Flight Templates are templated flights, or sets of questions, written by some of the world’s preeminent business leaders. With Flight Templates, Balloon users get unparalleled access to seasoned perspectives and proven business strategies across all areas of business, including leadership, product, marketing & sales, innovation, employee experience, culture, and more. This feature is part of a series on The Insight that profiles Balloon’s Flight Template authors.
How do you keep your workforce motivated—and stay sane yourself—when everything seems upside down? Daisy Auger-Dominguez, VICE Media’s Chief People Officer, has one idea: Stick to your rituals.
“Rituals, especially the ones where you share some part of your individuality or your personal life, are so important in these times,” Auger-Dominguez said. “It's a really impactful way of humanizing and engaging everyone, but it has to come from the top.”
Little rituals—like her Monday morning “What I did this weekend” email, one of Auger-Dominguez’s favorites—are only one of many best DEI practices that the highly-recognized Latina leader has cultivated since she joined VICE in mid-March. Traditions foster a sense of belonging and inclusion among a team, and this one in particular, Auger-Dominguez explained, allows her to set an example that it’s okay to bring your personhood to work. As a People executive, a Planned Parenthood board member, and the founder and CEO of Auger-Dominguez Ventures, Auger-Dominguez works closely with internal and external leaders to implement tangible practices to help ensure that their respective team members feel heard, seen, valued, and purposeful in their jobs, even when times are tough.
“My principal focus is the well-being of our employees, their engagement, their professional advancement, their connections to each other and to their jobs,” Auger-Dominguez said. “To me, DEI is so much more than so-called diversity indicators.”
Now, leaders don’t need to work with Auger-Dominguez directly to learn from her. Auger-Dominguez’s flight template series, Transforming DEI Culture and Policy, is now live on Balloon, with four distinct flights.
- DEI Audit
- Transform DEI for Remote Work
- Support Marginalized Employees
- Inclusive and Transparent Leadership
These days, team members need more support than ever. Auger-Dominguez defined these past few months as a period of sustained exhaustion, and throughout her tenure at VICE, she has grappled with the difficult task of rallying an exhausted workforce.
“First, you need great managers, because they’ll be the first people who can make employees feel valued,” Auger-Dominguez said. “Second, you need to be able to celebrate, even when things are hard. If we don't celebrate our values, we lose who we are, and your team members will wonder why they come to work every day.”
At VICE, celebration comes in many forms. Some are cheerful, like the weekly What to Watch newsletter that gathers the week’s best content from any of VICE Media’s many subsidiaries. Some are less so, like the listening sessions VICE held in the summer, during which any team member can share their workplace experiences with microaggressions, otheredness, inequity, and other forms of systemic inequality. But whether they’re uplifting or grounding, Auger-Dominguez considers every moment of transparency, every piece of constructive criticism, every newfound (as Angela Davis put it) condition for change, one more step toward a more diverse, inclusive, and truly equitable working world.
“Those little moments of celebration, for our work and our contributions to the world, constantly remind folks of who we are and what we stand for,” Auger-Dominguez said. “That's the ritual that I want to keep.”