I Track My Company’s Empty Promises in a Public-Facing Document

My living log of leadership’s unfulfilled commitments about diversity and work culture has become an internal truth-telling tool.

Photo by Flipsnack on Unsplash

A few months after another all-hands meeting filled with bright slides and bolder claims, I opened a new Google sheet and gave it the title of “Promises vs Progress.”

This was the moment I decided to stop waiting for everything to get better on its own.

The concept was simple enough. Every single time someone in leadership made a public declaration about diversity, well-being, and transparency, I would log it. The date, the quote, the context, and, of course, the status.

In the first few weeks, it was harmless enough. Just a few rows, a respectable record. Then it grew much faster than I imagined it would.

It began as a quiet act of survival. I could only feel gaslighted at meetings where leadership members patted themselves on the back for demonstrating empathy despite quietly defunding a mental health budget. I could only feel gaslighted when they discussed equity while quietly parading out the same members on the same deck of slides.