Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEI+B) are fundamental elements for building a strong company culture. Stratacomm makes it a priority to actively foster these values, particularly as we grow our integrated service offerings and the diverse team behind the expertise. With our work-from-anywhere footprint now spanning Washington, D.C. and more than a dozen states, Stratacomm strives to continue learning and improving our processes to foster DEI+B within the company and in all our work.

This past year, Stratacomm proudly lived our DEI+B value in multiple ways. 

To ensure we truly know our own internal audience, we conducted an employee survey where individuals could self-identify demographics including race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability status and veteran status. This information is helping us build staff diversity and internal networking opportunities and resources.

Many employees told the partners they wanted greater transparency and clarity around compensation. Informed by outside experts and public relations and advertising industry market data, Stratacomm created and internally shared salary bands to ensure competitive pay for all our current 35 titles across the agency. This data helps us consider salaries across title, experience and performance to ensure salaries are applied equitably for everyone with that specific title. Salary bands will be reviewed annually to maintain competitiveness and equity.

We also held meetings and learning sessions.

Our DEI+B Council led four learning sessions, where we shared information and talked in breakout groups about allyship, pronouns and gendered language, and disability types and accommodations. Not only are these topics critical for us as a workplace, but also for us as communicators. With a range of clients spanning the public and private sector, we know that reaching audiences requires language and visuals that are respectful and resonant to all.

To that end, we are piloting DEI+B assessments of different types of public-facing communications within our content production processes for clients. We aim to explore broader applications of this process agency-wide to help clients elevate their awareness of potential sensitivities that could undermine inclusion and belonging.

Five open DEI+B meetings provided a forum for employees to discuss relevant issues and initiatives with peers. These meetings held space for conversations on cultural appropriation and appreciation, land acknowledgments and microaggressions. They also guided our new corporate social responsibility policy around volunteering and identified needs around formal and informal training.

We continue to take genuine, concrete and significant steps to build on our efforts to advance DEI+B, and we’re holding ourselves accountable year over year. Working with our longtime consultant in this area, we are currently fielding another anonymous DEI+B employee survey. The results of this survey will be shared with the agency with full transparency, benchmarked against results from previous years, and used to help our leadership team and DEI+B Council prioritize future activities.

Jayda Leder-Luis is a vice president and current co-chair of Stratacomm’s DEI+B Council. Maris Laughton is an account supervisor who leads Stratacomm’s internal marketing efforts.