Why It Hurts Most Where We Expect Safety. What “Safe Workplaces” Owe Us When They Promise Inclusion
- Rea Eldem
- Dec 2
- 7 min read
Updated: Dec 3
There is a particular kind of harm that does not arise from open hostility, but from the slow and often invisible erosion of trust. It appears in moments when we have allowed ourselves to relax, when we have believed the promise of safety, and when we have made ourselves more visible than we otherwise would have dared. This type of harm is not louder than others, but it reaches deeper, precisely because it occurs where we expected care rather than defence.
The Workplace as a Promised Safe Space
Organisations across sectors have, over the last years, increasingly positioned themselves as inclusive employers. This shift has taken the form of public diversity statements, internal belonging campaigns, employee-led networks and carefully curated external communication. These initiatives constitute a deliberate narrative about what it is like to belong inside these institutions. And this narrative is one that gets up hopes and nourishes trust.
This can be extremely impactful in reaching out to talents of marginalised groups. At the same time, the moment an organisation articulates itself as a safe or inclusive workplace, it produces a shift in psychological risk. It implicitly encourages people who have historically been excluded or marginalised to lower their guard, to reveal more of themselves, and to trust internal systems that promise protection. The language of safety changes what feels possible, but also what becomes dangerous when that promise collapses.
What follows is a form of emotional dissonance. The institution continues to perform progress externally while remaining structurally unchanged internally. The burden of closing that gap is rarely carried by leadership. It is carried by those who believed the invitation and who now find themselves in the driver's seat of a change process that they are expected to take on.
The Rainbow Sticker as a Social Contract
Most marginalised people learn early how to move through spaces that were never built for them. They learn when to stay silent, when to soften themselves, when to anticipate rejection, and how to calibrate their presence to minimise risk. In openly hostile environments, discrimination often feels crude but predictable. The violence is structural, but it is rarely surprising. The more complex form of hurt emerges in spaces that explicitly position themselves as protective, affirming or progressive.
Of course, this does not only happen in the workplace. It also happens inside queer communities, chosen families, activist spaces and intimate social circles are frequently described as places of refuge. They are framed as counter-spaces to dominant, normative structures — spaces where marginalised people can finally rest, express themselves freely, and feel understood without constant explanation. For many, these environments do offer moments of relief. Yet they also carry a heavy emotional promise: here, you should be safe.
Safe Workplaces and Inclusion as Marketing
When harm occurs in such places, it does not only wound; it destabilises. Being misgendered by a stranger is painful. Being misgendered by someone who introduces themselves as an ally, or by someone who claims shared community, creates a different kind of fracture. It undermines not only self-worth, but orientation: if not here, then where?
The consequence is that the injured person carries both the hurt and the responsibility to manage it. It is this emotional architecture that increasingly shapes contemporary workplaces. It is thus important to be aware of the impact of a good PR campaign and to follow suit with according measures. What does this mean, exactly?
If you're a manager, a small rainbow sticker on your office functions as more than decoration. It performs a specific social act. It communicates not only political positioning, but behavioural expectation: inside this space, you will not need to defend your right to exist. When that expectation is violated — when a person is misgendered, questioned or subtly ridiculed — the harm exceeds the immediate moment. What is lost is the imagined safety that was actively produced by the symbol itself. The damage lies in the contradiction between promise and practice.
The Fragility of Manufactured Safety
To prevent this, it’s crucial to hold each other accountable for the messages you put into the world. If your workplace promotes diversity and inclusion, you’re asking prospective employees to give you trust upfront. It is then your job to assure that you live up to the expectations you set yourself.
One of the more uncomfortable dynamics within contemporary organisational culture is that visibility is often celebrated before safety is structurally embedded. People are invited to share pronouns, tell their stories, and act as symbols of organisational progress, while the institutional capacity to respond to harm remains underdeveloped.
The consequences of this are quietly cumulative. Marginalised employees begin to regulate themselves again, not because they lack confidence or resilience, but because they have learned that openness comes at a cost. The workplace, once imagined as progressive, becomes another site of calculated self-protection.
These patterns rarely appear in formal culture audits. They surface instead through consistent but easily overlooked signals: who speaks in meetings and who does not, whose discomfort is minimised, whose harm is reframed as misunderstanding, and whose presence is tolerated rather than supported.
