Supporting LGBTQ+ Employees During Pride Month… and Beyond

How Aware is helping organizations to protect diverse employees from workplace harassment and discrimination

Employees spend a third of their lives at work. Helping them to feel welcomed and supported is critical to attracting and retaining top talent, especially in tight labor markets. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) aren’t just good buzzwords — they’re good business practices.

• The most diverse public companies are 35% more likely to have above-average returns
• Companies with highly diverse teams have 3x higher cashflow per employee
• Diverse companies are 70% more likely to capture new markets

Creating a positive workplace environment for LGBTQ+ employees, free from harassment or discrimination, requires more from the employer than simply setting HR policies. Without safeguards in place to ensure those policies are followed, how do you know that your staff aren’t working in a toxic environment?

Since the rise of remote and hybrid working, it’s become easier than ever for discriminatory behavior to flourish unnoticed. When every interaction takes place on Slack or Microsoft Teams, how can you tell if a worker is being consistently excluded? How do you know that malicious actors aren’t sending abusive or harassing messages in private—especially if they’re smart enough to circumvent basic bad language filters.

Aware research found that private messages were 250% more likely to be toxic.

How Aware helps you protect your LGBTQ+ employees

Aware is the next generation of collaboration governance and compliance platform. Using industry-leading natural language processing (NLP) that was designed and trained for short-form collaboration messages, Aware surfaces risk across the collaboration ecosystem, however it presents. Here’s just some of the ways that Aware helps major corporations to safeguard the workplace for LGBTQ+ employees through Pride Month and beyond.

Detect and Action Toxic Speech with Smart Automations

Don’t let toxicity get a foothold in your organization. Through continuous connection to your collaboration environment, Aware searches for toxic and offensive speech and actions it in real time. Set triggers by keyword and by sentiment analysis. Best-in-class artificial intelligence automations and NLP produce the most accurate sentiment scoring available, helping you to gain even deeper insight into your employee dynamics.

When Aware detects toxicity or negative sentiment, you decide what to do. Quarantine or remove messages immediately to prevent further harm. Coach the employee in real time about relevant HR policies. Or alert management to repeat offenders for in-person resolution.

Uncover Covert Toxicity with Industry-Leading Sentiment Analysis

Aware’s sentiment scoring doesn’t just add insight to negative keyword use. It also helps organizations to uncover hidden toxicity from employees who deliberately attempt to circumvent keyword triggers.

Through organizational network analysis (ONA), employers can visualize the way topics of conversation flow through different groups. This can be especially useful at surfacing negativity and toxicity during events such as Pride Month that may be more divisive.

Identify the Messaging that Matters to Employees

Is Pride Month something your employees even care about? Are they paying attention to top-down communications about diversity and inclusion? Is that messaging having the desired impact? Answer these questions and more with aggregate analysis from Aware.

Make more impactful business decisions by listening to the authentic voice of employees and understanding the subjects that matter most. Aware provides daily insights into trending topics of conversation, allowing leaders to see how interest grows and wanes. Choose the optimal moment to deploy companywide messages and track aggregate sentiment for better results analysis.

Supporting DEI all year round

Diversity, equity and inclusion don’t just matter during Pride Month, but all year round. An inclusive philosophy doesn’t just make your organization a better place for LGBTQ+ and minority workers. It makes your organization more appealing to a greater number of candidates.

A recent survey revealed that almost 80% of employees want to work for companies that value and proactively support DEI. More than half class a company’s DEI stance as “very important” when considering somewhere to work.

With Aware, major corporations are developing greater understanding of what diversity, equity and inclusion looks like to their employees. That helps build new strategies for reaching and supporting minority workers, tackling toxicity at source, and creating a more welcoming work environment for all employees.

To learn more about the risk that toxicity poses to the enterprise, download Aware's Human Behavior Risk Analysis. Based on extensive research covering over a million digital interactions, Aware reveals the prevalence of toxicity in the workplace and the rippling impact it can have on employees.

Let Aware help your organization to achieve its DEI goals across the remote workplace.