Taking Care of Your Staff (part 1)

Discover how you can appoint someone as the point-person for all things LGBTQ+ to be a trusted resource for your staff, ensure inclusion compliance, and have a DEI initiative to brag about (it looks really good). 

Plus, learn about the importance of offering LGBTQ+ training for all staff as a foundational part of your company’s inclusion efforts.    

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Show Notes:

Welcome to part six of the Be Proud series, 10 essentials for LGBTQ+ inclusion in the workplace. Today, I'm gonna be talking about one of my favorite topics, which is looking out for your staff. People that work for you are the backbone of your company, so it is super important to make sure that they are taken care of. From a psychological perspective,

if people feel valued by who they work for, that contributes to motivation and morale. If you aren't making efforts to provide your staff with things that support them, being safe and supported by your company, they are less likely to be invested in the work they are doing for you, and they are less likely to stay there.

Not feeling appreciated leads to things like burnout, underperforming, talking shit about the company to colleagues and people outside of the company, and ultimately leaving a job. Let's talk about the essential things you need at your company to make sure you are taking care of the people that work for you.

This one is a three parter, so I'm just gonna go ahead and give you the spoiler on what those three are. One. You have to have a designated stat position that is responsible for overseeing the LGBTQ+ inclusion compliance at your organization. You also have to have staff training, annual LGBTQ+ inclusion training for all staff.

And the third component is having an ERG or an employee resource group for the Queer identified and allied staff at your organization. So for today, I'm gonna be talking about the first two. I'm gonna be talking about the staff position and the staff training. And on the next episode, I will get into the employee resource group.

First off, let's start with staff training. So your staff training should be for new hires to your organization. And this should also be an annual training for all staff. It's a good idea to start with a sort of like a 1 0 1 type training or slash an introductory training, just to give people foundational information about like, who is the community and what does the terminology mean?

And, you know, things like that. And then from there, if you want to, it's a good idea to also have additional training that is specific to the type of work that your company does. For example, mental health, schools, tech, entrepreneurship, you know, whatever those things are. It's a nice idea to have elevated training specific to the type of work that you do and the type of work that your staff does for the company.

You can also ask your staff what they want to learn more about. That's like one of those staple questions on the feedback forms. It's like, and what other topics do you want this company to train you on? So for that, let it be specific. What other LGBTQ+ related topics would you like to learn more about?

I have been doing trainings for professionals on how to support the Queer community for over a decade now. And I love it. And during the pandemic, I pivoted my training to being virtual offerings because, shocker, that's all that was available and people started asking me for it. And so then, you know, through doing that, I just sort of realized, oh, wow, this is a really cool way to be able to get this information to a lot more people.

I don't need to do them live and in person, they can still get all the information. And we all are pros at doing this now. Zoom calls and webinars and things like that. So I have pivoted my training and I now offer them as self-guided webinars, as well as live video training. Now let's get into the second of these three ways to support your staff, which is having a dedicated staff position to oversee the Queer inclusion at your organization.

This can be someone within the company, someone who already works there depending on the company size and the nature of the work that you do it very well might be its own position. It might be sort of supplemental to somebody else's full-time position that they do within the company. I know here in Charleston, we recently had one of the big healthcare organizations, which is M U S C create a position here as someone who is now the director of LGBTQ+ health.

That's pretty amazing. That's pretty next level. When I saw that announcement, I was like, yes, thank you. Like that is so needed because there are so many aspects of healthcare specific to the Queer community that don't get recognized. So how amazing that not only is this organization recognizing it, they created a full-time director position for it, not just a DEI director position.

That's awesome too, when companies are doing that, but to specifically then go another step and have a director of LGBTQ+. Plus health is pretty baller and bonus a friend and colleague of mine that I highly respect is the person that got this position. So I know they are doing amazing work and probably down the road.

I will have them on here to talk about. So designating this Queer inclusion as its own job title. This is how I came to become this person at a company that I used to work for. I started there as their LGBTQ+ therapist while I was there. This company went through an outside certification process to be stamped.

Boom. We are LGBTQ+ inclusive. . And so I got to be the point person for the company and doing all of those things. They needed to get that certification, which is where I got the idea. Hey, I can do this on my own. And now here I am doing it. But anyway, so going back to it. So while I was there, this went from a part-time position for me to a full-time position because I had a lot more responsibilities being put onto me.

