The finished company does not exist. The danger is the company that thinks it does.
Somewhere, there is a company that has finished inclusion.
Every policy is correct. Every manager gets it. Every employee feels safe. Nobody joins, leaves, gets promoted or changes their mind. Leadership never changes. Language stands still. Society stops evolving.
They have achieved equality.
The work is complete.
All that remains is to put it in the annual report.
There is, of course, one problem.
The finished company does not exist.
Yet corporate inclusion is remarkably good at creating the impression that it might.
We build strategies with three-year timelines. We launch programmes. We complete training. We achieve accreditations. We enter rankings, collect awards and report progress against targets. Eventually there is a temptation to look at all that evidence and conclude, consciously or otherwise, that the difficult bit has been done.
It is an understandable instinct because this is how organisations are built to work. A problem is identified, a project is created, somebody owns it, objectives are set and eventually somebody asks whether it has been completed.
But an inclusive culture is not a project and the moment an organisation starts behaving as though it is, the work becomes considerably more fragile.
Look at the language organisations use when talking about LGBT+ inclusion and you can see why.
HSBC Asset Management says: “We have achieved ‘Gold Standard’” in LGBT Great’s Inclusion Index Benchmarking Tool.
Quilter announced that it was “honoured to have achieved” the LGBT Great Gold Standard, describing the recognition as demonstrating a proven high level of competency across all ten inclusion indicators.
These are not unusual words. Achieved. Completed. Reached. Gold.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of them. Standards exist to be achieved, rankings require positions and awards recognise work that has actually happened. Organisations should absolutely be able to celebrate progress.
The problem is not the achievement.
It is the seductive little full stop that can come after it.
Because once an organisation has achieved Gold, reached the Top 100, completed its training programme and updated its policies, what exactly happens next?
Pride365 Partners offer a useful counterpoint because they often answer that question while talking about the achievement itself.
When Hilton expanded its Pride365 commitment into Australia, it did not describe certification as an endpoint. It committed to continued investment in training and education as part of what it called a “life-long commitment towards total inclusivity.” Life-long matters here. It accepts something corporate project language struggles with: an organisation can achieve things along the way without the underlying commitment ever acquiring a completion date.
Smiths Nissan expresses the same idea in more practical terms. David Smith described Pride365 as “a practical accreditation”, explaining that “it asks you to make clear promises and to follow them through.” The value of the certification, in other words, is not simply in receiving it. It lies in what the organisation is required to do afterwards.
Two organisations, two ways of expressing the same principle. Hilton talks about the duration of the commitment. Smiths talks about following it through. Neither treats certification as arrival.
Make the promise. Follow it through. Then keep going.
That is a very different proposition from treating an accreditation, ranking or award as evidence that an organisation has arrived.
The problem with treating inclusion as a project is that culture refuses to stay still.
People join and leave. Leadership changes. Employee networks gain or lose momentum. Legislation, language and the expectations of LGBT+ people evolve, while organisations themselves restructure, acquire and grow.
An organisation can therefore have exactly the same policies, accreditation and values statement it had twelve months ago while the experience of working there has changed considerably.
A certificate, ranking or award can tell you something about a particular point in time. It cannot tell you what happens next.
We have to be particularly careful about this at Pride365 because we certify organisations.
Certification could very easily become part of the problem. Complete the assessment. Pass the standard. Receive the certification. Put the logo on the website.
Finished.
Except that is almost the opposite of how Pride365 is designed.
Our assessment establishes a starting point. Organisations then make a public pledge containing commitments that are specific, dated and checkable. Those commitments have to become actions, whether that means changing policies, building networks, training managers, supporting communities or addressing something the assessment identified.
Then we return to them.
Every year, partners are reviewed against the commitments they made, and recertification takes place every three years. Organisations that do not deliver against their commitments do not recertify.
The reason is simple. A certification that only tells you what an organisation was doing on the day it passed is not telling you enough.
The organisations most vulnerable to complacency are not necessarily those doing very little. Sometimes they are the organisations doing a lot.
They have the LGBT+ network. They have trained their managers, updated the policies, appointed the executive sponsor, marched at Pride and won the award. Perhaps they have done all of those things for years.
That creates evidence of progress, but it also creates reassurance. And reassurance can become dangerous when yesterday’s evidence starts answering today’s questions.
Nissan Motor GB first became Pride365 Certified in 2021. If certification were a project, the obvious conclusion would have been that the project was delivered.
Instead, the work continues.
It has continued through changes of Managing Director and expanded into the dealer network. The Pride Network has developed, ally networks have been built and LGBT+ visibility has extended into community activity including the London Marathon and Great Run Series.
The point is not that Nissan has been doing the same thing since 2021.
The point is that it hasn’t.
The organisation has kept asking what comes next.
That is what progress should look like. The value of achievement is not that you can point back to it. It is that it gives you somewhere new to start from.
Progress creates its own risk. The more evidence an organisation has of doing the right things, the easier it becomes to stop questioning whether those things are still working.
That matters because inclusion is experienced in the present. An award may recognise excellent work, a policy may represent genuine progress and a certification may demonstrate commitment, but none can guarantee the experience of the person arriving at work tomorrow.
We see this particularly clearly around Pride. A Bowel Cancer UK employee contrasted Pride365 certification with the rainbow logos that appear during Pride Month.
“It’s not quite the same as the rainbow logos we often see popping up around Pride Month, which swiftly disappear on 1 July.”
The criticism was not of visibility itself. It was of visibility without permanence.
The same principle applies beyond June. What matters is whether the commitment remains when attention moves elsewhere, priorities change and the people responsible for delivering it change too.
So celebrate the progress. Achieve the accreditation. Deliver the pledge. Win the award. There should be pride in getting these things right.
Just don’t confuse any of them with being finished.
An inclusive culture is not something an organisation completes and then preserves unchanged. It has to remain responsive to the people inside it and the world around it. What worked yesterday may still work tomorrow, but the only way to know is to keep asking.
Perhaps that is the real measure of progress. Not how confidently an organisation can describe everything it has already achieved, but whether it remains curious enough to question what needs to happen next.
The finished company does not exist.
The danger is the company that thinks it does.