Episode #8: Building Authentic Company Cultures with Sophie Wood
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Sophie Wood, co-founder of Belonging Base, tells the story of her personal journey as a trans woman and her mission to foster inclusivity in company cultures. From her beginnings in the UK Police Service to leading global Diversity & Inclusion initiatives in the online gambling industry, Sophie has contributed greatly to advocacy and education in a number of industries. Tune in to discover Sophie's insights and aspirations for creating authentic and safe spaces in today's corporate world.
Notes
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Trinity: I'm Trinity Shaw, Wondr Labs apprentice at Wondr Nation. Welcome to another episode of Level Up with Wondr.
This episode is being recorded in the month of June, which is Pride Month. In observation, we're highlighting LGBTQ plus leaders in gaming. Today we're joined by Sophie Wood. Sophie is co founder of Belonging Base, a company that offers talks, workshops, and coaching sessions to promote human connections and transform company cultures through inclusivity.
As a trans woman, Sophie brings a unique perspective, drawing from her experiences living as both male and female. She is dedicated to creating psychologically safe and inclusive spaces that foster a sense of belonging for everyone.
Sophie has worked in the UK police service where she transitioned and became an advocate for trans inclusion. She joined the online gaming industry where she worked in various roles including customer service, fraud investigation, AML, and more. She also led global diversity and inclusion initiatives for companies like Entain and LottoLand, introducing industry first inclusion policies.
Sophie is committed to breaking down barriers, education, and transforming the workplace through inclusion.
Welcome to Level Up with Wondr, Sophie. We're so happy to have you.
Sophie: Well, thank you very much.
Trinity: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into gaming. You started your professional career with the UK police service, tell us a little bit about that experience and why you decided to change your career.
Sophie: The kind of job I held the longest in my life was working for the UK police service, and I was in learning development. I specialized in training, information and intelligence systems and intelligence collection, which meant that I mostly worked with CID, the criminal investigation department.
So I ended up specializing and training those detectives how to investigate crimes using data from communications networks, Wi Fi networks, and how to put that data into intelligence led interviews to challenge alibis, that kind of thing, and also to present evidence at court, so they can actually get somebody bang to rights for their, their wrongdoings.
So that's quite an exciting job. In 2011, I got seconded to the Home Office, which is the UK government, to lead a national training program to train the whole of the UK Police Service on something called the Police National Database. UK policing is quite complex,- so in the UK there are 43 different police service areas who all do the same things very differently because they've just kind of, you know, grown kind of randomly, if you like.And so what the Police National Database does, it's like a Google search on local force intelligence systems. So you can actually type in somebody's name, say a vehicle or a mobile telephone number and this search engine will reach into all of those 43 different local systems and bring back responses, thus converting all the local systems into one big national system.
I'm mentioning that because that was a real feather in my cap in terms of a UK policing career being the national training lead on, on that. And it's also when I transitioned and became Sophie that you can see before you know. So in the halfway through that secondment was, was when I, I transitioned.
That was quite, quite challenging probably more so for the people working around me. I was a bit unfair. I didn't give any warning to the people around me. We literally had a, a long weekend, and I came back into work and said, 'Hello everybody I'm now Sophie.' and everyone was like, Ah, what are we going to do?
They were quite, quite scared. It was an interesting time. I was working with great people and through, you know, various kind of open, open and sensitive conversations, we sorted things out fairly swiftly.
I was Sophie for the last six weeks of that secondment. And then I returned back to UK police, West Mercia police, which is in the centre of the UK.
I went back, that's my home police service area, and I, I went back there, back to training CID as, as Sophie.
Trinity: You spoke about your transition and can you share a little more about any challenges and how you overcame them?
Sophie: Transitioning whilst working at police headquarters, where I did, was particularly challenging, because I was working in, say, learning development and my wife, as well, was also working in the same building, in the same office as me.
So, as well as introducing the new me to my work colleagues in that office, we also had to manage how Danielle's team of people reacted as well. And one of the challenges was that people perceived that I had committed a wrongful act on Danielle because we were kind of normal, quote normal, married couple.