And so I advocated for more money. I was like, this is awesome. I'm happy to do it. I love being a part of this and y'all are asking me for a lot more stuff than you were when you hired me. So we need to renegotiate here. And at that point they said, Hey, you know what, why don't we make this a full time position?

It just makes sense with the you're right with now what we're asking you to do and similar to the healthcare organization, making it its own position. They recognized, we need someone here ongoingly, because this was working with youth in the foster care system who are overrepresented in the system. And so this company sort of had the foresight to be like, well, we need someone here to help us navigate all these things and help us serve these youth and serve our staff.

Just for context, this company that I worked for had 200 to 500 employees, which just considered like either a mid-size company to a large company. So it totally made sense for it to be a full-time position that they created here were some of my responsibilities. So one, I facilitated a peer support group for the youth at this organization.

I also facilitated ally training for all the youth on campus. I trained all of the staff from the executives down to the night staff, every single person. I also, while I was there, I was like, Hey, this company needs an ERG or an employee resource group. And so I launched that that's to come next on the next episode, but also there was just so many.

Other various things that would pop up, like, they'd be like, Hey, this new thing happened and we need to create a policy around it. We don't know how to do it. Can you do it? Hey, can you go represent our agency at these greater DEI groups around the county? And another just sort of neat thing. They had me in place.

So. Stuff would happen. Examples of anti Queer bias, either between the residents, like the youth residents or sometimes by the staff. And so they were like, perfect. Eric, go handle this. that could be a challenge, but I enjoyed doing it. And so if you have someone like that built into your company, like you have already said.

Part of your job responsibilities are to navigate situations that happen and bring resolve to anti Queer bias. Boom, you've already got that person set up. So this could be very well, could be its own position, depending on the nature of your, what your company does, or maybe it's a supplemental job title with responsibilities.

In addition to what someone else already does for your company. If that's the case, compensate them. Right. If you're asking more of them, make sure you're paying them for that, especially because Queer people often have additional work dumped on them. When it's related to fitting some kind of diversity quota.

Or like, you know, if an organization is doing some type of LGBTQ+ advocacy or events or sponsorship or all of these various things, what I see all the time from either my friends or people that meet me out and about, and learn this as the work that I do, they're like, Ah, yes. My job sort of did that for me.

Like they know I'm the openly gay person there. They know I'm the openly trans person there. And so when these things popped up, they just said, here you go, this is your job to go do it. Are they getting paid for it? Usually not. So if you're one of those people, uh, I advocate for, you know, know your worry and ask for what you need and want.

Hey everyone. Eric here with a question for you. What's your company's inclusion score if you're like, um, I don't know. How do I measure that? Don't worry. I've got you. I've created a free checklist of the 10 essentials. Your organization needs to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. It only takes a few minutes to discover your score and you'll get practical ways to make it higher.

Hashtag winning to level up your diversity, equity, and inclusion. Head over to Be Proud With Eric dot com slash inclusion checklist. You might be wondering what about like a general DEI director position? Does that count for this? No, it does not count unless that person has LGBTQ+ expertise slash it's pretty important that they also identify within the community.

Having a general DEI position is a really cool thing for a company to do. Oftentimes what I see happen is similar to like Queer people getting designated to do Queer stuff. Usually they're like, okay, we're gonna have diversity equity and inclusion position. We have to give that to somebody that fits some kind of quota of a marginalized group.

It's often somebody who is black indigenous or a person of color, which is great, right? Like that is a big tenant of DEI work. That makes sense. And what I see a lot, cuz these people are my friends, these people are my colleagues. They're like, okay. So I've been, you know, either given. Applied for and gotten this DEI director position.

I'm super jazzed for it. LGBTQ+ is not something I know a lot about. And I wanna make sure that I'm like representing the community in the work that I'm doing. And I need some help with that. Which one is totally fair. And B is respectable, right? It's sort of a parallel to my work that I do. It would be strange and it would be irresponsible of me to try to teach people from a lived experience as a person of color, how to be anti-racist.

However, it's essential for me to receive my own education and training on anti-racism and to get training on how to teach Queer inclusion from an intersectional lens. Having a general DEI director position, not enough on, on its own. If they have Queer expertise slash our community member that can work, it should be well known that that is a tenant of that person's work there versus just being under the greater DEI umbrella.

