Sharing advice for trans allies in the workplace

We caught up with Michel Ebbage, who shares his advice for being a visible ally and discusses the value of diversity and inclusion in RS Group.

Please introduce yourself and your role within the organisation.

Hello, well, I'm Michael Ebbage. I'm a principal engineer in our DevSecOps practice. We get involved in cloud applications, deployments, quality and security of the applications we use across the RS group.

Are there visible trans role models in your organisation and how has this changed over recent years?

We've got a couple of trans colleagues outside of my direct team. We've also got some very prominent trans allies, people like Jessica Chu, Head of Diversity and Inclusion.

From my own perspective, we had someone join from the trans community initially pre transition as part of a work experience section and then later as a one-year placement as part of a gap year from universities, so we've had direct experience within our team of supporting that.

How does the organisation and more importantly, yourself as an ally, how do you support trans employees?

There's a strong ambition around bringing our true selves to work, most of the RS behaviours that are promoted are around treating people with respect and kind of like treating others as you expect to be treated. There's very much a promotion of trans allyship, includinga number of events across the organisation. Also, things like the various Pride events around the world are recognised by the organisation and just general normal accommodations that we'd make for any employee just to apply universally.

How do you personally support your trans colleague and reports?

I think part of it is we support all our employees in a very similar way. Everyone's an individual and everyone has their own requirements. For our trans colleague who joined us part way through their transition, they were a little bit concerned about their appearance at the time and had requested if it'd be okay if they didn't show their face during teams calls and didn't have too much face-to-face contact. Our role within engineering made that very easy to accommodate. Because a lot of our work is, kind of, in the background working in a purely technical nature, so small accommodations like that were no problem. The other thing is just the general awareness of people's mindset at the time and where they might be feeling stress or anxiety, which applies the same for all our colleagues.

What is your advice for people to be more trans inclusive? I'd say approach things with empathy and try not to treat people any differently. Whatever our employees are, kind of, facing in terms of challenge or personal circumstances or their own requirements. We've got colleagues that deal with anxiety, we've got various genders and lots of people in different stages of their life; an equitable approach serves to make a positive environment regardless of someone's background