June is Pride Month!

As many of you know, June is Pride Month for the LGBTQIA+ community, but you don’t have to be a “L”, a “G”, a “B” etc. person to be part of the D&Z community.  You can be straight and still be an ally of or an advocate for the LGBTQIA community within Day & Zimmermann.

Allies are D&Z coworkers who educate themselves and support the LGBTQIA+ D&Z community at work and their social circles.  Advocates take it a step further; they publicly support the mission of the D&Z Employee Resource Group, True Colors, by donating, amplifying, lobbying, and driving the message of inclusion in the workplace.  One isn’t better than the other; it just depends on where you are in your journey toward inclusion.  

Let’s take this PRIDE month to refresh our memories about how we can show up for our LGBTQIA coworkers by doing the following:  

• Be open to listening. 
• When working to establish a relationship with a new manager, direct report, or teammate, use language such as “spouse,” “significant other,” or “partner,” instead of “husband” and “wife.” 
• Ask questions surrounding “gender-specific” holidays, instead of assuming. For instance, ask “Do you celebrate Mother’s Day/Father’s Day at home?” instead of assuming a male employee has a wife celebrating Mother’s Day, or a female employee has a husband celebrating Father’s Day. 
• Be aware of your implicit biases (e.g., Asking “what does your husband do?” to a female). 
• Get educated.
• Get fun swag!  True Colors T-Shirts and coffee mugs are available for sale, with proceeds donated to charity.  Contact Rebecca Donovan in Philadelphia for more information.
• Update your company email signatures with your pronouns of choice.  Pronouns means how you identify — he/him, she/her, they/them, for instance — and how you’d like other people to refer to you. 
• Update your social media pictures with Pride frames or filters.

These tasks may seem little, but they can mean a lot to showing our LGBTQIA coworkers that they are welcome at Day & Zimmermann.  

Speaking of welcome and inclusion at D&Z, the company has recently been recognized by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's Corporate Equality Index for 2022. For over 20 years, the Corporate Equality Index is the premier survey benchmarking tool on how employers treat LGBTQIA+ employees.  With a score of 90/100, D&Z is listed as one of 1,200 of the nation's largest businesses that has demonstrated commitment to implementing LGBTQ-inclusive policies and practices! 

One of the company’s inclusive policies is our paid parental leave policy.  Parental leave is just that – leave for all types of parents, not just the traditional “mom and dad” model. Leave for adoption is included in the company policy because it impacts single, opposite-sex, and same-sex parents. In 2015, I wrote the first paid parental leave policy for the company, and since then, the policy has evolved to the current version, which offers increased paid benefits to parents.

Happy PRIDE everyone!