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Michael Bach: It's time for this week's webisode of the "Diversity & Inclusion Debrief".
I sit down with Brent Chamberlain, the Executive Director of Pride at Work Canada to talk
about his upcoming webinar on LGBT inclusion in the workplace.
Brent Chamberlain: What you need to know about the LGBT community as it relates to employment
and how organizations can create environments that are inclusive
of LGBT employees.
You know, I think one of the things that people often forget is that the
LGBT community makes up to 10% of any population.
So, within any large workplace there is a large
segment of the population that is identifying as either LGB or T. So this isn't
something that only employers in downtown Toronto need to be
thinking about, this is something that all employers need to
be thinking about,in the sense that
these are live issues for a lot of people. Many people,
unfortunately are still not open,
or they don't feel able to be open about their *** orientation or gender identity
in the workplace. And that's a major concern both in terms of
productivity, but also in terms of overall staff satisfaction
within an organization.
So I mean, apart from things like legislation within the kind of gender identity
and gender expression sphere of things, I think that
it's also something that's changing not just in terms of fixing
the workplace, so to speak, making sure that
there aren't any barriers for LGBT-identified individuals, making sure people feel
supported, etc. Those are still things many organizations are looking at.
But some of the more emerging and interesting topics in this area are
the fact that it is a lot of partisan groups also the focus as well another
the fact that there's a real positive focus as well, now that
organizations are being more inclusive - how can that diversity be leveraged by employers.
Using LGBT employees and employer resource groups they may have formed -
in terms of customer and client development, in terms of product
development, understanding what the customer base is, marketing - there's really
a huge untapped resource
that organizations are starting to employ the work they have done on Diversity
and Inclusion within the LGBT space, to actually improving their businesses.
What people should walk away
from this presentation is really a bit of a
beginners guide and a good over view of what some of those key issues are, and
what some of the initiatives and programs organizations
in Canada are putting in place to create
and really that is what Pride at Work Canada does.
So giving you a bit of an overview of what our partners are doing to make their
workplaces more inclusive.