Representation
Geek Week for All
At Ingram Micro, we believe that diversity is a key contributor to our continued success. We strongly support the personal growth and professional advancement of associates with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
In 2016, we launched the Women’s Leadership Initiative, an internal effort to champion women in their pursuit of leadership roles. Through a support network, workshops and forums, we encourage our female employees to take the next step in their careers.
Our teams around the world have engaged in initiatives to hire more veterans, provide jobs to people with disabilities and support the LGBTQ community. And of course, working for Ingram Micro is an opportunity to engage with colleagues from many different cultural backgrounds.
Geek Week is for everyone, using pop culture to bridge communities together is a big part of what the event is all about and we've seen this happening with a lot main stream pop culture. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier series dealt with racism in America and the difficulties of a person of color whether they're an Avenger or not. Using shows and movies to open up conversation and include everyone is important to the growth of our workplace and our world.
Past Geek Week events have included meetings with our LBGTQ+ group at Ingram to talk about their representation in the pop culture world. We met with the Women's Forum group and brought in two local female cosplayers to discuss how pop culture and comics have influenced them, and we met with our Diversity group and talked about equal representation of people of color in our favorite fandoms and how it has grown recently.
Geek Week: The Dress Code
Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.
While we're not encouraging full cosplay at work, there are a lot of things we have done with Geek Week to still fit into dress code. If the theme of the day was Harry Potter employees were encouraged to wear colors that represented their houses.
In our new hybrid environment, we have had over the past few years, we had days during Geek Week where we would tell employees to go all out with their Geek Week attire. If their daily schedule allowed it and they were working from home we would schedule a virtual team meeting to have some fun with everyone in costume.
The level in which you let your employees dress for Geek Week can be up to you, fun t-shirts, Geek Week polo shirts, or full costume it can work at all levels. Letting employees show off their favorite pop culture gear is a way to let them be seen as who they are outside of work amongst their team.