And then I transitioned, and it wasn't something that Danielle had bargained for in our relationship. And so people who worked with Danielle were quite defensive on her behalf. And so that was a tension in the workplace that needed to be managed. The thing that worked really well was that the police force recognized that they didn't have an inclusive policy.
They put me and Danielle at the center of how things would be managed. So we actually had a big meeting off site with me and my manager, Danielle and her manager the head of the people team, human resources, and the chief superintendent in charge of, of this area.
We had a, just had a planning meeting, basically, how we would kind of roll out how we'd manage everything from changing documentation, changing ID, to considering whether I continue in my role as a trainer or whether I choose to do something that was less kind of vocal and more in the background.
We then discussed how to educate and create a sense of empathy with Danielle's team and together we created a, a really good plan, which basically Danielle and I both kind of signed off and, and we drove that, that plan and, and that that really helped worked really well.
I elected to continue in my training role because when you're training, you're actually using your voice and you're speaking out loud all the time. My life outside of work when I transitioned was, was really, really quite terrible.
Sophie: My family had a really bad reaction to me coming out as trans, my brother, my parents. So I told them, in 2011, and they then wrote me a letter saying that as far as they're concerned I was dead. So, and that was the last time I actually had contact my family. So that's still pretty raw, as you can tell.
But it was also difficult as well because people used to seeing a different me around and they were quite hostile to me. I kind of tended not to go out quite as much. Initially my marriage as well had broken up, the house that we lived in was being sold and so I had to change accommodation as well.
Things were very much kind of up in the air for me , so I kind of retreated into my four walls rather than kind of going out and interacting with the local community at that time. To be able to come into work and actually train and use my voice and speak to people and engage with people in a kind of structured setting was a real godsend to me.
And so when I actually came into work, it actually felt like a safe haven for me. So even though I didn't have unified good reactions from my, my colleagues and wider colleagues, I did have sufficiently good reactions and enough support for me to actually continue in my job and actually then begin to thrive in it once again.
Trinity: It's amazing that you were able to find support the place that you worked. When you started working in gaming you had already transitioned. What was that experience like?
Sophie: So that was that was one of the scariest my first day working for what is now Entain, in Gibraltar, was was really scary because I didn't know how people were going to react to me. It's a brand new industry, I knew kind of very, very little about it. The reason for me moving to Gibraltar to work in online gaming was personal reasons.
I mentioned earlier that my relationship with my wife had broken down because of the transition, it wasn't what she was bargaining for.
What we did was we enabled Danielle to leave the relationship by kind of moving, moving her from the UK to Spain. So we live in Spain and work in Gibraltar.
I helped Danielle with that move, we drove down together to Spain from, from the UK. We got Danielle settled in, and then two weeks later, I, I flew back to the UK.
And as Danielle tells the story, at that point, she realized she'd made a mistake, and that she was actually in love with me as a person, and we wanted to be together.
So we then spent the next 18 months trying to get me a job in Gibraltar, to actually come out and join Danielle in Spain.
It was a big deal when the moment actually arrived, and it'd been difficult finding a job in gaming, because culturally, at the time, particularly in the gaming companies in the Gibraltar jurisdiction weren't really great at recognizing transferable skills.
So if you to characterize a job interview, say for any position, say an AML team leader, or say for gambling manager, then they would look at your CV and look at your experience. And if you hadn't had direct experience in that role, then you weren't considered, you know, to be a suitable candidate.
They couldn't say, for example, that teaching detectives how to investigate crime and even financial crime couldn't translate into working in a, you an AML team in, in the gambling industry.
After several negative interview experiences, I had a successful interview, I would say. And I started at the ground floor in customer services. I'd say it was a big day, my first day, but I was really lucky.
I just joined a really great kind of cohort of people, we're all joining on the same day and we just really hit it off.
We created a car share to get in and out of work, so there's like five of us coming in and out every day, which helped create those bonds. I had a really positive training experience within that cohort, and that led to a really positive experience in, in customer services working for Gala Coral as it was then, which is, which has now been subsumed by Entain.
That positive experience was purely down to the people around me, and that's twice I've mentioned good experiences and reference my immediate teams.
