Pride in Ourselves (recently renamed to OVO Pride) was set up around 5 years ago to offer a safe space for our LGBTQI+ community to come together.

It’s worth noticing we changed our name form Pride in Ourselves to OVO Pride to signal a shift from a space that was predominately run by and for LGBTIQ+ people, to a Network that is truly inclusive of everyone and is based on a shared sense of Pride in our people and in our OVO community overall, hence OVO Pride).

There was an immediate recognition of the network’s work, and we were given the empowerment to become proactive; leading on policy changes, including writing new progressive policies such as; transitioning at work, and assisted conception policies. We worked hard and fast to ensure that all our policies, communications, training material and images are gender neutral and inclusive of all identities.

We then took a strategic approach to ensuring that our managers and people at OVO are trained on creating an LGBTQI+ inclusive workplace through dedicated training courses, lunch and learn sessions, and human libraries. We set up a dedicated learning channel on our internal digital learning platform with hundreds of resources, covering everything from Trans 101 to How to be an Active Ally.

We delivered OVO Ally training to all our senior leaders, which includes developing an action plan on what they will do to go from a bystander to an active ally. This supports a top-down approach, highlighting to the rest of the business that all senior leaders are allies, and that the organisation takes allyship and education seriously.

We recently completed a review of our benefits to ensure they are fully inclusive. This directly led to OVO introducing a full trans inclusive healthcare package – our people have told us this has literally changed their life. We updated our HR system so pronouns can be added. We now ask all of our people to add their pronouns to their email signature and to share pronouns on every introductory call.