Psychological Safety as a Material Working Condition
Psychological safety is often treated as a leadership style or a team dynamic. In practice, it functions more like infrastructure. It determines whether people can think clearly, take risks, admit uncertainty and exist without constant strategic self-monitoring. When this infrastructure is absent, the effects are neither dramatic nor immediately visible. They emerge slowly and systemically, through patterns such as:
Persistent underrepresentation of marginalised staff in senior roles
Disproportionate emotional labour carried by those already excluded
Silent withdrawal from participation, innovation and dissent
These are not cultural accidents but rather predictable outcomes of institutions that declare safety without building the conditions necessary to sustain it.
Inclusion as Obligation Rather Than Aesthetic
There is a profound difference between aspiration and obligation. Organisations often position diversity as a future-oriented value, something they are “working towards”. However, the moment inclusion becomes a public identity, it ceases to be an aspiration and becomes a responsibility.
Promising safety does not require perfection. It requires structure, consistency and willingness to redistribute power when harm occurs. Without this, inclusion functions as an aesthetic object: polished, visible, and emotionally consumable, but politically hollow.
What Organisations Must Do If They Claim Safety
If inclusion is treated as a public identity, it must be anchored in material organisational practice. Not in symbolic gestures, but in systems that shape daily reality. Organisations that claim to be safe must therefore accept that safety is not a sentiment, but an obligation that requires work, resources and a willingness to be uncomfortable.
This does not require perfection, but it does require deliberate structure. At minimum, this means:
Building reporting and response systems that are independent from reputation management, so that harm can be named without fear of retaliation or reputational silence.
Training leaders not only in diversity language, but in active intervention, so that managers are capable of interrupting microaggressions, misgendering and policing behaviour in real time rather than deferring responsibility to HR.
Treating psychological safety as a working condition, audited and resourced in the same way as workload, performance and compliance, rather than as a cultural aspiration.
Creating clear accountability pathways with real consequences, including when harm is caused by senior or high-performing staff, rather than protecting those with institutional power.
Moving beyond symbolic visibility — such as Pride campaigns or surface-level allyship — and redirecting those resources towards structural protection for marginalised employees inside the organisation.
These measures are not excessive. They are the minimum conditions for a workplace that invites trust to be ethically allowed to benefit from that trust.
The Question That Reveals the Truth
The decisive question is rarely asked in onboarding sessions, annual reports or leadership town halls. It is not whether people feel inspired, welcomed or represented. It is this: What happens, concretely and predictably, when someone is harmed inside your organisation? The answer does not live in values statements. It lives in procedures, consequences and patterns of protection. And it is this answer that ultimately determines whether safety is real, or merely promised.
What IN-VISIBLE Offers
IN-VISIBLE was built for exactly the organisational gap this text describes: the distance between intention and infrastructure. Our work begins where symbolic inclusion ends. We support organisations in building the structural, relational and leadership capacities required to ensure that queer employees are not merely visible, but safe. This includes translating abstract commitments into concrete practice, helping teams recognise the emotional labour often outsourced to marginalised staff, and designing systems that prevent harm rather than manage it retroactively. We do not treat inclusion as a branding exercise — we treat it as institutional design.
What we offer is not a predefined checklist, but a way of working that centres lived experience, clarity and accountability. We partner with organisations to develop processes for responding to harm, equip leaders to intervene early and consciously, and build cultures where queer people do not have to negotiate their existence in order to participate. Our approach is deliberately pragmatic. It meets organisations where they are, but refuses to leave them there. If you claim to be a safe space for queer employees, we help you build the structures that make that claim ethically defensible.
A New Offering: Drag Workshops For Corporates
This year, we are extending our work with a new format: a drag-based workshop that uses performance, exaggeration and queer world-building as tools for leadership development. Drag operates with a level of intentionality that most organisations lack — it reveals how identity is constructed, how power is performed, and how confidence can be embodied rather than demanded.
In this workshop, participants learn from drag artists not as entertainers, but as strategists of presence, boundary-setting and creative resistance. It is an invitation to understand inclusion not as compliance, but as craft: a deliberate and imaginative practice that reshapes how people show up, lead and create spaces where others can flourish.
