Enough

The team at Timely and I stand in unity with everyone making a peaceful stand against racism. Black lives matter and the world is infinitely more wonderful when we embrace differences between people, knowing that we are indeed one race. The human race.

This is a time for us to come together, for love and for kindness.

It is also a time for leaders in positions of privilege to reflect on our actions. Many people reading this will be business owners in the beauty or technology industries, as this is our audience here at Timely. In our business world, the most impactful discrimination comes in the form of systemic and subconscious biases. It's less about hate crimes and violence and more about the everyday decisions made by people who would not think of themselves as racist.

When people who represent the majority occupy most positions of decision-making power, systems can be subconsciously created that benefit them and disadvantage minorities. It is then our obligation to understand and thoughtfully dismantle those systems.

Breaking our silence helps today, but what is more important are our actions. If we are compelled to speak out about racism in the past two weeks, what have we been doing about it on a day to day basis to actively back up our words? What plans did we already have to fight systemic discrimination before George Floyd was senselessly murdered?

At Timely we've been actively working on building an inclusive workplace for a number of years. And we have a bunch of people who come together regularly to advance this cause from inside and outside of our team. How are we going with it? We're learning and improving. We've done a bunch of things that starts with defining our culture to be inclusive and goes all the way through to details that matter like the language of our job ads. In between there's subconscious bias training, looking at how we hire, policies on inclusion and inclusion surveys to measure how we're going. Despite that we still have work to do, in particular we have a lack of representation in leadership positions. That's on me as CEO.

In a chat with the current chair of our inclusion committee, Marlia, said to me: "Now is not the time for another group of predominantly white voices to release a statement with no thought as to what comes next."

And I couldn't agree more. Breaking our silence is good. But actions always speak louder than words. A great resource to start if you're early in your inclusion journey as a business leader is https://projectinclude.org/

Stay safe and be kind y'all.