That's really significant because my kind of success and my enjoyment and my thriving at work is entirely dependent on the people that I have around me. Not many people, let me put it in this context, not many people meet a trans person. So they don't really kind of get how we're just normal human beings. So they get influenced by kind of the media narrative, which is often completely false.
And, you know, loads of fear is created around trans people, and that's most people's kind of experience. But when I'm actually working with a team of people day in, day out literally, that ignorance disappears in the first 30 minutes of meeting. And then from that moment forward, we just have normal interactions as co workers.
We develop relationships as anybody else would do because they're normal human beings and I'm a normal human being. So there's actually, in reality, no barriers to those relationships forming. That happened when I was working at the headquarters in the police service and that happened, fortunately, when I started work in the gaming industry as well.
That's something that I talk about a lot when I talk about creating inclusive cultures in the workplace is, it's the people around you. It's the people in the teams that you work with, it's the people who manage those teams that actually create your culture. That's been my absolute real experience in, in both workplaces.
Trinity: How has your personal identity as a transgender woman and your experiences influenced your career path and advocacy work, particularly in developing inclusion policies for marginalized communities?
Sophie: Okay, that's, that's a really good question, I think one of the negative things about the way I'm treated as a, as a trans woman is, is being treated as other. So quite a lot of people perceive my identity as, as less than human. And so you get this term othering, and that's, you know, I've experienced that a lot.
When you're in a room with somebody, for example, and you get a sense that you are being tolerated by somebody who's obviously got a problem with you, and you can pick up on that in the atmosphere in a room, it's an absolutely awful sensation. Because, you know, from my perspective, I'm like, how dare anybody tolerate me? I'm not here to be tolerated.
I've got as much right to be in this room, you know, as anybody else does. That kind of treatment, that othering, really has an impact on you, as a member of a minoritized group. And I recognize that this experience will have been experienced by other people in other minoritized groups.
So, including people of color, people of different sexual orientation, people of different religious faiths to the, to the majority, people who are differently abled or neurodivergent, all, all of those kind of differences have this one thing in common, that they are different from, you know, the supposed majority of people.
That kind of indignation and, and that outrage on my behalf, I managed to turn that outwards and that's helped me to advocate for diversity and inclusion in the large. And also enabled me to have an awful lot of empathy with other minoritized groups and acknowledge the experiences and the history that they've experienced.
Whilst different to mine, have many things in common that we can share and use in solidarity with each other.
Trinity: Can you share any specific moments or milestones that have shaped your approach to advocating for and promoting diversity and inclusion?
Sophie: I think a key moment for me in the UK police service, which really inspired me was I went to a, a national conference of senior policing people.
And at that conference, I was sat at the dinner table with a lady called Sylvia Lancaster. And she's probably more known in the UK rather than, than globally. But she was at that conference because her daughter had been murdered in a park in Manchester in the north of England. She was murdered trying to defend her boyfriend from being attacked by a group of people.
And the reason that they were attacked was because they were goths. They looked visibly different to the other people around them, so the kind of kind of goth subculture was, was what they kind of represented visually. And these lads took against them.
In response to that this brilliant lady Sylvia Lancaster created a charity in their daughter's name -to stamp out prejudice, hatred, intolerance, everywhere and I got really inspired by that. Coupled with the fact that every time I go to a conference representing work I would like to bring something back.
And so what I did, I came back into West Mercia Police Headquarters and I spoke to the Deputy Chief Constable, who's like the second in charge of the whole place, and actually persuaded him that it would be a good idea to bring the charity's educational resources into all primary schools in the local area, which taught children how to be accepting of other people's differences, particularly visual differences.
So, for me, that was a really big success. It taught me the importance of being able not just to influence your work culture, but also influence the wider society around you through activism and hopefully some, some good decision making.
But that, that's a real standout moment for me, and that has influenced my approach to diversity & inclusion. Certainly working within the gaming industry as being, acknowledging that education is the enemy of ignorance. And so by educating people as much and as widely as you can, then that's going to have a significant difference to the way that people think about other people.
