Use Social Media to Celebrate Women’s History Month
Social Media provides us with a fun and enlightening way to celebrate the contributions of half the world’s population.
By EmployDiversity
Despite all media attention being drawn away to the Coronavirus, there’s still an important matter to celebrate: Women’s History Month During at least March, government authorities have declared most places where people gather closed. However, social media affords us ways to say thank you to the women with whom we work or live or have lived with in the past.
Take a few minutes to put together a virtual placard that thanks all the women who have contributed to the success of your company. Make it fancy and fun! Stay away from “corporate blue,” which seems to sober any sort of sense of celebration. It’s like inviting an undertaker to a party (though undertakers can be fun, too, as long as you don’t ask what they do).
A large number of small- and medium-sized businesses maintain company Facebook pages. Post a past photo of a group of female coworkers together: they can be working or relaxing together at a company get-together. Identify them and thank them and all the women who work in your organization for the great work they’ve done.
Companies large and small have LinkedIn accounts. Make up online cards (or use the same one you made for your Instagram account) to post to the company network. Or you can post the photo(s) you posted to the Facebook account. Be sure to post the same media to the company’s Linkedin company page, where it will stay visible for several months. Customers or Followers who come to the page will be impressed and may even Like the post. It may even inspire a few to do the same thing on their own social media pages.
Don’t Slack Off
If you're a boss working from home and still responsible for managing staff, albeit remotely, you have all kinds of opportunities to thank female team members for the tough transition they’ve made. Before the coronavirus struck, they were able to work under the same roof unfettered by home life. Now, family members will likely expect the same level of attention from mothers, wives, and girlfriends as they would when women coworkers are at the workplace.
This is where a communications tool like Slack can come in handy to spread thanks. Slack helps facilitate communications on teams with an email-like interface organized into channels. Employees take and make messages in channels relevant to their work or interests. Create a channel in Slack called Women’s History Month. Encourage staff online throughout the organization to post their thanks, photos, quotes and more.
Old fashioned email
And don’t forget good old fashioned internal email blasts. Write a blurb about the meaning of Women’s History Month and distribute it throughout the organization. Make sure the C-level gets a copy. Perhaps, even, modify it for the executives and let them know that celebrating the month with staff can be a real morale-booster, especially during these difficult times. Call-outs to predominantly female teams or individual female team or department heads can spur them to even greater heights. In the least, the recognition makes them feel that the Leadership really does have the matter of working during the time of Coronavirus in hand.
Though the Coronavirus has redefined the world of work, we should all pause a moment to thank the half of the world’s population that has historically made so much of our lives possible at all. The virus will come and go, but we should always recognize women and their history of contribution to humanity.
