cinch celebrates pride

Like our customers, our people are at the heart of our business. We want our actions to reflect this in everything we do.  To celebrate Pride, we took 50 of our employees and a huge cinch-ified truck to participate in the Manchester Pride Parade. 

We’re completely open to new ideas and new ways of working so when the opportunity arose for us to show off the culture that makes cinch what it is, we jumped at the chance. As we paraded through Manchester city centre, handing out fans, led by a cinch-wrapped car, we’ve never felt a bigger sense of togetherness. We are a close-knit community of individuals. From the day you join, we respect one another, learn from each other, celebrate our differences and thoroughly enjoy working together. Pride solidified that for us and whilst we can’t rely on a big parade to push this inclusive message forward, it’s a fun place to start.  

It’s important that our LGBTQ+ community feel supported every day. Over the weekend we spoke to countless employees about how important it is that cinch is a part of Pride weekend and what this means for them as a business. Overwhelmingly, there was a sense of reassurance from them to be part of a company willing to go out of their way to show their support for their community.  

“I’m so happy that a company I have been working for since the beginning is supporting Pride. By supporting Pride, they are supporting me.”

Tim Roberts, Service Support Analyst

“I’m proud of cinch for choosing to support pride, it makes me feel like I’m working for a progressive organisation that is accepting and diverse.” 

Lee Dewhurst, Supplier Manager

But in saying that, we know there’s so much more that can be done.  

In transforming an industry, we always need to be thinking ahead. Pride weekend highlighted a lot of things that we as a business need to consider. For a workplace that is predominantly based online, we need to get creative with how we show our allyship. Events like Pride are essential in doing this. If we can show support in and out of work, we can show not only our employees but also the outside world that we support and value our people. That’s how we prove ourselves as employers.  

So, we asked our colleagues: what can cinch do to support you better? 

Stewart Livingstone: “For cinch to support us better we need to get our diversity policies and our colleague networks up and running.  I’m actively working on getting our LGBTQ+ networks with our HR teams. This will be a huge support to our colleagues and help to educate the rest of the business on LGBTQ+ issues.” 

Lew Dewhurst: “It would be great for cinch to have a community where like-minded colleagues and allies can get together to support each other.” 

Jack Bramhall: “This is more outside of LGBTQ+ community specifically but setting up some sort of forum/committee focused on community engagement and charities with budget set aside for it would be incredibly influential.”  

Tim Roberts: “cinch is already doing so much. But I want to see it happen all year round, not just at Pride or during Pride month.” 

We take ownership and accountability for the things we do as a business and that extends to our employee policies too. We welcome different perspectives, that’s how we move forward. Taking this on board, we know what we need to do. We’ll build up our communities, take steps to bring different parts of the business together, actively educate ourselves and work together to build our LGBTQ+ network.  

Really, the answer to the question is to keep asking that question. cinch is ever evolving, the way we work is constantly evolving too. We want our people to be as involved in pushing these initiatives further. Because when we move forward, we move forward together.