As long as you tell good stories but the people telling those stories are those people. Everybody speaking with their own voice and their voice being elevated, and that's absolutely key. And that's one of the things I was really proud of at Entain you know, doing things like Black History Month, for example, which in the UK is in October. I'd reached out to all of our black colleagues in the UK and in Gibraltar, and , I actually got those people to share stories that they were happy with, but also to share their experience and in their communities. The biggest highlight of that was one of the guys that worked in learning development with me was actually a former teacher and in his local community he had created an online platform for including black people in UK history for children because he recognized it wasn't in the curriculum because black people were excluded from teaching, you know, the stories in UK education. I interviewed him about that project and he got the opportunity to speak about that to the whole of Entain, and then the company ended up actually investing in that project and contributed a lot of the funding to enable that platform to exist in the greater London area.
Trinity: I love that you've taken your personal journey and transformed your passion in a way to help others through policy. Did you face any challenges in trying to develop policies over the course of your career?
Sophie: I've had very little resistance in introducing policies like we introduced the trans inclusion policy at Entain, which again, which I thought was a great piece of work, and it was a good levelling policy because it kind of enabled an equity of, of support across all the different kind of countries that, that we were in as, as a company.
Senior leaders in most gaming companies that I've come across don't actually know enough to challenge what you're doing so as long as you're not spending, or intending to spend huge amounts of cash, then you very much get a kind of free reign to develop the policies that you want to develop.
Sophie: What I'll say about policies, and it's a good question, is that I've had some great working experiences in companies that don't have any policies in place, and I've had some really bad working experiences in companies that do have policies in place to actually protect people.
So, again, it brings me back to something I'm passionate about, and that is, it's the culture of your company that matters to people's lived work experience. Policies have their place, they are useful, but they're not the main feature.
Trinity: It's amazing what an incredible impact you've been able to make and you are continuing to make impact through your company Belonging Base, which you recently founded.What was the inspiration behind this consultancy and what are some of the offerings?
Sophie: The company is, it's Danielle, my wife and myself, we created it and it's a combination of our lived experience in the workplace, both in the private sector and in the public sector. So when I say public sector, that's a UK reference to kind of working for the, you know, government department.
It's based on our learnings throughout work experience. So for example, me as a transgender woman, it uses all of those experiences, but it also our experience working in kind of people teams, human resources ,working as diversity and inclusion belonging professionals.
We think, it cuts right to the heart of what makes a difference for people's working lives, as I say, is actually working with companies to influence the culture that they have. So there's, there's a great American former basket player, I'm a huge fan of, called John Amici and one of his, his famous quotes is, your culture is your least tolerated behavior. And we kind of almost like live that as a mantra.
It doesn't matter what values you have on your walls or what policies you've got in place, it's the way that you kind of are treated by the people around you that actually makes you feel good or bad about being in the workspace. We recognize that the hard work that needs to take place to improve inclusion in companies is actually making people better people, managers, better managers changing the conversations that people have, creating teams where there are psychologically safe spaces for people to voice their opinion without fear of being shut down, safe spaces where people can make mistakes without fear of being punished, spaces where everybody gets heard.
That's the kind of environment that we're trying to create in all the companies that we work with. A large part of that in terms of offerings that we do is, is actually talking about things like mental health in the workplace. Mental health is something that we all have, it's a gateway to bringing everybody on a journey together. One of the things that is problematic with your typical kind of diversity inclusion approach is say, typically you'll have, diversity, inclusion departments and companies and you'll have all these kind of monthly celebrations, day celebrations for different minorities, which in and of itself is great work, but it's almost like the diversity paradox is those activities can be almost as exclusive as they are inclusive.
And one of the reasons, and this is something that we've, Danielle and I recognized over the last 20 years, is the dial hasn't moved as much as it should have done for you know, diversity, equality and inclusion. There's something of an echo chamber about the whole corporate D&I movement. So you've got people with great intentions, great minds, great thoughts and great deeds, but always addressing the same people who really get diversity and inclusion.
