I've written previously about a number of areas where we’ve got it so very wrong when it comes to the people experience in most organisations. Here, I want to share what and how we’re doing it differently at Mission Equality. As ever, we are leaving no stone unturned in our quest to use ourselves as guinea pigs and reconfigure what it is to build a business based upon equity and equality for everyone. Here’s where we’ve got to so far when it comes to the ‘people experience’ in our company… No...

When I first started thinking about the people we needed at Mission Equality and sketching out an org design for how to structure the team, the plans quickly grew from the 4 of us from my previous startup to a team of around 50 people 😱 Two of the most important lessons I learned at said former startup were: Stay as streamlined as possible - fast growth across a team also exponentially increases the financial outgoings which either quickly drains any funding raised and/or requires significant...

When I took over the people role at my former startup (after our 3rd co-founder and ‘Chief of People’ left), I joined an excellent Slack group full of “Head of People/Talent/HR” folks so that I could learn what I needed and ensure I wasn’t missing anything on the people experience front. The list of HR/people topics include things like: Culture and values Engagement and retention Diversity, equity and inclusion Learning and development Performance and progression Policies and handbooks Scaling...

At my former startup, my female white CEO said and did all the ‘right’ (performative) things to appear to be anti-racist. This included: Paying out of her own pocket to attend the Anti-Racism facilitated sessions we ran (and was vocal about investing her own money). Confirming repeatedly how happy she was to be nudged by and educated by us, for free, whenever she messed up (which was often). ‘Publicly’ owning her mistakes though ‘public’ was only ever to the team, never externally to her wider...

I wrote previously about a new process we’d introduced at Mission Equality - Decolonising Work. We currently have half of our team - 4 of 8 - folks going through this process with a couple coming to the ‘end’ of the official period we’d originally designated for it. It has, however, become crystal clear… How absolutely vital this process is for the mental and emotional health of everyone. How fundamentally broken our systems are - starting from the education system and continuing across our...

Decolonising work is something we’ve introduced recently at Mission Equality because we noticed that folks who joined us - who’d been steeped in the conventional world of work - were struggling to think outside the confines imposed from decades of working within the ‘system’. This limits creativity, this limits progress, this limits growth. And so we now invite all new joiners to participate in a period of time that we call ‘decolonising work’. This is a page taken from our internal team...

I read a post recently on LinkedIn that went viral, from that of a white, male CEO acknowledging his white privilege in being able to get to where he’s got to. In the comment section, he is rightly challenged on the fact that acknowledgement is one thing but where’s the action and how has he used his privilege to help others from deliberately disadvantage communities. He has referenced his company scorecard and the fact his company is explicitly anti-racist. My hat is off to him because he...

I’ve skirted around the margins and edges of this and said it out loud to a few people and now it’s time to set it in stone writing… A company truly and deeply committed to DEI, anti-racism and equality of all kinds cannot be this or do this under the stewardship of a white person at the very top. I say this from recent lived experience of co-founding a company with a white woman, which had significant potential…but which, two years later, is no longer in existence (here's why). [This is NOT...

I mentioned the importance of ‘document culture’ in a previous post - and how it was a safeguard for me as evidence of what actually happened regarding my resignation from Omnis Education - so I wanted to share more about it. It was one of the BEST things I implemented at Omnis as COO. I first read about it in this article, then did some digging to read more about other peoples’ thoughts/experiences of it. It didn’t take me much convincing to decide to implement it at Omnis Education, with the...

Many purpose-driven businesses have an origin story, one that goes beyond “Because I had a great idea and I wanted to make some money”. Mission Equality is no different. The reason for starting this journey - to achieve equality for all - is personal in more ways than one. I sit at the intersection of a number of deliberately disadvantaged communities - I’m Brown. I’m gay. I'm autistic. I identify - at different times - as a woman or gender fluid or gender free. That’s a fair bit of...