Avid Core remains focused on the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), not just as a reflection of our corporate responsibility but as a tenet of our internal work culture.
Through our outreach and engagement work, we continue to do our part towards identifying, understanding, and weakening systemic racism by recognizing opportunities for growth, improvement, and education and taking advantage of those opportunities. This three-pronged approach extends across our firm’s hiring and workplace practices, how we support our team members, and how we choose to advocate for and support change in our communities.
We will not stop at just promising to be better; we are continuously reaffirming our commitment to equitable conduct as we recognize the gaps within our company that still need to be addressed and take the necessary steps towards improvement.
Below are some ways we’ve upheld and expanded on our promises from three years ago:
Promoting Pay Transparency and Equity
We recently completed a pay equity analysis, making sure that we’re compensating everyone equitably. While ensuring pay equity is an important social responsibility, it also helps us succeed as a people-first enterprise.
Reevaluating Avid Core’s Work Culture
In the past few months, we conducted a work culture session with Jade Johnson, cofounder of Johnson Squared Consulting, in which Jade led our team through a variety of virtual exercises. Giving everyone time to anonymously fill out questionnaires during the session, Jade facilitated discussions around the perceived expectations surrounding Avid Core’s internal culture.
She helped the group get a better understanding of different work cultures, providing the team an opportunity to not only reflect but also engage in assessing and contributing to our shared work environment.
This was not just a one-off exercise – we continue to work with Jade and her company because we understand that intra-workplace communication, our growth as a firm, and the wellbeing of our team members is an important, and ongoing, process.
Implementing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility
Through Kantola Training Solutions, the entire Avid Core team participated in online sexual harassment and DEI training courses, viewing story-based videos and answering questions while also reflecting on personal workplace experiences as well as conscious and unconscious bias.
Team members were able to complete their assigned courses on their own time, helping ensure a more engaged learning process and, ultimately, help our company further develop a more conscientious approach to how we handle both internal and external interaction and conflict.
Floating Holidays and Celebrations
We continue to reevaluate our holiday schedule to make sure we’re being fair and accommodating to all. In addition to our company policy of providing team members with a floating holiday, we also took off June 9 and June 19 this year to commemorate Pride Month and Juneteenth, respectively.
Our Emphasis on Accessibility
Being mindful of different people’s needs and wants is an underpinning of our work. As part of our outreach efforts with various stakeholder groups and communities, we have worked to ensure language access for people with limited English language proficiency, while also translating stakeholder and meeting materials as needed.
Being thoughtful of different demographics and their specific needs and goals has shaped our approach to crafting outreach materials and general readability. In addition to language considerations, we work with our lead designer to finalize public materials that employ color contrasting, fonts, and letter sizes that work to enhance accessibility and make the given content available to as many people as possible.
Working to improve our work culture, while simultaneously striving to incorporate all voices in our communications and stakeholder efforts, is an ongoing challenge – but a rewarding one. As Avid Core continues to grow, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility will remain a major touchstone of our work.
Our series of blogs on accessibility in communications, written by members of the Avid Core staff and exploring topics such as alternative text, color contrast, and webinar accessibility, represents a small part of this ongoing commitment.
Read our previous DEI reflections: