Tag Archive for: inclusion

How to Build an IDEAL Campaign Workplace – So You Can Win with Integrity

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We are just two weeks out from Election Day, and campaigns everywhere are in the final stages of getting out the vote.  It’s an intense time for campaign managers and their staff, who are working almost around the clock to bring their candidate successfully across the finish line.

How these last couple weeks play out could depend a lot on campaign equity, and how much a campaign values and supports the people they hired months ago to carry them to victory. On those campaigns where leadership has focused from the start on building a strong and inclusive culture — and aligning their workplace practices with the values they are fighting for on the trail — that final push can be a time of solidarity and dedication. But where leaders have enabled or ignored a toxic work culture, or simply neglected to establish the basic operational practices necessary to a functioning workplace, the strain of going all out to win can be a breaking point.

This is what we have learned in our work this cycle advising political campaigns and advocacy organizations: a commitment to campaign equity is a critical component of a winning strategy. Hiring and empowering a diverse staff can generate more innovative tactics and better advice on reaching all voters. Ensuring equity in your pay and practices can simplify your operation and increase staff dedication. An inclusive culture sustains the people power you will need to carry you through the constant challenges of a campaign environment.

But even more importantly, these approaches can help you win with integrity. If you are a progressive candidate, or a leader on a progressive campaign, it is not enough to fight for good policies and to champion racial and gender justice in public. You also need to make sure your own house is in order, and that you have the policies and practices that ensure the safety of your staff and volunteers and promote equity and inclusion in all your in-person and remote workspaces.

We put all of these ideas together in a #CampaignEquity Handbook. This resource for campaign professionals includes strategy checklists, sample policies and plenty of links to the research and experience that backs them up as best practices. It includes advice on building a harassment-free workplace, staffed by great hires and sustained by fair pay and a safe and inclusive culture.

Working IDEAL Campaign Equity Toolkit checklist excerpt

Checklist excerpt from the #CampaignEquity toolkit. Click on image to learn more.

When campaign leadership comes together after Election Day to understand what worked and what didn’t – the factors that carried them to victory and should inform their transition plans – we hope this can inform those conversations.  And as the next cycle begins, we believe this will be an essential resource.

Campaigns are workplaces too. Let’s put an end to the myth that overwork and toxic work environments just go with the territory and that diversity, equity and inclusion are just the extras you hope to get to at some point. Investing in #CampaignEquity can increase your chances of winning, and of doing it based on the values that brought you to this work in the first place.

DOWNLOAD THE TOOLKIT (PDF)


Working IDEAL provides trusted and innovative advice on inclusive workplaces, diverse talent, and fair pay. Contact us to learn more about the services we offer.

Authors: Pam Coukos and Peach Soltis

How Your Company Can Take Action to Close the Wage Gap

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In order to advance pay equity, it’s important to adopt an “equity first” mindset. Make equity a top priority when you make decisions, take actions, design programs and measure results. Gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, or any aspect of your identity should not determine your outcomes in the workplace – including pay. 

Our co-founder and CEO, Pam Coukos, shares her insights about how to close the wage gap:

Here are three ways to put equity first:

  • Remove barriers: Do your due diligence. Go looking for the places where equity gets out of balance and bias can operate. Do you value new untried talent over the committed and valuable people who have been delivering the work? Do you rely on objective, measurable and unbiased factors to set pay? 
  • Change norms: Justifying or excusing a difference in pay isn’t good enough. Start with the principle that you pay the same for the same kind of work, the same kind of experience, the same level of responsibility. Hold everyone accountable for making fair, consistent and equitable decisions.
  • Embrace transparency: Secrecy can’t protect you in a world where pay transparency is a legal right and a cultural reality for large parts of your workforce. Look at your data and pay practices with the assumption that are or will be public – and if they don’t measure up, take action. Share your progress to build trust in your workplace and in the marketplace.

Prioritizing pay equity is the right thing to do. It’s the law. Also, it can make your pay program better, cheaper and more efficient. It can drive innovation and provide a competitive advantage when hiring, retaining and supporting a truly diverse workforce.

Working IDEAL provides trusted and innovative advice on inclusive workplaces, diverse talent, and fair pay. Contact us to learn more about the services we offer.

10 Ways to Foster an Inclusive Workplace Culture

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Many employers understand the importance of assessing their workplace culture and the need to promote inclusion. An inclusive workplace culture offers benefits to both employers and employees by fostering engagement, productivity, retention, and innovation. In an inclusive workplace, all employees are treated with respect and have an opportunity to contribute. An inclusive workplace accepts and values individual differences in race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, and disability. 

By contrast, exclusion in the workplace leaves workers feeling marginalized and devalued. Disrespectful behavior that goes unchecked can lead to a toxic environment, particularly when workers do not have sufficient options to report, address, and resolve workplace problems. This dysfunction in the workplace may cause talented employees to leave the organization. Exclusion can take many forms. Some employers fail to convey a commitment to organizational values. Employers may fail to set clear expectations about appropriate conduct. Gaps in policies, benefits, technology, and training can exacerbate internal problems. Employers may be unaware of problems with the workplace culture because they fail to seek feedback. 

To avoid these problems, employers can take concrete steps to promote inclusivity in meaningful ways. 

