THE CONSCIOUS BLOG

I caught COVID around a month ago. Luckily, I wasn’t too ill - just wiped out for a few days. The fever broke after three days, and the cough only lasted a week. A month later, though, my fatigue hasn’t shifted. I’ve spent more days than I’d like to admit this past month logging onto my meetings and writing documents from my bed or my sofa, unable to summon the energy to sit upright at my desk.

Conscious Culture is a Bolt initiative to balance execution with humanity and Bolt and so many other Conscious Culture companies are technology-driven companies. As a result, occasionally, we’ll bring you more technical discussions for your teams to discuss on how technology companies must apply the principles of a conscious company to strategic and tactical engineering decisions. Technology is a product of humans and it is impacted by our societal norms, definitions, and behaviors.

Humans are programmed to autonomously engage their environment both physically, mentally, and emotionally. The purpose for an automated response is for safety and secondarily for efficiency. Considering this, let’s look at how programming is affecting women, their lives, roles, and their success. Where does programming come from? Research reveals that it’s a combination of heredity, experience, and lifelong learning. This means we are the result of what family we were born in, how, where and when we were raised, and life experiences, including place and area of study.

In the past, we’ve talked about building inclusive workplaces, where staff can feel safe, supported, and valued. Diversity and inclusion go hand-in-hand with creating a Conscious Culture – in theory, diversity should reflect the communities workplace culture serve. It’s only been in recent years that employers are starting to realize the tangible benefits of taking diversity and inclusion initiatives seriously. Below, we’ll look into what that means and detail what workplace culture looks like for workers and organizations when D&I strategies are introduced and supported.

In late 2015, I was job hunting when I came across a Digital Inclusion Officer job at a well-known social change charity in the UK. I had spent the previous few years working in digital marketing and desperately needed a change. I read through the job description, did some research and applied. I had a lot of advantages growing up in a nice suburban neighborhood on California’s central coast, not far from Silicon Valley.

Stella Young said it best: “No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp.” As society begins to, slowly, consider accessibility, ramps are often at the top of the list. Synonymous with disability in general media, they have become a symbol for accessibility. Perhaps, too much of a symbol. To be clear, ramps are, definitely, one of the ways that society can become more accessible.

Building a Conscious Culture is, in part, recognizing that some of the things we regard as “defaults” are worth revisiting. In some ways, the whole idea of Conscious Culture is about challenging the status quo that work is supposed to be something you slog through. That’s a dated paradigm, and it’s what prompted us to create this library of information and the movement around it. In a similar way, creating a Conscious Culture should lead us to rethink biases in the technology we build.

Building an inclusive workplace is an important part of being a Conscious Company. Everybody wants to feel safe and supported in the environment where they spend the majority of their time. Prioritizing inclusion can no longer be an afterthought. But as with all aspects of Conscious Culture, inclusion isn’t a given. Building an inclusive workplace is something that needs to be actively worked on. This guide will give you tips and suggestions for creating an inclusive workplace for all.