Happy spooky season! For many of us, the scariest thing about this Halloween season is the unknown outcome of the upcoming Presidential election. Given how impossible the topic is to avoid, it can feel challenging as a leader to know whether and how to talk about the election with their staff. After all, many of us were taught to avoid political conversations at work.

The right-wing in the US is clearly terrified of the power or DEI work – they’re trying their best to make it illegal. Republican state legislators are proposing, and in many cases passing laws to ban certain types of DEI work in many states. And as mainstream media outlets pay less and less attention to the racial justice movements that gained more airtime after George Floyd’s 2020 murder, organizational leaders feel less public pressure to invest in DEI work. As a result, they’ve deprioritized it, slashing their DEI budgets and eliminating positions for DEI subject matter experts.

In March, I had the honor of giving the keynote speech at a professional development conference in Washington state. The conference organizers wanted to use the keynote as an opportunity for participants – all of whom had track records of acting as champions of the LGBTQ+ community – to learn more about gender and how it impacts their work, specifically their interpersonal interactions with each other and the people they serve.

I had a blast! The participants were super engaged and asked thoughtful questions. I’m sharing three of their common questions and key takeaways here so that you can benefit from them, too:

Did your organization acknowledge Black History Month (February)? Are you planning to say anything for International Women’s Day on March 8, LGBTQ+ Pride Month in June, or Disability Pride Month in July? Should you? If you do, what should you say?

Do a quick Google search, and you’ll find endless “Diversity Calendars'' with lists of monthly observances and holidays…

Read through this example to learn how we partner with Full Umbrella to help clients build customized equitable hiring practices, and highly-qualified, diverse candidate pipelines.

Why wellness perks can’t cure chronic burnout, and what we can do about it other than powering through until our next vacation.

A note before you begin reading:

Although the work I do with organizations is much broader than this, this particular piece is specifically meant for people who:

• Work in secular (not faith-based) organizations, and/or organizations whose work is not directly related to or taking place in Israel/Palestine, and

• Manage or supervise other people, or do (internal or external) communications work for their organization.

If you’re not in both of these categories, of course, you are more than welcome to continue reading! And I’m honored to work with you on navigating how this conflict is impacting your workplace if you’d like that support. But you may not find the guidance that follows here relevant to your context.

This won’t be published until early next week, but I’m writing it on Friday afternoon as my Shabbat challah dough rises on the kitchen counter, and I make plans to attend a local protest this weekend calling for a ceasefire in Israel/Palestine. I’m telling you this for three reasons:

Today, I’m sharing another very common missed opportunity I see in job postings across industries and how to fix it.

The Mistake: You’re not using a cover letter ask effectively.

Today, I’m sharing another very common missed opportunity I see in job postings across industries and how to fix it.

The Mistake: Your Equal Opportunity Employer (EEO) statement reads like a legal disclaimer.

Want to make your team more diverse, and/or make your hiring process more effective and efficient? You're in good company. A lot of factors go into this, and solutions usually need to be customized for your particular context (starting with diagnosing why you’re lacking diversity and what’s not working about your process).

But when I look at job postings, I see some common mistakes across industries. So in the next two blog posts, I’ll be sharing three of those mistakes and instructions for how to fix them.

I’m so glad many of you were able to join my Ask Me Anything session with Pyn last month! I had fun answering the thoughtful questions folks brought to the forum.

Unsurprisingly, several of the questions were about how to make progress around DEI during a period of economic uncertainty and downturn, like many industries are currently experiencing. Since I’ve been hearing similar questions from clients lately, today I’m sharing one of those questions and a summary of my answer.

Attendee Question: “I work in tech, where diversity is difficult at the best of times. Most of the areas that are most vulnerable during a Reduction in Force (like Marketing, Admin, and Sales) tend to also be where you will find a large number of underrepresented folks.

What are some strategies to help bring more diversity into less vulnerable sectors of the business during a downturn?”

My Answer: Let’s first note that this question makes an important (and correct) assumption about DEI work…

This post was supposed to be about my organizational values. 

Given the economic climate, organizations are cutting their budgets for DEI work, so I was going to start a series of newsletters about how you can do your standard HR work with a DEI lens. And maybe I will start that series at some point.

But just as I sat down to write that series yesterday, I learned about the Supreme Court’s decision that will dismantle affirmative action.* 

While this decision isn’t surprising given the current Court, I am enraged nonetheless. And now I can’t find the capacity to think or write about anything else. 

So that’s what I’m going to write about instead.

This decision is going to have devastating effects across all areas of our lives – and our workplaces are not exempt. 

Remember #BlackOutTuesday?

It was June 2020, and a LOT of non-Black people (mostly white people and companies led by white people) were posting black squares on Instagram to “show solidarity” with the Movement for Black Lives.

Do you know what #BlackOutTuesday was supposed to be?

The hashtag and day were conceived of by Black movement organizers to share information about protests and resources with and for other Black people. So these black squares dominating Instagram feeds were quite harmful, hiding the posts that #BlackOutTuesday was conceived for and making it challenging or impossible to access that information. (Here’s a great article with a more detailed explainer.)

Our clients often ask us for help drafting their all-staff emails (or public facing statements or posts) for various holidays or history months. These are really tricky to write. It’s so easy for them to come across as performative; an attempt to seem inclusive while employees feel a painful dissonance in their daily experiences at work.

Here are the questions we talk clients through when helping them decide whether to send an email to their staff or make a public-facing statement about an upcoming holiday and/or history month.

Curious to learn about our hiring method but looking for an example of how it works in reality? We wrote up a case study that details the work we did with our client Storyroot to establish their equitable hiring process.

After starting Storyroot in 2019, the founder, Katie James, was ready to hire in 2020. She wanted to make sure the company’s hiring processes reflected Storyrooty’s values from the very start, to make sure they help drive the company’s DNA as it scales.

What hiring tactics have you used to build a strong organizational culture? Before working with us, a lot of our clients tried to do this by screening candidates for “culture fit.” This usually means they were looking to get a good gut feeling when talking to a candidate. But it turns out our gut feelings are largely impacted by our unconscious biases. (This is a big part of why we wind up with homogeneous teams.)

To be blunt: “We screen for culture it” is usually code for, “We let our gut instincts/in-group biases make hiring decisions for us.” This isn’t an equitable way to evaluate candidates, and is a huge roadblock to hiring strong talent and building diverse teams.

Referring to individual people as “diverse” is harming your DEI efforts – especially in hiring.

Here’s why (and what language you should use instead).

I said this in passing to a client last week. Later, they said it (and the follow-up discussion we had about it) fundamentally changed the way they thought about how to recruit stronger and more diverse talent. So I thought I'd tell you about it here.

For most of my life, the vast majority of my closest friends have been, like me: white, Jewish women. I’m grateful for these relationships, especially since these are two parts of my identity that are marginalized in our society, and building community helps me feel solidarity and the joy of these identities. But as I got older, I started to come to terms with how white my friend group was. For a while, I sat with it, feeling shame I wasn’t sure how to process.