LGBT History Month, commonly known as pride month, is dedicated to the LGBT community. It was founded by the history teacher, Rodney Wilson, in 1994. Since then, it’s rapidly gained popularity as a way to celebrate marginalized communities. Here are a few ways you can encourage a good pride month if you’re an employer.
Host a Trivia Night Related to Pride Month
Pride month trivia is an easy way to familiarize everyone at your company with the concept. Plus, you can make it a fun experience by giving out prizes. We’ve seen people organize teams, or they’ve done it individually. Either way, learning about pride month through trivia has been a blast. So many people have learned about its history, expanding their knowledge and tolerance.
To us, nothing makes learning about pride month more enjoyable than trivia. It has a light-hearted tone that’s missing from many conferences. So, it can be a lot more fun to teach people this way. When learning, it doesn’t have to be too serious to be effective. Plus, by making it enjoyable, everyone will be more enthusiastic while participating.
The more creative the questions can be, the more fun everyone will have. Plus, you’ll expand the boundaries of your pride month knowledge. We’ve also seen some programs where they’ve implemented music along with their trivia. For us, that makes it an even more exciting experience we get to enjoy.
Enroll Everyone in Sensitivity Training
Sensitivity training is not somewhere people go to hear how they’re bad. Instead of berating them, it’s actually about how our language affects others. Sometimes, people don’t understand the way they’re talking has an impact. So, they may not realize whether they’re being offensive to someone on the team.
It’s not a case of them being insensitive, rather a lack of knowledge instead. By teaching everyone how to speak sensitively, it’s easier to run an office. There will be fewer incidences of miscommunication, and things will run more efficiently. When everybody feels as if they belong, work tends to flow more smoothly.
Once they’ve learned about language, it’s shocking to see how fast changes happen. Most of the time, you can tell a different next time you’re in the office. They’ll speak to each other with respect, acknowledging their shared humanity. That’s what’s made it worthwhile to us whenever we’ve helped growing organizations.
Encourage Team Participation
At some places, certain team members may try to avoid participating. Most of this isn’t because they’re insensitive. We’ve hesitated before getting in front of a crowd, too. So, make sure to encourage everyone to participate by making some of it mandatory. That way, they can get over any anxiety at the start of the month. Then, enjoying the rest of it should be much easier for everyone, too.
Start by hosting a trivia night and dividing the office into teams. To do this fairly, have someone draw straws out of a hat. It’s impossible to discriminate if you’re leaving the teams up to chance, thankfully. Then, once everyone has a team, start shooting them questions.
Tally up everyone’s score and put it on a whiteboard. In fact, you can get someone to track everything instead of being on a team. That way, you can join the team’s as a member of management. It’s always better if you can involve someone from higher up when it comes to trivia night.
Another way you can approach stuff is by having the teams rotate. If everyone switches several times, the teams will cycle through them all. Doing things like that would mean everyone has a chance to interact with everyone else on the team, too.\
How to Have a Great Pride Month as an Employer
Ever since it has become a part of our culture, pride month has served to bring us together. Today, it’s widely celebrated at organizations across the planet. It’s no longer a celebration confined to one country or even one continent for that matter. People worldwide enjoy celebrating this acknowledgment of the LGBT community. So, it’s grown to be a huge milestone in their ongoing struggle for recognition. Continuing to embrace it is something everyone can do to support them, too.
