In companies across Ireland there’s an unprecedented drive to make LGBT+ people feel included and supported, with all sorts of initiatives from social events to workshops, to creating policies that recognise and respect the speciic issues employees may have. For this, our fourth workplace diversity issue, we meet some of the people championing a brave new working world. Words by Ellie Sell.

Danny Buttle

Chair of the Vodafone LGBT+ Friends Network

“Coming up to the marriage referendum in 2015, it started bringing a lot of things home to me about the bigger picture of being an open LGBT+ person. I was happily working in Vodafone, living with my fiancée, and things were going well for me, but I started thinking about doing something for people who might not be having such an smooth time in their organisations.

The way that I sought to make change was by working within Vodafone for it to be a more outspoken advocate for LGBT+ inclusion. I felt this would be my way of making a mark on the bigger piece.

The network is part of a larger group and one of the things it has worked on is an LGBT+ Role Model campaign. This has taken different forms in different markets, and in Ireland we looked for volunteers to come forward and tell us something about themselves, just a quick story. Everybody who volunteered told coming out stories and about what their lives had been like. It was hugely successful and the most read internal communications story we ever had. We put pictures of all the people up during Pride month and we kept the stories up on our screens. It was extremely effective, people responded to it very positively.

All of the LGBT+ Networks in all of the Vodafones came together in London two months ago to look at how we could drive LGBT+ inclusion. Now we’ve broken into small groups to drive different LGBT+ projects across the Vodafone markets.

Vodafone was lucky enough to be listed in the Stonewall Best Companies for LGBT+ Workers last year. The reason for this is that we operate in some challenging markets, where LGBT+ inclusion is not so secure. We were recognised for our ‘embassy model’, whereby we can assure that anyone who works for Vodafone is protected inside of our doors.

I think that’s going to be a work in progress and it’s something Vodafone will continue to grow with. We have had people engage in our LGBT+ webinars from countries in Africa, and from India and Egypt, where it’s difficult to be openly LGBT+. It’s part of the reason I got involved in the first place, because it’s impacting societal change on a much bigger scale.