Black History Month, LGBT History Month, Neurodiversity Celebration Week.

Awareness events have become a go-to for any good NGO wanting to raise the profile of its cause. They’ll flood their selected date with compelling research, newspaper column inches and a bumper fundraising campaign.

But I think that we, as HR and diversity leaders, have been swept up by the (admittedly, very good) PR around these events.

We’re put under pressure to deliver ‘our own’ events on these dates. Which puts us under even more pressure to decide which events to mark, and which ones not to. And even when your schedule and calendar is lovingly crafted to celebrate every single date, when International Women’s Day rolls around, someone will promptly remark,

“When’s International Men’s Day then?”

To which you respond,

“It was November 19; you replied to our email calling it ‘woke’.”

I believe we’ve got lazy. We’ve let outside organisations set the internal agenda for our organisation.

We’ve stopped thinking about what our organisation needs and started following the crowd.

And that’s a big problem, because visibility feeds perception. If an organisational focus on ethnicity (specifically Black ethnicity) is only visible for one month of the year, the perception is that the organisation doesn’t care about ethnicity for the other eleven months.

Meanwhile, you’ve celebrated both LGBT History Month and Trans Awareness Week. That’s five weeks total of LGBT activity and visibility; the perception is that LGBT is a higher priority.

It’s this kind of thing that causes real damage to DEI efforts. It confirms that the aim is diversity-washing rather than contributing to the bottom line. It demonstrates that the approach is generic, not bespoke to the organisation’s needs. And worst of all, it means employees can ignore DEI until their ‘thing’ comes around.

So, my advice is to start your calendar again. Begin with solid HR principles; which events will affect the operations of the organisation? These are dates where you can expect a higher-than-normal amount of leave requests or absences.

This is also where the groundwork you’ve done with diversity monitoring comes into play. If Muslim employees make up a large proportion of workers in a specific business unit, there may be a need for additional resourcing during and at the end of Ramadan. Equally, a sunny Bank Holiday may result in an increased absence rate on Tuesday morning. Or a Pride celebration could cause an increase in leave requests. Whilst very different situations, all are foreseeable and, using data, the potential effect is predictable.

Once you’ve identified business impacts, it’s time to identify dates. But what to do on these dates?

Scheduling activity around them is, for the reasons described above, lazy and counterproductive. Furthermore, activity should be delivered constantly, not annually.

We make a similar mistake with training; we know the theory about repetition embedding learning, but instead deliver once a year refresher on health and safety, which are disregarded within a month.

Regular, low effort activity embeds change far better than annual showcases. However, we’re drawn towards flashy Hollywood deliverables because of what they can do for us and our performance reviews.

Regular, low effort activity is also the perfect deliverable for employee resource groups. This reduces the workload on you, and helps you manage the output of your ERGs. Some organisations struggle with this. ERGs, especially those helmed by particularly powerful individuals (and this can be in a formal or informal hierarchy), can run away with themselves, becoming a lobby group somewhat detached from other organisational structures. Having a clear and agreed set of deliverables focuses the ERG and its leadership and sets expectations.

So once again, what of the notable dates?

Well, I see them as opportunities to celebrate, not to do. The problem of course with regular, low effort activity, is that incremental effects are less visible, and thus create the perception that little has changed. A notable date is a great opportunity to measure the current position against twelve months ago, report and celebrate progress, and set goals for the next twelve months.

Tying a reflection point to a notable date establishes a target, making your DEI initiatives timebound and SMART. It also forces you to change outputs from delivering events to sharing progress.

I’ve no doubt that this is a challenging proposal, and that many of you will tell me that this can’t work in your organisation. There are several challenges inherent with this approach:

• Constant reporting cycle

Instead of an end of year report containing all progress on all streams, this approach requires each stream to be reported on individually. Progress on ethnicity may be reported in October, LGBT issues in February, neurodiversity in March. This approach demands results; one can’t obfuscate and hide lack of progress behind strong achievements in other areas

• Employee attachment

It’s obvious, but people are emotionally attached to things that are important to them. Additionally, we often grow engagement by making our events fun. This results in chasing vanity metrics like attendance or participation. But fun events for an ingroup aren’t a DEI strategy on their own. We can overcome this issue by tying celebrations of a notable date with celebrations of results and progress.

• Resourcing

Keeping many low intensity programmes running all year round is a more challenging proposition than the project-based approach one can adopt with a date-centric agenda.

This is good.

If you’re reading this, you likely describe yourself as an HR or DEI leader. Leaders, by definition, require followers. People who believe in your destination and trust you to be able to keep them safe on the journey.

The DEI agenda generates more passion, goodwill, and offers of support, than any other workplace initiative I’ve ever been involved in. These are your people to lead. Whether they take the form of ERGs, working groups or champions, they believe in what you’re doing and will happily contribute. Use them.

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Our 2025 Calendar is the perfect tool for shaping your DEI agenda for next year. It’ll help you see which dates are important to your teammates, when your organisation’s operations are likely to be affected, and when ‘things’ should ‘happen’.

But it is just that – a tool. A blunt instrument. How you use it will determine what form your 2025 agenda takes and how successful your ideas are.

You have only twelve months. Don’t waste them.

Get our 2025 Calendar