The dial doesn't move in our opinion because the 85%, 90 percent of the majority don't give a shite, pardon my French, about diversity and inclusion, they're not interested at all, they're completely turned off by it. But those are the hearts and minds that you actually need to change to actually make a difference to people like me, as a minoritized person in the workplace.
And so, by focusing on subjects like mental health by focusing on human behaviors that we all have in common then we actually manage to bring everybody on the journey, and the end result are the same outcomes you want to achieve by your traditional diversity inclusion work, but you're not calling it diversity inclusion work, you're actually tackling the human behavior that underpins it, and you're getting people to contract with each other, how they deal with each other and actually hold each other to account in terms of their behavior. It's a different approach to diversity, inclusion, and belonging that we're about at Belonging Base.
In terms of products, we do mental health training and we also work with, with companies when invited to, to actually get people to workshop and contract the behaviors that underpin the company values. So we take the company values and we say, okay, what do they mean? So what are the behaviors that actually underpin all of those different values? And what does that look like? How does that manifest itself in the workplace? And how do you want that to be? And then we get everybody in a room from the highest manager in the department to the lowest administrator, and we have honest open conversations and a lot of fun around it. But at the end of the session, we actually have either a formal or informal contract of how we're going to deal with each other in that, in that team, in that department.
Sophie: That's where the psychologically safe space bit comes in, because if you want to call out inappropriate behavior in the workplace, it takes courage, but if you've got some kind of agreement amongst you all, in terms of how you're going to deal with each other, just giving somebody the ability to say, Oh, no, remember we had that session, we've agreed. We're not going to accept things like that in this team. It gives people that support, you know, to, to nudge them from being a passive kind of participant to being actually actively, you know kind of team supportive.
Trinity: It's clear that Belonging Base is focused on some very impactful approaches. Are there any early successes that you could share?
Sophie: In terms of early successes we've been working with, with a firm that's entirely remote based and so they've got no office space at all. We've recently worked with them around supporting each other as teams as, as remote workers.
So breaking down the barriers that, being physically remote brings up. We did a great session with them on how to turn up for each other, support each other. And again, a lot of that conversation was around supporting each other's mental health and recognizing individual challenges that people face when suddenly the workplace is actually in their safe space, which is obviously normally their home.
We are working with LottoLand in terms of delivering what we call mental health first aid training. It's a two day course where we actually educate people on how to use different, different models to help support each other. If they're having a kind of an emotional moment or a crisis at work. Those courses have been really warmly received and, and a great success. When people are feeling low from a mental health perspective, when things aren't going well at work, say people have got burnout or any other kind of workplace scenario you can imagine, a natural human reaction is to emote and that drives quite often the way that we interact with each other. That generates conflict and sometimes that can be quite destructive. So by educating people in terms of using kind of structured visualization models that they can actually use helps people to take their mind out of the emotional subconscious thinking into a kind of conscious problem solving response. It's using a different place of their brain, then they can actually use empathy with good intent to actually have better conversations to resolve, you know, situations.
Trinity: Sounds like some great work, thank you for sharing. Ideally, where do you see belonging based going in the coming years? What do you hope to achieve?
Sophie: I think we want to achieve a good reputation within the industry for being a consultancy that really is genuinely there to, to help people do better work and create great inclusive cultures. That's, that's our main aim. We're quite modest in terms of our aspirations in life, we don't want to, we don't want to kind of grow the company, we don't want to achieve great wealth.
We're really happy with our life and our lifestyle. So our financial objectives are to keep that in place and make that sustainable so that we can actually continue doing good for people around the globe within, within the gaming industry but also achieve a kind of work life balance as well that keeps us happy and mindful at all times. We feel good by doing it, and that's what we're all about at the end of the day. And that's more important to us.
Trinity: It sounds like there are some amazing things to come, can't wait to see what's in store. If anyone wants to learn more about Belonging Base or work with you, where can they find information and how can they engage?
Sophie: Well, they can check us out on our website, which is www. belongingbase. com. Check out the kind of things that we offer. We call it on our website, our superpowers. So, using my, 'll say our transgender experience, so Danielle's been on the journey with -me as my, my life partner.
