Black History Month at Work: What Actually Helps

October is Black History Month in the UK. Most workplaces will mark it in some way. Some will do it well. Plenty will put a graphic on LinkedIn, send one email from HR and move on.

If you'd like your organisation to be in the first group, here are some practical thoughts. None of this is revolutionary. Most of it just takes a bit of effort and a willingness to be honest about where you are.

Ask the people it's about

Before planning anything, speak to your Black colleagues. If you have an employee network, go to them first and ask what they want the month to look like. They might want a big event. They might want budget and time off to run their own programme. They might be tired of being asked to do unpaid labour every October and would rather the company did the work this year. You won't know until you ask, and the answer should shape everything else.

If you don't have a Black employee network, that's worth sitting with. It may be a sign of how safe people feel being visible at work.

Do something with substance

Posters and hashtags are fine as far as they go. But a month is long enough to do something that people will remember.

Run a lunchtime session on Black British history, which most of us were taught very little of at school. Put together a reading and viewing list and give people time in the working day to engage with it. Use your internal comms to tell the stories of Black colleagues, past and present, if they want to be featured.

The test is simple. Would anyone notice if you didn't do it? If not, it probably isn't worth doing.

Bring in a speaker

One of the most effective things you can do is invite someone from outside to talk. An external speaker can say things that are harder for an employee to say to their own colleagues, and it takes the burden off your Black staff to be the ones educating everyone else.

Look for someone who can speak to your sector specifically, or who has lived experience that connects with your workforce. A good talk followed by an honest Q&A will do more than any number of intranet articles.

If you need help finding the right person, myGwork works with a network of speakers on race, LGBTQ+ inclusion and the places where the two meet. You can get in touch through mygwork.com or at [email protected], and we'll help you find someone who fits your organisation and your budget.

Look at your own numbers

This is the part organisations tend to skip. Black History Month is a reasonable moment to pull the data on your own workforce. How many Black employees do you have? At what levels? Are they being promoted at the same rate as everyone else? What does your ethnicity pay gap look like, and are you publishing it?

You don't have to announce the findings on the first of October. But if the month passes and nobody in leadership has looked, the celebrations ring a bit hollow.

Don't forget who else is in the room

At myGwork we spend a lot of time thinking about LGBTQ+ people at work, and Black LGBTQ+ colleagues are often the ones who fall through the gaps. Race networks don't always feel welcoming to queer people. LGBTQ+ networks are often very white. The result is that people end up explaining themselves twice, or picking one part of who they are to bring to work.

If your networks exist, get them talking to each other this month. Co-host something. Figures like Marsha P. Johnson and Bayard Rustin, who were central to movements that are often remembered without them, are a good starting point for a conversation. So are the Black LGBTQ+ people in your own organisation, if they're willing to be part of it.

Make sure leaders turn up

Staff notice who comes to things. If the only people at your Black History Month event are the ones who organised it and a handful of allies from the same department, that tells its own story. Senior leaders should be in the room, and ideally should have something to say that isn't read off a card.

Better still, ask them to commit to something specific. A mentoring scheme. A sponsorship programme. A target for representation at a particular grade, with a date attached. Then check back in November, and again in March.

Then keep going

The obvious point, but it bears repeating. The problems Black History Month exists to highlight don't go anywhere on the first of November. The organisations that get this right are the ones where October is just the most visible part of work that happens all year.

If you're starting from scratch, start small and start honest. That's worth more than a glossy campaign that nobody believes.