Co-Designing an Equitable Holiday Calendar
How can you co-design a company calendar that nourishes healing and belonging for your employee community?
As the visibility months and days, such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, International Transgender Visibility Day, Disability Awareness Month, Mental Health Awareness Month, begin this year, that is a question that has been top of mind for many clients, with limited time and increasingly constrained budgets - and the fear of upsetting employees who may not feel seen or recognized within the official company calendar, or the organization itself.
An unconscious lack of recognition can be a microaggression - a behavior or language, often unbeknownst to the person or people committee - that can lead to deep harm and disruption in psychological safety at work.
On the flipside, recognition can be a powerful tool for healing and belonging, to support people to feel emotionally safe and seen at work.
Here are strategic thought starters, based on my work advising mid-sized global creative and tech organizations on their DEI strategies and implementation:
Summary
Operationalize a formal team and process, compensate DEI leaders for their time and unique expertise.
Create an employee survey to gather your employees’ most salient identities and what holidays are important to them.
Skillfully ask for feedback on your calendar strategy, but do not rely on the unpaid emotional labor of your employees who come from marginalized backgrounds.
Bring strategic depth and flexibility to your calendar acknowledgements.
Lastly, accept imperfection.
1
Operationalize a formal team and process, compensate DEI leaders for their time and unique expertise.
DEI is often an afterthought; a check-box exercise. To create enduring organizational change, we need to bring operational rigor to the practice of equity and inclusion. It's not enough to have a one-off DEI calendar committee or holiday celebration.
Employees from marginalized backgrounds are often expected to take on the unpaid labor of company events and holidays. If you're wondering why you might be having a hard time retaining your people, especially Black and Brown employees, we need to understand how well-intended actions and asks may create harm. Bring a Critical Allyship lens to the company calendar.
For example, during Black History Month, do not expect your Black employees to educate you, organize events, or be on your recruitment page to demonstrate ‘diversity.’ Celebrate and uplift Black employees (particularly interns and those just starting out their careers) and leaders throughout the whole year, not just the month of February.
Create a DEI committee, across levels, identities, and departments, where the tasks — including the company calendar — are an integral part of committee members’ job description, performance metrics and bonuses. Ensure committee member time and resourcing are respected and realistic. Recruit an Executive Ally, not just an Executive Sponsor to proactively advocate for the committee in executive decision-making and hold other leaders accountable to their commitments. Connect DEI goals to organizational goals and revenue to sustain investment and operational rigor, even amidst difficult financial times.
2
Create an employee survey (or add questions to your existing employee or DEI survey) for folks to share their most salient identities and what holidays are important to them.
Who are your employees as people? What are their life stories, identities and backgrounds? What parts of themselves have been seen and unseen at work and the wider world? How can you honor the fullness of their humanity?
Which communities have been historically excluded from your organization and our wider society? Who is represented with your organization and particularly on a leadership level?
How can you bring an intersectional lens to acknowledge and highlight the most marginalized within the marginalized? For example, highlighting the experiences of trans people of color who reside in countries where there is no legal protection.
What communities are you proactively trying to reach in your long-term recruitment strategy?
Particularly for question #4, even if the vast majority of your organization’s employees don’t have children, it can make a powerful statement to employees who are aspiring parents and attracting talent who are parents when you acknowledge Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and National Parent’s Day (fourth Sunday every July in the States, more inclusive to parents who have been marginalized by the dominant cisgender norm).
3
Skillfully ask for feedback, but do not rely on the unpaid emotional labor of your employees.
A number of my clients (many who are White American HR leaders) have expressed the fear of asking employees of color to take on extra emotional labor yet also being the White person in leadership making decisions on behalf of employees of color, thereby replicating harmful racial power dynamics. There is a complex nuance here. Whilst it is important to ask for feedback and offer opportunities for invitational co-creation, your request should come from a place of acknowledgement and consent.
A 15-30 min feedback session is far less work than hours or days organizing events, yet it is still emotional labor, often rooted in painful experiences, that leads to commercial impact around retention and belonging.
So how might ask your employees for feedback? For example, please note this language is imperfect and must be specific to the individual and organizational context:
“I want to acknowledge that our employees of color are often asked to take on extra emotional labor and I’m wondering if I could get your perspective for 15 mins on our calendar for Black History Month, as I want our organization to stand by our commitment of antiracism. I truly want to honor your time and boundaries, so I understand if you have no capacity.”
This language can still feel like a subtle manipulative and mandatory requirement masked as an invitation so be mindful if your request is realistic and if the person actually has time. The skillfullness also comes through your relationship with the individual, your tone of voice and body language, and the extent to which you’ve done your own inner work and learning around the holiday you want to get their perspective on.
4
Bring strategic depth and flexibility to your calendar acknowledgements.
Holiday celebrations often feel one-off and performative. For example, it’s not enough to have a rainbow flag or to say “Happy Pride” over Slack or once during the all-hands. During the month of Pride in June, we’ll see company offices brandishing rainbow flags yet take them down once the month of Pride is over. Pride, as all other holidays in service of dismantling oppression and building belonging, should be a celebration throughout the year.
To consult with your LGBTQ2IA+ employees, whilst not forcing unpaid emotional labor, amending the language to be sensitive to the individual and organizational context:
How do you want us to honor you and/or your community on this day / month?
What would a meaningful celebration or acknowledgement look like?
How could we make this less performative and more transformational?
Examples, specific to Pride, must be catered to the needs of your teams and organizations
Building collective organizational skills
This could be an all-company workshop on challenging transphobic microaggressions a week before International Trans Visibility Day on March 31, combined with a meaningful accountability plan in Q2 to implement meeting agreements around inclusion and microaggressions.
Building team empathy
This could be making a quarterly commitment to supporting queer activists and artists in your community -- an exhibition of a queer disabled artist of color or attending a queer international film festival as a part of your next team meeting.
Financially supporting community
Instead of making a one-off company or individual donation during Pride, can you make a monthly donation and get your team collectively involved with nonprofit organizations aligned to your organization’s goals and values.
Once you’ve created a draft calendar, ask for feedback from your employees.
What do you think? Are there days or months we are over or under celebrating?
Are there days or months we are missing?
To create flexibility for days off, particularly for global remote-first organizations, I also appreciate this strategy from Lattice on allowing employees to decide what holidays they’ll celebrate by giving them a specific number of days off to do it. For example, Pride is celebrated during different days across the world — in Oakland, it’s September, in Sao Paulo it’s June, in London it’s July. Let your queer and trans employees take time off to celebrate Pride on the days and months that resonate most with them.
If you are thinking through universal company holidays, this is a strong example from Wellspring on how to showcase the purpose, differences and examples of the organizational paid holidays. And appreciate this list for religious and spiritual inclusion found through Better Allies on High Holidays for Major World Religions.
5
Lastly, accept imperfection.
Even with a nuanced level of empathy and engagement, you will make mistakes. Acknowledge this may happen, and proactively create a restoration and accountability plan if holidays are missed. Appreciate this thinking by Disability Activist Mia Mingus on accountability and how to give a genuine apology.
Hold space for feedback through invitational 1:1s and group listening sessions - come from a place of courage and compassion, rather than defensiveness.
Acknowledge the feedback - and provide a plan of action and accountability if salient days and months are missed.
What are your learnings on creating an
equitable company calendar?
In conclusion
The holiday calendar is more than just internal marketing -- it’s a powerful symbol for what matters in your organization, and our greater society. If approached with intention, meaning and resources, it can be a powerful tool for healing and belonging -- and ultimately encouraging socially just high performance.
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