The idea started in a room full of women talking honestly about what bothered them at work. What came out of it surprised me.
We had organised a gathering. Just the women of the company, sitting together, talking openly about what was working, what was not, and what they wished were different. The kind of conversation that rarely happens in formal settings because people are too careful, too aware of who is listening and what the feedback might cost them.
The goal was simple: understand what would make the office a more comfortable place to work in. Not a grand culture transformation. Just: what do you actually need? What is missing? What makes coming in every day harder than it should be?
Starting With the Basics
Some of the answers were straightforward. Women asked for better storage in the office so personal items did not have to live on desks or be tucked away awkwardly. They asked for sanitary products to be available in the washrooms. Sanitiser. Practical things. The kind of things that, when they are absent, create a small but constant friction. A reminder, repeated daily, that the space was not quite designed with you in mind.
These felt like the bare minimum. And yet they had not been there before anyone asked. That gap between what seems obvious in retrospect and what actually exists until someone names it is where a lot of inclusion work lives.
We made those changes. They were not difficult to make. And the effect, even of something as simple as knowing that a washroom has what you need, was more meaningful than the change itself might suggest. The office began to feel like a place that had considered you, not just accommodated you.
But the conversation did not stop at the physical. And the more we listened, the more something else emerged.
The Thing Nobody Had Named Out Loud
The women in the room were not describing harassment. They were describing something subtler and in some ways harder to address: the way casual swearing among certain colleagues had become a kind of cultural currency. The men who swore freely seemed at ease, connected, comfortable. Vendors responded to them warmly. The atmosphere around them felt loose and social in a way that was harder to access if you were not naturally part of that register.
The women did not swear like that. Not because they were told not to. Simply because it was not how they communicated. And in a workplace where that style had quietly become the default tone of belonging, they felt, without anyone intending it, slightly outside.
That distinction matters. Nobody in that room had done something wrong. But a culture had formed around a behaviour that was making some people feel less at home than others. And nobody had named it because it did not have an obvious name.
We decided to do something about it.
Fun Police
The Swear Jar was our intervention. Simple in concept: anyone who swore in the office contributed a small amount to a shared jar. Not a punishment. Not a policy. Just a visible, slightly ridiculous reminder that we had collectively decided to try something different.
The reaction was immediate and fairly predictable. We were called the fun police. The three of us, the women volunteers who had introduced the idea, became the target of affectionate mockery from colleagues who thought it was slightly absurd and also, we suspected, slightly uncomfortable to be nudged about something they had never considered a problem.
We held firm. Not aggressively. Not self-righteously. We just kept going, kept collecting, kept gently noting when the jar applied. We had said we would do it and we were going to do it.
Over time, something shifted. The frequency of casual swearing dropped significantly. Several women later mentioned that the tone of their team environments had changed in ways they could feel even if they could not always articulate what had changed. The jar still sits in the office. The money in it has never quite been spent, though the plan is to use it for a team meal at some point.
What This Taught Me About Culture
Culture is not changed by large-scale pronouncements or company-wide policies. It changes in small moments: what gets named, what gets laughed at, what gets quietly allowed to continue. The Swear Jar worked not because it was a sophisticated intervention but because it made something visible that had previously been invisible. It gave people a way to notice a behaviour they had stopped noticing.
And the physical changes, the storage, the washroom supplies, the small daily comforts, mattered for the same reason. Not because they solved a deep structural problem. Because they signalled something. A workplace that attends to what you actually need communicates that you were thought of before you arrived, not just after you raised a concern.
Designing culture is not so different from designing products. You observe what is actually happening rather than what you assume is happening. You identify the friction people have learned to work around. You create a small change and watch what it produces. You stay consistent even when the early reactions are resistant or dismissive.
Being called the fun police was not comfortable. But the willingness to be mildly ridiculous in service of something that mattered was part of what made it work. Nobody was afraid of us. They were slightly amused by us. And amusement, it turns out, is a reasonable entry point for change.
The point was never to make people feel bad about behaviours they had never considered problematic. The point was to create a workplace where everyone felt equally at home. The bare minimum was making sure the basics were there. The harder work was everything that came after.