Diverse Voices, Powerful Messages: The Strength of Inclusive Messaging

The weather is getting colder (or warmer depending on where you are!), and we here at Heylia are celebrating the end of our first Blog campaign! Diversity was a very important topic to us, and while we did our best to cover a variety of issues pertaining to the business world, there's no doubt that it has many many more roles to play in all avenues of our lives.

In this final week, we’ll be talking openly about the place where the business world and the rest of the world appear on common ground: Social Media.

We aren’t here to say what you should or shouldn’t post on social media, after all that's why having social media training is important. Specifically, we’d rather talk about the right and wrong ways that corporations have utilized social media through the scope of diversity. Whether it's workers speaking out about company behavior, or a diversity initiative meeting some form of backlash, we’ll explore how to best navigate these situations.

It is important to keep up with current trends of social media, even when it feels difficult to fully take them seriously. Most public failures begin and end in the social media sphere. It’s where voices of dissent are most likely to be amplified, and where companies actions are put on display. As an executive, you should never take these kinds of things lightly.

Employee satisfaction is one of the more serious issues that tends to end up on social media. This can come in many different forms, but sticking with the theme, let's analyze some moments where diversity and the values behind it ended up spelling trouble for companies that backed down from upholding those values.

The most recent example of this is Target. During pride month, Target fell in the crosshairs of anti-LGBTQ+ campaign to get rid of Pride displays from their store, as well as a disinformation campaign to paint a misleading picture about Transgender people. This culminated in Target putting out a statement saying that they would roll back some of their Pride merchandise as well as some of the displays due to an increased threat against their workers.

First and foremost, let's make it clear that the sole responsibility of why this occurred lands with the hate groups that targeted a corporation. The point is that these bigots should not have had the power to bully a multi-billion-dollar company into compliance.

There were credible threats made against the company, which means its statements about removing certain items due in order to preserve employee safety wasn’t completely unfounded. However, a proper crisis response team should have taken into account how actions like taking down certain displays could signal the wrong message, to both the LGBTQ+ community and anti-LGBTQ+ groups. In the end, it happened precisely as you’d expect — the hate groups touted victory, while those truly affected felt betrayed.

Following the fiasco, social media turned against the company, and even workers began speaking out about their experiences and what Target taking down pride merch and displays meant to them.

Now, this specific instance of a harassment campaign happening inside a physical store may not be very relatable for an executive in the tech sector, but there are some extremely valuable lessons to take away from this debacle.

First and foremost, don’t back down from DEI initiatives. Just because you’re not in the service industry doesn’t mean you’ll not feel heat whenever you launch these kinds of programs publicly. Whether that heat comes from a small flame or a raging inferno typically depends on the size of your company or how ambitious your plan may be. It’s vital that you and your team stay on message, and that any hiccup in the plan is swiftly addressed or managed.

Anticipate hiccups, cold feet from investors, or other roadblocks that could be detrimental to these plans. The reality is, any faltering could spark speculation from both outside sources and inside the company. The spark can catch quick, and soon you’ll have a firestorm spreading throughout the company, and all over social media. Do not let this get out of hand; provide consistent and adequate updates on DEI initiatives as you go in order to extinguish any notion that your company is all talk, and no action. Especially be completely transparent with your employees. In the end, outside speculation will not be the downfall of a diversity initiative facing turbulence, but an ill-informed team will.

Current politics will always be relevant, and in recent years, a subsection of politically engaged people have made it their goal to push back against social progress. Bending to them will not appease them. They will continue to push back against every form of social progress, which is one of many reasons (if you really need any) to not follow the route of capturing that subsection as a market.

The fire metaphors throughout this piece were very much intentional, as managing these kinds of actions are extremely volatile. Most feedback on social media may be disingenuous and devoid of any real substance, but make sure you can distinguish those kinds of comments from good faith efforts to provide critical feedback.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as a whole is far from a perfect science. It changes with time, ebbs and flows, and what we know to be true about it now could be a far cry from what it may be even five years from now. As you navigate this topic, we’ll leave you with this: don’t psych yourself out. Be ready to be humbled, and also to stand up for yourself. Educate yourself as much as you rely on others to educate you. Don’t be expectant or complacent.

Above all else, just treat people as people. Most of the time, it's as simple as that.