Women’s History Month

Transforming the workplace, transforming the world

March is Women’s History Month and like with Black History Month, we want to urge companies to not just hand out coffee gift cards, but additionally think about how your current policies and practices are living up to your diversity and equity goals. Truly inclusive workplaces require more than giving a shout-out a couple of times a year—lasting change comes from intentional investment, mindset shifts, and actionable long-term strategies.

One of the most exciting things about starting Next Big Thing was the chance to embed inclusivity into the very bedrock of our foundation. Next Big Thing is owned and led by LGBT and BIPOC women, and we love the excerpt from the book “The Body Is Not An Apology” by Sonya Renee Taylor where she writes, “my team was a kaleidoscope of bodies and identities. We were a microcosm of a world I would like to live in.”

Image by @chi_z.z from our “intersectional feminist” moodboard last week. Follow us on Instagram for more Future of Work inspo.

In founding our company, we brought our varied identities to the forefront to create the business culture we wanted to work in. As LGBTQ+, brown, and first-generation American, we believe it’s impossible to build the world we all need while operating within white supremacist, colonial, or hetero-patriarchal systems. As a result, the values that drive our work center the tenets of intersectional feminism and anti-racism, as well as collectivism, curiosity, creativity, humor, flexibility, and humility.

Here are a few ways we’re incorporating our values and intersectional feminist, anti-racist practices in our company. We hope these can serve as inspiration for others aiming to build more ethical and inclusive workplaces.

1. Avoid hierarchies and promote the collective

Intersectional feminist leadership is non-hierarchical, and we believe in sharing power as much as possible. We have a cooperative decision-making process that will include staff across all levels of our company as we continue to grow. Instead of vertical hierarchies, we prioritize shared horizontal areas of ownership and responsibility and value company-wide brainstorms and crowdsourcing since the best ideas can come from anywhere.

We have also enshrined a four-day workweek and remote, flexible schedules in our operating manual to guarantee a workplace designed for care. We aim to limit the number of meetings, keeping them to an “only if necessary/can this be an email” basis. At least once per quarter, we host in-person, all-staff get-togethers to bond as a team and have fun. Staff take turns proposing meet-up ideas so everyone can share their interests.

2. Show compassion

We believe that nurturance should be present at every level of our company, and at every stage over time. We believe in listening actively, showing compassion and empathy, and providing care. We respect the dignity of all team members and recognize everyone has their own lives to lead outside of work. We especially focus on centering marginalized people, especially Black, Indigenous, and people of color who have traditionally been sidelined from the work of leadership. We want to ensure all voices are heard and everyone feels seen, and this applies both to our internal company workflows and the work we do with our clients.

3. Build thoughtful systems that empower

Behavioral scientists Don A. Moore and Max H. Bazerman call good leaders “decision architects” because they set up the infrastructure where team members can “make their own wise, ethical choices consistent with their own interests and the company’s values.” While we are still a relatively small team, we have put systems in place to guarantee future good decision-making around DEIB policies, hiring practices, work culture, and more. This will help us avoid reactive, confirmatory decisions in the future that might not be in line with our values and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. As such, we have removed educational requirements from our hiring policies and offer transparent salaries based on title alone. Any employees promoted to manager or director positions will be required to receive leadership training geared toward their new responsibilities. 

Just as we do co-creation with our clients, we will co-create with our team members to ensure our company values align with theirs. This includes co-creating individualized growth plans for each employee at their six-month mark. Using a whole-person development plan model, each growth plan includes a mix of hard and soft skills the team member would like to develop in the context of both Next Big Thing’s business goals and their career goals. Growth plans serve as the basis for personalized professional development opportunities and will be revisited during monthly one-on-one check-ins with supervisors. This is to ensure we are paying attention to each individual’s growth and sense of overall purpose.

4. Reimagine the world

During dim times like these, optimism is a form of resistance. We started Next Big Thing because we believe that companies have a tremendous opportunity to leverage their resources and authority to scale promising new approaches to social impact. Intersectional feminist practices seek to bring about social transformation and our very business model has this idea baked into it. The pandemic reminded us of an important lesson: community and networks are essential for survival. We see it as our larger mission to help communities thrive alongside businesses. By improving how companies participate in local solutions to social and environmental challenges, we seek to inspire connection, meaning, and belonging for teams and communities everywhere.