Simple Things I Do To Help More People Feel Welcome At Work

Over the last few years, I consciously started doing some simple things publicly at work (internally and externally with partners) to help more people feel welcome.

Then I waited for them to start catching on, only explaining if asked or indirectly via my social media posts.

In my experience it takes a while but things are changing.

At first, each change takes a bit of practice, and steeling myself for the inevitable sealions.

Part of that practice is also practicing keeping a straight face, behaving like what I am doing is completely normal and nothing out of the ordinary, no matter what reaction I see in front.

I think the first one I worked on was cutting "guys" out of my vocabulary.

Especially each time a meeting starts or ends, the "hi"s and the "thank you"s go to "everyone" and "all".

I still sometimes slip up, but practice makes perfect.

This is one I've seen more and more people taking up, although there are some increasingly isolated and obvious standouts.

Amazingly I've even started to see some people feeling safe enough to correct people and stand their ground against the "but guys includes everyone" absurdists.

No more "man days", "man weeks", and "man months".

"Person weeks" etc is now just the normal way people say it.

I have indirect evidence that at some point this one got sponsored independently by some senior people. Good!

And there's another one - "people".

I just talk about people. It's one word. It's simple. It's clear. It includes everyone.

This is another one that is still in transition but again I've seen significant change for this too - much fewer people are still say "men ... and women" for example.

How about "He", "...or she"?

This one is harder to change, especially for non-native speakers. Already getting to the "... or she" reflex is progress. Still I am starting to see some people moving to "they" also.

Baby steps, everyone is learning.

I added my pronouns to my work email signature.

So far I've seen this practice spreading to just a handful of people, but I know that more people have noticed and have thought about it, even if they're not ready yet.

I added my pronouns to LinkedIn.

Quite quickly a few others did too.

And then LinkedIn made it a feature, and now lots of people have it. Still many don't, but there's been huge change on this one.

I added this to my work email signature: "Note: my working day may not be your working day - please don’t feel obliged to reply to this email outside of your normal working hours."

So far, I've had quite a few people privately saying it's great, but for now I've not seen anyone copying it.

People join meetings late, have interuptions, deliveries, children, spouses, cats, dogs, and more: "sorry".

It costs nothing to say "It's normal, no problem", "we like seeing them", "it's nice, no need to apologize", etc, and mean it.

This one has also gone widely, but not yet universal, and the apologies continue for now.

I've blocked off lunch time every day in my public work calendar. It's my choice whether I agree to meetings then.

Similarly for late & early meetings - "can this happen during working hours please?".

This a work in progress, but I have seen quite a few people becoming publicly more considerate of people's working hours.

Meetings with people in different timezones - make it standard practice to check all people are within their working hours.

Systematically schedule 2 sessions or alternate Americas friendly vs. APAC friendly times and record it for big global sessions.

Work in progress too, including for myself, but I'm seeing many are starting to follow this practice.

Tell people "you're on holiday, you don't need to answer", "it's late for you, should you still be working?".

Push back on people praising all-nighters - "no all-nighters please, we don't want burnout".

Push back on people apologizing for being away when they take their holidays - make it clear that they can take their break in peace, and follow through. Most things are just not that urgent. And if your pre-holiday communications are good, most urgent things can be handled as a degraded service by other people.

Again, this is slowly becoming more normal with some unfortunately very obvious exceptions.

The hardest one yet: "Sure, I'm Fennel Aurora, pronouns he him, I'm the Product Management Community Lead".

3 easy words.

Deliberately not reacting to the tension and continuing is harder.

For this one I'm still waiting to hear it elsewhere, but I'm sure we'll get there.

Asking and practicing the correct pronunciation of people's names. Publicly correcting myself, and not making a big deal about it - me getting someone's name wrong is a me problem.

This is also improving a bit, again there are some who struggle more with this, or don't seem to notice. But I clearly hear less and less "jokes" about how difficult or strange someone's name is.

None of these are my idea - I've copied/adapted every single one from things I've learnt here and elsewhere.

I'm still learning. I'm still making mistakes.

None of these fix the systemic problems that all our companies, and our wider societies, still have, but I'm sure they help.

None of these changes only come from me.

Others are doing the same and more.

Others are learning new better norms of politeness and consideration for others too.

Neither I nor anyone else needs a cookie for doing any of this - taking care for the people around us, listening, learning, and improving is just the basics of trying to be a human.

This list is also far from exhaustive, both for things I'm attempting and things I could try later.

I'm simply using my position to deliberately act as a very visible example to give people with less situational power permission & courage to do the same.

And also to deliberately act as a very visible example to maybe jog the consciences of people who have power to do much more.

"May we all consider the many ways that each of us can make every space we enter less hostile for more people." - Koritha Mitchell