At Hays, we’re committed to fostering an inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcome, respected, and valued. In honour of Pride Month, we’d like to take the opportunity to highlight the initiatives we’ve implemented over the past year to support our LGBTQIA+ colleagues, as well as sharing our plans for this year’s Pride Month celebrations.

 

Over the past year, we’ve been evolving our DE&I framework to include Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). ERGs are employee led groups that focus on a particular area of our DE&I agenda and help us drive greater inclusion, awareness and allyship.

 

As part of this restructure, we re-launched our Pride network and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Renee Tyndale and Michael Psalios for their leadership of the group, and to our Executive Sponsors, Clint Dal Santo and Laura Dalziel for their support.  Our Pride ERG aims to bring together a community of LGBTQIA+ employees and allies to create a respectful and inclusive environment for all through education, training and promoting opportunities for change.

 

From an education perspective, our Pride ERG hosted an insightful webinar in recognition of Wear It Purple Day that focused on sharing stories to create greater understanding and inclusion at work, as well as exploring the role of allies. We also regularly promoted LGBTQIA+ inclusion training provided by our partner Pride in Diversity.

 

We raised funds for LGBTQIA+ youth in Australia and New Zealand through the sale of our beautiful Hays Pride Pins, which we encouraged our people to wear to show their Pride and allegiance. Our team was proud to be one of the Top 5 teams in Australia for Wear It Purple with our fundraising efforts.

 

We know the importance of meaningful change and we’re progressively reviewing and updating our policies and processes to ensure that they’re inclusive to LGBTQIA+ people. For example, noting that our parental leave policies and benefits are available for all families, including LGBTQIA+ families and that our policies extend to adoption and surrogacy. We also updated our Dress Policy to highlight that trans and gender diverse employees can dress according to their affirmed gender at work. We’ll be continuing to progress this review over the coming year.

This year for Pride Month, our Pride ERG will be hosting a webinar for our employees where we’ll be exploring the importance of creating supportive workplaces and spaces for LGBTQIA+ people.

 

We also have some external engagement opportunities that we are looking forward to supporting. Our Pride ERG Co-Leads Renee Tyndale and Michael Psalios will be joining headspace as guest panellists in an internally focused webinar, to share their lived experience and inclusion at work for people in the LGBTQIA+ community. We are also proud to be joining the PRIDE in Employment Job Expo, aimed at Job Seekers from LGBTIQ+ communities as well as sponsoring the Leaders Forum as part of Top End Pride programming.

 

Building on the success of our Hays Pride Pins last year, this year we wanted to continue to provide visible markers of inclusion. And so, we created reusable Rainbow Kits for our teams across ANZ. These kits include pride progress flag bunting and posters that can be utilised to celebrate Pride and other days of significance. The bunting was purchased from Minus18, a youth-based LGBTQ organisation where all profits are invested in programming and support for rainbow youth.

 

We were keen that these kits would have ongoing impact, and so we also created stickers for employees to show Pride and allyship all year round and we are also planning to include these in our Welcome Boxes that we gift to all new employees. Additionally, all offices across Hays Australia and New Zealand will also be displaying ‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ signage to show LGBTQIA+ inclusion to our colleagues, clients and candidates.

 

We know Pride doesn’t stop in June, and we’re committed to ensuring an inclusive and equitable culture every day. Some of our plans include progressing our AWEI accreditation to build on our culture of inclusion. We’re also planning to amplify the great work of our Pride Employee Resource Group and host local meet ups for our people across ANZ. And finally, we’ll be hosting an upcoming Pride in Diversity Round Table in Sydney in August and we’d love to see our fellow Pride in Diversity members there!