Empowering Women In The Workplace
In celebrating International Women’s Day (IWD), it’s important to reflect on how your business or workplace is making strides towards empowering women and ensuring equal opportunities for all employees. TwentyTwo Digital, being a female-owned company, places equality and equity at a very high priority and continuously makes efforts to improve and make our workplace comfortable for all.
International Women’s Day 2023
This year’s theme for IWD is Embracing Equity. It focuses specifically on understanding the differences between equality and equity. This is an important distinction, as simply giving everyone equal opportunities isn’t enough. Each individual should have opportunities based on their own unique set of needs. It’s essential that we all challenge gender stereotypes, call out discrimination, draw attention to bias and seek out inclusion. When we embrace equity, we also embrace diversity and inclusion.
TwentyTwo’s Commitment To Diversity, Equity And Inclusion
One of TwentyTwo Digital’s core business commitments is to empower our employees and ensure they feel included and respected in our workplace. It is so important to check in with your staff to ensure you have created a company culture that empowers women to feel safe speaking up and that you are achieving true equity, diversity and inclusion. Having a primarily female team at TwentyTwo, equity and inclusion are extremely important. We want to foster an environment where all employees can speak freely about their wants and needs. With frequent staff check-ins, feedback forms and close working relationships with each other, the team feels empowered to speak their mind and share their opinions. Creating this safe space for conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusion is essential to maintaining a great workplace culture and a happy team.
Ways To Empower Women In The Workplace
Here are a few ways to empower women in your workplace and ensure each employee is presented and encouraged to undertake opportunities based on their needs.
Create Values And Processes To Empower Women
Ensuring your workplace has actual processes in place to empower women is essential. It’s not enough to make a cause your business value without implementing initiatives to support these values. At TwentyTwo, we have a mostly female team meaning there are numerous leadership opportunities for the women in our office. We offer tailored learning schedules to ensure each employee's professional and personal growth is prioritised to help them reach their goals. In addition, we often engaged in empowerment campaigns such as International Women’s Day for ourselves and our clients.
Put Barriers In Place To Prevent Burnout
Burnout is a common occurrence, especially in the marketing industry. Evidence supports that women are typically more susceptible to burnout than men, with 42% of women reporting that they feel burnt out (McKinsey, 2022). It can be as simple as making sure to leave at 5 pm on weekdays and not staying back at work late or not bringing work home with you and genuinely enjoying your hours out of the office. Ensuring your employees feel comfortable leaving work at the office and taking their full lunch breaks are just a few things that are essential in any office. Leading by example is especially important for your younger employees, who tend to follow suit with more senior staff.
Debunking Imposter Syndrome
Imposter syndrome is something that many can relate to, especially when starting a new job or role. Unfortunately, this term is typically used by women who feel that their work is inadequate or that they aren’t smart enough to do the job right. The emotions women typically feel when experiencing imposter syndrome are nervousness and feeling out of their depth or comfort zone. These feelings aren’t acknowledged for what they are and are instead coined as imposter syndrome, which doesn’t truly address the emotions being felt. These feelings need to be addressed and normalised to empower women in the workplace. It is especially important for those in leadership positions as it sets an example for the rest of their team that it’s normal to feel nervous or uncomfortable, even in higher senior positions.
Final Thoughts
This International Women’s Day is the perfect time to reflect on your workplace culture and processes to ensure you foster a positive working environment and have happy employees! Reflect on how you can be a part of the solution and encourage your friends, family, colleagues and community to embrace equity.
If you have any questions about our initiatives or digital marketing services, please feel free to contact our team!
