By Christina Nguyen
Happy Black History Month! This month, businesses and media outlets have been highlighting the struggles as well as the incredible accomplishments of the Black community. Black History Month isn’t the only extended celebration of heritage ‒ May is Asian-American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month, while September 15 to October 15 is Hispanic Heritage Month. October is Filipino-American Heritage Month.
While each marginalized community continues to make history every day in its own way, it’s important to highlight their stories during their respective heritage months or weeks and beyond. Even if you don’t have the most culturally diverse set of employees, you can still honor each culture in inclusive, uplifting, educational ways that don’t rely on uncomfortably singling out particular employees based on their ethnicities or financially capitalizing off their cultures. Remember the backlash to Walmart’s Juneteenth ice cream? That was a pretty clear example of how not to celebrate a culture, as it came off as superficial and overall tone-deaf.
Here are some ways you can celebrate heritage events in general that look to share knowledge and celebrate cultures:
Put together and share an audio playlist
A more passive way to learn about other cultures can simply come from listening to insightful podcasts, audiobooks and music. Assemble playlists of audio you’d like your employees to listen to. If you have the time and budget for it, you can consider booking one of the speakers or authors to visit and conduct a virtual or in-person reading or workshop.
Of course, research each source and be careful to avoid any highly controversial, polarizing or extremely politicized figures.
Decorate the office with bios of relevant historical figures
Put your artistic and writing skills to the test! Research relevant key inspiring figures, such as prominent activists or entertainers and have fun making some artwork with their bios and photos. You could even make it a team-building exercise during lunch hours, giving different departments an avenue to interact with one another and spur some meaningful conversations on each person’s unique experiences with the community being celebrated. You can also decorate your walls with art from relevant artists as well, including local artists.
Serve cultural dishes
New food in the office kitchen is always exciting. Ordering some catering from a local business helps to support the community and treats your employees to something unique and yummy. You can even display placards describing the food next to it, with a description of its origins, its historical and contemporary cultural significance and, of course, its ingredients. While food may seem superficial, many cultural foods actually originated as a direct result of war, slavery or other forms of oppression and conflict.
Promote your favorite ______-owned businesses
Although the above three points are already doing this, you can take it further by sharing more relevant businesses you support and you can encourage your team members to as well. This can take place in a company-wide email and/or social media posts for your customers to partake in as well. If you choose to highlight cultural dishes, don’t forget to highlight the business where they’re coming from.
Consult DEI experts
If you’re unsure whether your efforts are appropriate, you might want to invest in a DEI consultant. If you don’t have one in-house, you’ll be able to find providers on LinkedIn. DEI consultants often share LinkedIn posts on their thoughts, so you can browse their profiles to see how well their experiences and beliefs align with what you’d like to promote to your business and customers.
Suggest recommended reads
Maybe your team members and customers could use some reading suggestions, so consider putting together a reading list to promote in internal emails and marketing materials. If you haven’t read the materials yourself, be sure to read summaries and reviews. Ideally, you should choose books you’ve read yourself.
Don’t single out any team members
You might have noticed that other businesses often post personal team member stories during heritage events. Generally, this is an excellent way to humanize the community and show an individual, unique perspective on how a real person has been positively or negatively affected by their community’s issues.
However, singling out such team members must be done in a respectful manner that doesn’t draw unwanted attention. Individuals might feel tokenized if you reach out to them specifically due to their perceived heritage. If you’d like employees to share their stories, it would be better to send out a company-wide internal email asking employees who share such heritages if they’d like to share their experiences with the company and with your customers on social media. Individuals who are interested and enthusiastic about being spotlighted will give you the green light themselves, as you’ve left the ball in their court. This way, no one is singled out and made to feel othered.
Gauge how comfortable your team members feel discussing issues relating to DEI
Receiving feedback from your team members on how they feel about their jobs and your company, in general,, is crucial to satisfaction and, ultimately, team member retention. An essential part of an individual’s experience with your business is how comfortable and safe they feel in regard to diversity, inclusion and equality ‒ for example, do they feel like they can safely mention their cultural background without fear of derision or ignorance? If not, slowing down and stepping back might be the first step toward creating the culture and environment you’d like to have within your company.
While each cultural awareness event is an opportunity to better learn about another critical part of our country’s history and contemporary race relations, they also provide an opportunity to learn about and connect with your current team members in deeper, more meaningful ways than before.
What are your do’s and don’ts for celebrating cultural heritage months? Feel free to let us know in the comments below!
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About Stingray Advisory Group LLC: Stingray Advisory Group LLC is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is a proud member of Local First and the West Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. We help businesses grow. By creating customized solutions, we empower businesses and entrepreneurs with the tools to further their development.
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