Beyond the Rainbow: How Our Social Strategy is Impacting Our Corporate Culture

At the beginning of Pride Month, rainbows 🌈 started showing up all over social media. And we’ll be honest, we asked ourselves whether we should be doing that too. LBGTQ rights are very close to home for us.

Regardless of whether any of the initials apply to us personally or to our friends or loved ones, we all should and can be good allies.

But what does that look like?

It’s incredibly easy to put up a post that says Happy Whatever Month. Or to change your profile picture to something that demonstrates your support for a cause. But if we don’t stop and think about the real meaning, our actions can be worse than meaningless. They can actually be harmful.

It’s not enough to say “we love women” for international women’s day. It’s not enough to stop shaving in November. It’s not enough to slap a rainbow on it and call it pride.

Because the day ends or the month goes by, the status quo continues.

Take a look at your employment policies, at your culture, at your compensation practices. Is your workplace inclusive? Do you respect individual boundaries? Do you actively encourage and promote voluntarism? Do you foster professional partnerships that avoid exclusion and discrimination?

It’s one thing to say, well of course we don’t discriminate. Of course we’re not biased. Of course we’re inclusive. At 5HD, we’re a small office of people that get along really well. Most of the time.

But of course that’s the easy answer.

And we aren’t about accepting easy answers.

This month we’re taking the time for education and learning what Pride Month is really all about. We’re taking the time to improve our office culture and make it more of what we hope it is already. We’re taking the time to find ways that we can make a difference over time, whether through donating our time, our money, or both.

We’ll probably end up with a bunch of moments that are actually worthy of being shared socially.

But we want to be clear, that’s not why we’re doing it.

The bandwagon may have gotten us moving, but we’re not going to climb on board unless we know why we’re doing it and until we can put our actions where our 🌈’s are.

So for now, we decided to start at the beginning. Forgive us if we’re a little late to the party. We want to be sure that we’re not just crashing it.