to give employees a space – and a voice – to choose how they celebrate. And that may not always be through the activities that you have planned.
Your intranet should be a space where anyone feels encouraged to express themselves in their own way, and providing everybody with access to social intranet features can empower employees to create and share their own posts, receive likes and comments, and interact with posts from their peers.
Do some content planning
The power of content planning in advance cannot be overstated. A quick brainstorm can often generate a few ideas for articles that you can create, publish, and share through your intranet. If your organization has an active community connected to your theme, such as an active LGBTQ+ community, asking for advice, or better yet, inviting people from that community to contribute will not only give them a platform to amplify their voice, it will also help to ensure your content is both meaningful and authentic.
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Another way to encourage an all-company conversation is by sharing an article with a call to action to share words of encouragement or support for their peers using the comments of the article page. Also consider leveraging user-generated content by creating a themed photo gallery for staff members to share how they are marking the occasion.
Some quick example ideas for an LGBTQ+ History Month intranet makeover include:
- Spotlight local LGBTQ+ partners or charities that support the communities external to your organization. Connecting staff to community charities and partners will allow them to find creative ways to get involved.
- Share stories of diversity and inclusivity in your workplace.
- Present opportunities for training and learning about allyship and support for relevant communities. There are a lot of great resources out there that will bring belonging, inclusion, and diversity to your workplace.
Build a themed community space
We have seen our customers build amazing online communities through their intranets and it is inspiring to see many create safe spaces for LGBTQ+ communities and allies in this way. A workplace community on your intranet is perfect for starting conversations, offering specialized support and resources, and even gaining valuable insights that help you make better organizational changes to support a more diverse workforce.
Intranet communities are easy to create, but they do require a little bit of love to keep them updated and useful. We recommend that you find a few willing colleagues to stand up and be caretakers of the community to ensure questions are answered and staff using it feel validated.
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If you already have a community available for employees to use, the period that you use to celebrate your chosen theme is a great time to advertise and grow that community. Ensure that articles are pointing staff to the community and make use of navigation or a dedicated widget on your homepage to drive traffic there too.
Host a virtual or hybrid event
Virtual or hybrid events can bring people together and help to ensure that those who work remotely also feel included too. The sky is the limit here when it comes to bringing colleagues together in meetings convened for a specific purpose, but if your organization also runs regular town halls or all hands meetings, it could be a great opportunity to apply a theme to those as well.
Reflecting your organization’s support for Pride on your digital workplace platforms is not only a powerful statement of inclusivity but also a crucial step in fostering a welcoming and diverse environment. By showcasing your commitment through visible support, thoughtful content, and active engagement, you can create a culture where all employees feel valued and respected. But remember, these efforts must go beyond tokenistic gestures and should be part of a fully rounded strategy for celebrating Pride with meaning.
