Hanna Stepanenko, Inclusion and Employee Experience Manager at JTI Ukraine
A few months ago, JTI Ukraine released an Inclusive Language Guide, a paper resource that is visually attractive and helpful in the team’s daily work. The very first experience of using it demonstrated its real value: it gave no "ready-made" correct answers, but helped people stop before saying something thoughtless.
The idea for the Inclusive Language Guide didn’t appear out of the blue. At JTI Ukraine, we speak of the environment as something more than merely a physical space. Of course, we need ramps, shelters, or physical accessibility. However, it is important for us that people feel safe both physically and mentally.
Language has always been part and parcel of this discourse. Words have an impact a person’s feelings as they can offer support and help a person feel respected and accepted, or, on the contrary, they can hurt, even without any bad intentions, simply because of ignorance.
We do believe that a safe environment should be formed simultaneously at several tiers: through space, through interaction rules, through support culture, and through language. No tier is more or less important: we care equally about all of them.
Why Demanding Inclusive Language Doesn’t Guarantee Getting It
Once, at an office meeting, I heard a colleague say "disabled person" instead of "person with a disability". My first reaction was simple — I wanted to put the colleague straight. But I stopped short as I asked myself an uncomfortable question: Do I have the right to correct a person if they were never told what was right? It would be at least unfair to demand inclusive language without providing any instruments for that. And a demand without guidance just turns into an approach, changing nothing.
I shared this case with the team of DEI Ambassadors, and we started looking for such a tool together. We found that, indeed, there were many vocabularies of inclusive language. Something else was a problem: they were large, academic,
scattered across various sources and overloaded with theory. There was no sense in promoting these vocabularies, hoping that someone would read or study them. And we found no simple, concise format suitable for everyday use, as we had intended.
So, we decided to create it ourselves. We deemed it important to have a palpable thing one can hold in their hands, not just another "check-the-box" audit, but a visible demonstration that the cross-functional team focused on diversity and inclusion actually serves the people — including those working on production lines and in the field, far from presentations and nice words. We sought to lay the foundation capable of changing the environment.
One can talk endlessly about respect and empathy at training sessions, but people need to see that daily, both through the company’s actions and physically — on their tables and in their hands. When you create conditions and accessible resources instead of repeating slogans, workplaces also change.
A Person on the Right, a Person on the Left
However, the guide is only the visible top of something much bigger. It is a part of the "Our People.Diverse" programme, where the title conveys its essence: we remain united, remain a team, but recognise at the same time that we are all different, and that’s OK. And here the language forms a cornerstone. This guide is based on a principle that is, in fact, a code of humane behaviour: the person always comes first, and only then do their appearance, profession, ethnicity, race, or disability, whether visible or invisible, come into play. We even created our own catchphrase. Imagine two people standing near a tree: one person in a wheelchair, the other on prosthetic legs. How should I ask someone to contact them? I shouldn’t say "approach the person in the wheelchair" or "the person with a prosthetic leg," but simply "the person on the right or the person on the left." The person comes first, and everything else comes later: their job title, appearance, diagnosis, or experience.
A Language You Would Not Master in a Year
Language was always important, but the full-scale war changed everything. There are more and more veterans, people with disabilities, internally displaced persons and people who have lost loved ones living among us. Inclusive language can hardly be mastered in a month or a year. That’s why if we want to have an environment that is comfortable for everyone, we should start to shape it now. I recently heard a telling example at an event: in 2014, everyone was referring to "ATO guys" without even thinking about how traumatic the term was. But now we say "veterans" or "people from the Defence Forces". Language is alive and evolving, and we are the ones who shape it.
When a Person Starts Reflecting
Did anything actually change? Yes, it did, and you can see that best in little details.
Teams began choosing words more carefully, and pauses emerged when a person stopped for a second to recall how to say something in the right manner. Once, during a conversation that wasn’t even about work, I called a horse "old" and was immediately reprimanded with a question: "What kind of language comes from a person promoting exclusion?" It’s funny, but that’s actually the best proof that the principle has sunk in. If language is a weapon, as Maksym Rylskyi put it, then it is used now much more carefully. It is not about idealism — we are living and emotional creatures, and sometimes we allow ourselves to be different. It is about intentions — people started thinking about what they say, to whom and when. And this is about caring.
Of course, scepticism was also present. I was far from expecting excitement: some people responded to the guide with reserve, some put it silently aside, and some made jokes about it in private. It’s OK and it’s honest. However, another, more important thing happened. People took the guide home and we did not forbid it. One of my colleagues, after looking through it at home, said that it was something worth teaching children from kindergarten. And then I had an insight that the first stone had been laid and that the tool was effective — not because everyone was excited, but because people talked about it at home, between themselves and beyond their workplaces. And people discuss only those things that catch their attention.
That is why we, instead of hiding this experience, openly share it. We do not want to be the only cool place to work. We want many such places to appear.
After all, an inclusive environment stems from many different things: from autonomous shelters that save lives and from words that defend dignity.