  1. Lead from the top. Leaders must visibly model respectful behavior and practice organizational values. Managers should promote inclusion at all levels and across all departments.
  2. Put clear expectations in writing. Employers can establish a code of conduct and recommit to organizational values. The strategic plan should promote inclusion, and the employer should periodically evaluate progress toward meeting stated goals. Job descriptions and performance evaluations can address responsibilities to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. 
  3. Seek input and value contributions from diverse talent. The organization must go beyond simply ensuring that it employs a diverse workforce. Everyone should have a seat at the table. Seeking out diverse perspectives helps to amplify marginalized voices. Working groups and teams should include a diverse cross-section of the workforce. 
  4. Assess the culture regularly, accept critical feedback, and take action to address concerns. Anonymous surveys, focus groups, and informal discussions can help to identify concerns about the workplace climate and potential solutions. Employers should ensure that a diverse cross-section of the workforce is involved in identifying problems and implementing responses. Inclusion should be a regular focus of discussion.
  5. Ensure that employees have accessible options to report, address, and resolve workplace problems. Managers may not be aware of problems that go unreported. Employees must have trusted and effective channels to report concerns.
  6. Ensure accountability. Employers must act quickly to address problems at all levels within the workplace.
  7. Update policies to use inclusive language and make the workplace more welcoming. For example, employers should review benefits policies to ensure equity for LGBTQ+ employees and offer opportunities for employees to provide the pronouns they use. 
  8. Build a culture of accessibility for applicants and employees with disabilities. Employees with disabilities should have access to any needed technology or other accommodations, but don’t wait to be asked. Make accessibility a regular part of planning for meetings, events and activities, and standard workplace practices.  
  9. Foster inclusivity in informal situations. Workers may feel excluded when it comes to social situations at the lunch table, at happy hours, or even in casual conversations. Employers can seek to disrupt office cliques through team building opportunities.
  10. Offer training that provides tools and skills to address problematic behavior. Employers should move away from compliance-focused training to ongoing and regular education that equips workers with the knowledge and skills to take action. For example, bystander intervention training can equip workers with methods to act as an ally in support of a colleague who faces harassment or bullying.

By taking concrete steps to promote an inclusive workplace culture, employers can build a stronger workforce.

Working IDEAL provides trusted and innovative advice on inclusive workplaces, diverse talent, and fair pay. Contact us to learn more about the services we offer.

Author: Sarah Crawford

Does the law protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination? It should be an easy answer.

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By Jenny Yang

Originally published in The Washington Post

Jenny Yang, Strategic Partner at Working IDEAL, was commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 2013 to 2018 and is a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute.

The Supreme Court decided Monday to hear a trio of cases addressing a long-disputed and critically important question: whether discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This issue has profound implications for our understanding of the meaning of equality. Although this question has fractured the United States for decades, the answer should be easy.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bans employment discrimination “because of [an] individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Sexual orientation and transgender status are not listed as specific protected categories. But no such language is required. The beauty of our nation’s civil rights laws is that they protect everyone — including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people — who faces discrimination based on sex.

Under Supreme Court precedent, the question should be whether an employer relied on sex-based considerations or took gender into account when taking the challenged employment action. In 1989, the Supreme Court established in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins that discriminating against an employee for not conforming to gender stereotypes — in this case, not walking, talking or dressing “more femininely” — is sex discrimination. The court concluded that Title VII means “that gender must be irrelevant to employment decisions.”

In 1998, a unanimous Supreme Court in Oncale v. Sundowner resolved a dispute among the lower courts, finding that Title VII prohibits the “entire spectrum” of sex-based discrimination — even a man harassed by other men. Although Congress may not have contemplated this situation when it passed Title VII, Justice Antonin Scalia, in writing for the majority, called for “common sense” in evaluating claims in “social context,” recognizing that “statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils.”

In 2015, while I served as chair and commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, we deliberated carefully before concluding in Baldwin v. Department of Transportation that discrimination based on sexual orientation is discrimination because of sex. The commission determined that this reading of Title VII is the most faithful and common-sense interpretation of the plain words of the law and Supreme Court precedent. In 2012, the commission in Macy v. Department of Justicereached a similarly straightforward conclusion that discrimination against transgender people is a form of sex discrimination.

In Baldwin, the commission explained that the concept of sexual orientation is inseparable from and cannot be explained without reference to sex. Indeed, an employer that fires a woman because she has a female spouse has taken gender into account where the employer would not have fired a man for that reason. In addition, courts have long recognized that employers cannot discriminate against employees for associating with someone based on race, and these principles apply equally to same-sex relationships.

To be sure, when the commission decided the Baldwin case, we were well-aware of the contrary precedent on this issue. Although earlier case law essentially carved out an exclusion in Title VII for discrimination based on sexual orientation even if related to sex, this reading finds no support in the statute. Indeed, many of the cases holding that Title VII does not cover sexual orientation either predate the Price Waterhouse and Oncale decisions or reflexively adopted earlier outdated reasoning.

Notably, this precedent developed largely in the 1970s and 1980s when same-sex relationships were not just a cultural taboo, but also a crime in many states. These cultural biases prevented a straightforward application of the sex discrimination language of Title VII. Today, we have an opportunity to ensure our understanding of equality is not the product of historic biases.

I am often reminded of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s words, writing for the majority in recognizing marriage equality, that the “nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times.” Throughout history, we have seen that, as our nation evolves, we continue to define what it means to be equal.

Most courts once ruled that sexual harassment in the workplace was a personal matter or an inevitable result of having women in the workforce and not a form of sex discrimination. Often it takes a cultural shift to change our understanding of long-standing practices that may have been widespread and tolerated but are unjust and illegal.

Today, courts are increasingly recognizing that no statutory basis exists for excluding LGBTQ individuals from the rights provided to us all. The ability of millions of Americans to support their families and live with dignity should not need to wait for further congressional action. Congress has already spoken by prohibiting discrimination based on “sex.” And that is why this should not be a hard decision.