An alternate option to having a dedicated staff position could be to hire an outside consultant. And I would say to keep them on retainer, like yes, hire an outside consultant if it's just for a particular project or something like that. But if you don't have a dedicated staff position at your company, have a consultant on retainer because again serves all the same purposes of having that person.

Be within your company, sort of like you need someone who has a set list of responsibilities and who is a go-to resource for anything that's gonna pop up that you're not anticipating. If you're going the outside consultant route, I would recommend be very intentional about making this person known as an available resource to your staff.

Let's talk about how having this Queer inclusive staff position benefits your organization. One, it looks good, plain and simple. It looks really good. Like I was talking about the healthcare organization that created that position that stands out like that's like, whoa, that company is really doing something right here.

Not only is it impressive to people who are members of the LGBTQ+ community slash advocates and allies. And so porters of them, even for people that like don't necessarily care that much about that. Cause that still looks good. It's like, oh shoot. We didn't even think of that. Should we be doing that now?

Also it helps lighten the load. To ensure compliance. Like if you are trying to be an inclusive company, takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. Here's the beauty of it. You get to delegate out a lot of this stuff, you know, it's like, we are so happy to have you, and here you go. And help us figure all of this stuff out.

This happened to me at my former company when this was my position. For example, while I was there, a Senate bill passed that all of a sudden said that transgender youth in out of home care have the legal right to choose the gender with which they are housed with the law passed. And none of the organizations knew what to do with it.

They had no idea how to do that, even though they wanted to, they were like, okay, this is now a. We will abide by it, but we don't know how, and we need some help in figuring it out. So my organization had the benefit of being like, here you go, Eric, this is your job. Figure this out and give us the report, which of course they had to like, you know, have a hand and ultimately give the approval of, but how nice just to be like, here you go, you go figure this.

This person is also really helpful for your company, because they are a wealth of information about the experiences and attitudes of your staff toward your company, in regards to things pertaining to the LGBTQ+ community, and that they can give you guidance on the things that need to be improved within the organization.

We've talked about a lot of different ways. This benefits you as a company. Let's also talk about how this benefits your staff, cuz again, that's what we're here talking about today. Like how to look out for the people that work for your company. So let's start off with again, it looks good. It is super impressive to any Queer identified staff that works for you.

However, not just us. It's also really impressive to allies, AKA. People who support the community, but are not themselves members. And here's the thing. Most people are allies. Here's the other beauty, even people that don't necessarily consider themselves to be allies. It still shows them that the company supports DEI, which has been shown to be good for business.

Also for your staff, this person, whether it's a dedicated position or you're hiring somebody from the outside, your staff knows that they have a go-to resource. It's someone that can serve as a mentor for them. It's someone that they know that they can go to if something has happened within the company that they are uncomfortable with, or if they were on the other end of some anti Queer bias.

They know, this is somebody that I can go to and tell them what happened, even if nothing else, just to get some support and just to be heard, but also hopefully through kind of showing through the company culture. This is someone who can actually help me get resolution for what happened. And it's super cool.

To get to have someone be this resource for your company and to get to be that person is also really neat. That's what ended up happening for me when I got this position and like, you know, it became spread across the company. That that's what I did there. All of a sudden I was this trusted resource now.

And like people would come to me all the time on the side and be. Look like I have a question and this isn't how they said it. They were essentially trying to figure out how to be a better ally. You know, it would look like things like, Hey, I wanna ask a question. I'm nervous to say it wrong, but like, you know, can I ask you.

Which I was totally fine with. I was like, yes, for sure. Like, it's really important that you're asking these questions, even if you say it wrong and you can totally say it wrong to me, I won't be offended by it, but I will let you know, sort of like the better or right way to say it. But yes, please ask me your questions.

Like that was one of my favorite parts about that job, especially because whoever this person is. Again, if you make efforts for them to be fully ingrained within and across your company, people are like, oh, that's so and so they're cool. I can talk to them. I can totally go to them.

All right. Cool. So we've covered the first two. There's three main, big things you need to do for your staff. Some takeaways from today, the first two that we've covered. One staff training. For all new hires and as an annual refresher for all staff, top to bottom and two, you need to have either a dedicated staff position, responsible for LGBTQ+ inclusion either within the company or an outside consultant that is readily available to that company.

On the next episode in this series, I'm gonna keep it going. We are gonna be talking about the third way to look out for your staff, which is starting an LGBTQ+ specific employee resource group. Also known as an ERG until next time stay proud.

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