National Inclusion Week

National Inclusion Week is celebrating it’s 10th year and is going from strength to strength. The theme for this year is:

Time to Act: the Power of Now

The week is a time for employers to focus on inclusion within the workplace, raise awareness and emphasise this is a time to act.

Our parent organisation, Voluntary Norfolk, has a team of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) champions.  They have created 5 days of actions to fit in with the working week. Each day we’ll share on our LinkedIn page their informative and helpful suggested small tasks, videos/talks to watch and a quote of the day.

To get a flavour of what we’ll cover, here’s day 1:

The Power of Identity

‘To be a good citizen, it’s important to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes and see the big picture. If everything you see is rooted in your own identity, that becomes difficult or impossible’ – Eli Pariser, Author

To work our way into the week, we have come up with some really easy ways for you all to get involved and to help promote the power of identity in the workplace:

  1. If you haven’t already, you could consider adding your pronouns to your email sign off, your ID badges and anywhere else that is applicable. Some of you may think this is no brainer, but others may be wondering what’s the point. Here is a helpful article from pronouns.org about what pronouns are and why they are so important to someone’s identity: https://pronouns.org/what-and-why
  2. Again, if you haven’t already and use MS Office, consider adding a photo of your to your outlook and Team accounts. When we all work for the same organisation but aren’t all in the office at the same time, or spread across different teams and/or locations, it is easy to never have met someone in another team face-to-face. Having your photo on your accounts helps us connect with each other better by putting a face to a name. If you aren’t sure how to do this, follow this step by step guide from Microsoft: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-your-profile-photo-or-name-in-outlook-com-fb6a40cf-0dc8-4ee8-95ae-fa506586f120 or watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCfqaaMogJs
  3. We all know that identity and bringing your whole self to work is more than a profile pictures and pronouns, but they are a good start. We need to look at how neurodiversity and mental health is also thought of in the workplace. 1 in 4 adults will experience poor mental health every year and more than 15% of people are neurodiverse, so it is something we all need to start thinking about a lot more. To just get things ticking over in your mind on this first day of National Inclusion Week, here is a TED talk by Temple Grandin about how she sees the world: https://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds

To get involved with the the rest of this week, follow our new LinkedIn page HERE. Time to Act.