Today’s guest blog comes from our two U.S. office leads, Jackie Kolek of New York and Ann Barlow of San Francisco, ahead of next Tuesday’s election day. Go vote!
Peppercomm has always fostered a work hard, play hard culture. We are constantly looking around the corner to see what’s next, creating new solutions and capabilities to prepare our clients for the new world of social activism and enabling them to address these challenges head-on and leverage the opportunities.
On November 6th we’ll temporarily put aside our relentless dedication to client service and put our employee’s civic duty at the top of our to-do lists. While the past two years have delivered a seemingly never-ending cycle of negative news, personal attacks and arguing across party (and sometimes family and friend) lines, the upside has been the growing passion about, and attention to, the critical issues that matter to us as Americans and individuals. This Election Day we want to ensure our employees can exercise their right to have their voices heard and encourage them to do just that. We’ve designated Election Day as a “Flex Day,” which means employees can work from anywhere, come in late, leave early, extend their lunch, or make any arrangement they need to make voting as easy as possible. We’ve also marked it a “meeting-free day,” rescheduling all internal meetings to free up more time. Since not all states make it as easy as it should be to vote, and we know some employees will face long lines or challenges voting by mail, it is our duty as an employer to help our team exercise their right to vote – regardless of the challenges.
In addition to ensuring our employees can vote, we want make sure we encourage them to vote and celebrate them for doing so. We value diversity within our firm (our executive leadership team is 80 percent female) and believe that diversity can take place in many forms, including diversity of thought and values. Therefore, we urge our employees to make their individual voices count on Election Day. We’re asking each of our team members to snap a selfie of themselves with their “I voted” sticker. To celebrate these voices being heard, we’ll be hosting a free lunch for employees later in the week where employees will use their “I voted” sticker as their entry ticket (and in the spirit of inclusiveness, our non-US citizen employees get in for free).