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Now you can wear your pride on your badge
New badge backers allow you to display your preferred pronoun.
June is Pride Month, and a good time to acknowledge and celebrate the diversity in Asante’s 6,000-strong workforce. The Asante Belonging, Inclusivity, Diversity and Equity (ABIDE) committee is working to normalize gender inclusion into our organization’s culture. As part of this, we introduced in May preferred-pronoun badge backers, which are available to any employee who wants one.
Preferred pronouns offer an option (and psychological safety) to those whose gender identity may not align with their sex at birth. Whether our pronouns are he/him, she/her or the nongendered they/them, displaying them provides us an opportunity to acknowledge and support our co-workers.
You can find preferred-pronoun badge backers through Guest Services.
Here are some other ways to normalize how to respectfully address one another:
- Honor gender identities and pronouns in patient charts and when you see them on your colleagues’ badges, email signatures and business cards.
- Share your pronouns when ordering business cards, which now have a field for a pronoun choice.
- Add your pronouns to your email signatures in accordance with Asante’s Style Guide: lowercase he/him, she/her or they/them.
- Add your pronouns to your profile in myHR. Email Human Resources for assistance.
- Give thought to inclusive language. For example, instead of addressing a large group as “ladies and gentlemen,” try “esteemed colleagues” or “hello, all.”
- Complete implicit bias training (part of Elements later this year) to help you become more aware of your hidden assumptions.
Because it’s expensive to create new badges solely to add preferred pronouns, the badge backers are an effective way to share your pronouns until you qualify for a badge upgrade, at which time the pronouns can be printed directly on your badge.
What ABIDE has been up to
The Asante Belonging, Inclusion, Diversity and Equity team has been busy over the past two months. Our work has included:
- Reviewing Asante’s Behavioral Standards to fold more inclusive and equitable language into behavioral expectations.
- Joining the regional All in for Health’s equity networking group to collaborate on the Community Health Improvement Plan for Jackson and Josephine counties.
- Creating Asante’s health equity operational team to identify how we can improve health equity for our patient communities.
- Expanding the work of ABIDE’s employee engagement team, which has created four exciting initiatives centered around awareness, communication and education of inclusion and belonging.
The ABIDE team attends department and staff meetings to share information about our work in belonging, inclusion, diversity and equity.
If you would like a member of the ABIDE ream to come speak at a staff meeting, or to join ABIDE employee engagement or ABIDE health equity operational teams, please reach out to ED*@as****.org.
If you have a question, please contact the author or relevant department directly.