So, we use that experience, as I say, to help educate and inform, and kind of change, hopefully, hearts and minds of people around the trans community. But also check out our, our kind of mental health provision, and our work based culture packages such as what we're calling the memorable manager. So how can you be that manager everybody will look back upon and say oh, that was that that was one of the best people I ever worked for. We want everybody to aspire to be the memorable manager in their company.
Trinity: So given all that you've done what have been some of the proudest moments of your career thus far?
Sophie: When I was in the police service we had an organization called the National Trans Police Association, which doesn't exist in the UK anymore. It's been, um, made part of a wider LGBTQ organization. But when I was in the police, we had the NTPA, National Trans Police Association.
And me and two of my colleagues, we wrote lawful guidance on how to deal with people's data when they come into contact with the criminal justice system in the UK. And we also worked with the Home Office to write legal legislation on how to lawfully fairly deal with trans people in a custody environment if they're kind of arrested or charged with a recordable offence. Having that kind of level of impact was a big, big wow.
One of the best moments for me, came from a really dark a really dark experience for many people throughout the world. So I say it's dark because the trigger point for that was the, the sad murder of George Floyd but of course that kind of triggered the rise in the Black Lives Matter movement. We, as senior leaders, wanted to put a response out from the organization in reaction to those horrific events. At the time, there was a lot of kind of virtual signaling going around the internet particularly on social media, and quite a lot of the reactions just felt a b it false, a bit inauthentic.
And the reason this is one of the proudest things for me, even though it's such a horrible circumstance is at that time, I recognized that this was not about me at all. The people who should inform the way our company responded was actually all of our black colleagues. I reached out to those colleagues, asked them how they wanted us to deal with it, making sure that they were happy to, to kind of take part in those conversations in the first place, because we had preexisting relationships.
We ended up deciding not to put out any public statements around that situation because it was felt that if the company did, then it would be a big integrity issue because we actually had a problem in the UK in the retail sector of our black colleagues experiencing racism in our betting shops.
It was still very early days of the company supporting those individuals, and the success rate at that point was not very good. So it would have been a really dodgy area to go saying how much we supported the Black Lives Matter movement when our experience of our actual employees was, was less than satisfactory.
So what we did was we actually internalized our response. We actually created working groups and work streams to actually improve the lives of our black colleagues and I believe that work is, is ongoing and hopefully successful. It was probably a strange one to pick out, but with hindsight, I'm proud of the way that I dealt with the situation and hopefully created a better work environment rather than, you know, just putting a social media response out like many companies did at the time.
Trinity: Some amazing impacts, those organizations were lucky to have you. What advice do you have for LGBTQ+ community members in the gaming industry that may be feeling isolated or lacking support? How can they find ways to safely advocate for themselves?
Sophie: I think if you're in that situation and you're feeling really isolated, it's really important to either establish or join pre existing LGBTQ networks.
The purpose of the kind of working networks are there for people to be there for each other and support each other and actually have conversations about things that matter. I've worked with companies that have set up pride groups, and they, they haven't flourished at all, they've just kind of died because they weren't actually needed.
Priority for anybody in that situation is don't be alone, reach out, whether it's within your organisation, whether it's without your organisation, it's really important that you actually have the ability to speak things out loud because there's great power in being able to say words out loud that actually help you deal with situations and actually problem solve situations positively.
If you don't get the opportunity to say it all out loud then it just gets internalized in your mind and that can have a real negative impact on your mental health.
Trinity: It's great advice.
Sophie, this was a wonderful discussion. I really enjoyed our conversation. I enjoyed learning about your journey and the incredible impact you've made. Thank you so much for sharing, for being so candid and transparent, and thank you for all that you do and have done for the LGBTQ plus community and other marginalized communities.
Sophie: Okay, I'll leave you with a quote, which is mine, and that is, I'm a human being and that's all you are too. I say that at the start of every diversity inclusion session that I deliver, because within that one sentence, you absolutely dispel the notion that any one person in the room has any kind of superiority based on any of their characteristics or, where they were accidentally born. And that's what diversity inclusion should be about.
Trinity: Thank you, Sophie. We appreciate your time.
Sophie: Thank you.
