What do you picture when you think of the term “ally”?
Most of us instantly associate an ally as a friend — someone who has our back. But there’s a caveat to allies that we often miss. This person will advocate for you as an individual or part of a group, although the two of you don’t have the same privileges or backgrounds.
In the workplace, we refer to this connection as an allyship.
Here, we’ll explain what allyship in the workplace looks like and how you can build a diverse, supportive culture that encompasses this term correctly.
What is Allyship?
As Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year in 2021, allyship gained a lot of traction. Companies integrated this noun into their policies, neglecting to add the verb aspect that differentiated it from yet another thing to do on the corporate ladder.
At its core, allyship is intended to be the proactive actions of privileged individuals building and connecting marginalized people through consistency and trust. The relationships that come out of alliances reduce the marginalization of individuals or groups. These purposeful connections are chosen and deliberate, continually occurring regardless of challenges and obstacles.
What Allyships Look Like
Being an ally is more about what you’re doing to help others than what you get out of it. In fact, allyships can be hard when they’re done correctly.
According to the Racial Justice Resource Guide, being an ally requires digging into your core and taking the struggle of the marginalized people you want to help as your own. While doing this, you’ll listen to the voices of those who are oppressed rather than assuming their pain based on your limited understanding of it.
In an allyship, the privileged person exhibits behaviours such as:
- Recognizing their own privileges and extending the benefits (or transferring them) to those who do not have the same privileges.
- Admitting when they’ve made mistakes that encourage marginalization
- Hearing and amplifying the stories wants, and needs of marginalized people
- Acknowledging their pain while simultaneously making it clear that the allyship is about them, not the privileged individual
- Standing up for social justice and fighting the status quo, regardless of fear or the potential consequences
- Actively educating themselves on their allyship and what it needs to grow
Fostering an allyship requires collaboration and trust, which take time to build. The results may be a relationship that lasts a lifetime, making significant strides toward ending marginalization during its connection. But workplace allyship comes with other variables that muddy the waters and confuse the issue.
What Does an Ally in the Workplace Do?
Maybe you’ve never dealt with the feeling of marginalization due to your race, gender, ethnicity, or other demographic. But if you look around the workplace, you may notice that others must fight a little harder than you to get the same privileges. And you decide to become their ally.
This decision must come with careful action to ensure you don’t appear insulting or condescending. Being an effective ally isn’t solely centered around being someone’s “friend.” In fact, friendship doesn’t need to be part of the term at all.
Workplace Allyship
In the workplace, allyship occurs when a person with certain privileges works together (in a partnership of sorts) with a marginalized individual or group of people to eliminate the systems that are marginalizing them.
The goal isn’t to help a single person move forward — although that might be the first step. The ultimate objective of an allyship is to effect change and improve the basic rights and equal access of marginalized groups.
Although employers and hiring managers’ hearts are in the right place when they try to force a culture of allyship, they miss out on the most integral piece: allyship is a chosen pathway to creating a collaborative and trustworthy relationship.
Forcing it to happen through the strategic use of points and bonus systems takes away both the choice and trust components.
Tips on Creating Allyship in the Workplace
That’s not to say that leadership doesn’t play a crucial role in developing workplace culture. In fact, the strong values and opinions of the leaders of a workplace will almost always permeate into the atmosphere.
Even as recently as 2023, psychological studies reported more than one in five people witnessing or experiencing discrimination. Many others admit to hiding aspects of their lives that they feel identify them, such as their:
- Sexual orientation
- Religion
- Ethnicity
Yet, other factors like gender, race, and age can’t be hidden, and marginalization among these groups continues.
If you want to incorporate diversity and support to create an inclusive workplace, you must start at the top. This involves educating those in leadership positions on what allyship looks like and what it shouldn’t include.
What Not To Do To Form Allyship in the Workplace
Not too long ago, “allyship is dead” headlines were visible worldwide. However, digging into those words, we’ve understood that it isn’t the relationship that wasn’t working; it was connecting allyship to performance, a term called “performative allyship.”
This attempt at shifting to a more inclusive workplace culture brought attention to the cause, but only at a surface level. Privileged people would support the end of systemic inequality in world but with no action attempts to follow. In short, they received the acclaim and popularity of allyship with no effort or need for accountability or change.
In a social media popularity contest, those who engaged in surface-level activism, posting their works for likes, would receive followers and attention. However, they wouldn’t actually do anything to actively drive change or eliminate oppression.
This surface-level allyship merged into the workplace when employees saw they could gain recognition from leaders and peers for their bare minimum actions.
Beyond the surface level, some performative allyship measures resulted in tokenism. These actions often did more harm than good, as marginalized individuals would be hired or placed as the “face” of a business to show diversity in the workplace, while no real changes were made to reduce oppression.
Without accountability and commitment to take strategic action, performative allyship in the workplace puts the burden on marginalized individuals and groups to educate the world on why they should be treated as equals.
What To Do To Reclaim Allyship As a Culture
Ultimately, the term “allyship” became a hollow shell for what should have been a helpful commitment to drive change. It was relegated to the graveyard common cancel culture, but recent activists have exhumed it, attempting to give it new — and authentic — life.
So, what should an HR manager or business owner do to correctly integrate a culture of allyship?
These tips from an LGBTQIA group can be expanded to apply to everyone in the workplace:
- Listen to and learn from the groups you’re attempting to ally with. They know what they need more than you do.
- Remember that you’re an ally, so you’re part of the helper side, not the community.
- When you see something that you’ve learned is marginalizing, say something to the leaders. Take action to make a change.
- Learn from your mistakes. If someone is offended by something you do or say during your allyship journey, apologize and thank them for bringing it to your attention.
- Be a mentor for other allies.
Taking on this challenge in your business is rewarding but comes with many obstacles.
Remember that it’s a long-term process of building connections and establishing trust; every time someone new enters the workplace, either as a client, vendor, or team member, the cycle of trust and allyship begins again.
Even in a diverse team, it’s easy for everyone to adopt an attitude of a “melting pot,” where individuals are expected to let go of their identities and create one unified culture.
Bring in other perspectives and continue to educate yourself as you attempt to create a diverse workplace rather than a melting pot. Encourage differences and ask for clarification when you don’t understand a word, concept, or trend.
Let those you’re attempting to ally with lead the way. It won’t always be time to jump on board the allyship train, but if you’re not watching the tracks and itinerary, you’ll miss it entirely.
Train Your Team
As with anything important to your company’s mission, your team must see that you value allyship in the workplace. From your hiring practices to the topics you choose for continuing development, allyship principles should be visible.
Take a Bird’s Eye View on Training and Hiring
Whether you’re coming from a privileged background or you’ve struggled with problems like oppression and microaggression yourself, you likely won’t catch every potential opportunity to improve your business’s culture.
Assuming you will is often a quick way to miss your own unconscious bias, overlooking something important that should be addressed, like pronouns or the struggles of women in the workplace.
Instead, work with diverse talent pipelines like Obsidi® — professionals who know your industry. Obsidi® encourages allyship between hiring employers and diverse tech professionals, even offering a Black Tech Ally of the Year Award.
Companies that partner with Obsidi® as a hiring platform can confidently move forward in their hiring process, knowing that their pool of candidates will enter their workspace armed with the tech skills necessary for the job and the ability to function as allies for each other. Obsidi® Recruit is a talent recruitment tool designed to propel your brand’s allyship and diversity approach forward to unlock the benefits that await.