Rework Work

Call Directions Website Contact the business

Rework Work Reimagining inclusion one workplace at a time. And we believe it is important to choose an employer who will love you back!

Here at Rework Work, we subscribe to the philosophy that if you choose a job you will love, you will never have to work a day in your life. Rework Work is the brainchild of Founder, Stacey Gordon with a focus on reworking how companies work, including how they recruit, hire and engage women and professionals of color. Frustrated with hearing that companies don’t have the resources or are unable to identify skilled diverse professionals, Stacey combined her diversity & inclusion knowledge with her recruiting expertise to create education workshops, leadership development and provide other resources to help companies with their ‘pipeline’ problem as well as advise executive leaders on DEI strategy.

Michelle is an engineer with more than five years of experience. She wraps a project with her colleague Mike. Mike tells...
10/16/2026

Michelle is an engineer with more than five years of experience. She wraps a project with her colleague Mike. Mike tells her she did a great job, and that he was really surprised.

She keeps the smile on her face. Inside, she is somewhere else entirely. Insulted again, she thinks. I may never be valued here.

Here is what makes that sentence land the way it does. Surprise requires an expectation. You cannot be surprised by an outcome you thought was likely. So when Mike says he was surprised, he has told Michelle exactly what he expected from her, and it was less than what she delivered.

He almost certainly did not mean it that way. He thought he was handing her a compliment, and in his head, he was.

That is the whole problem with microinsults. They are usually well-intended. The intent stays in the room with the person who spoke. The impact leaves with the person who heard it, and it compounds. These are the comments that historically isolate people, pull down engagement, and quietly move good employees toward the door.

So think about the last time you praised someone and told them you were surprised.

Surprised by what?

Mike will never know he did this. That is what makes it a pattern rather than an incident, and it is why the gap between how you experience your own leadership and how your team experiences it matters more than your intentions do. The Leadership Reality Check measures that gap, free and in five minutes. Link in bio, along with my unconscious bias course if you want the foundation underneath all of this.

10/13/2026

I keep coming back to this idea of lanes, because the same phrase gets used for two opposite purposes, and we rarely stop to sort out which one is happening.

Sometimes "stay in your lane" is how people try to get you to stop doing something. This is not your business. This is not for you. It arrives dressed up as feedback about scope, and it is really about silence.

And sometimes staying in my lane is exactly what I need to do, because that is how I become effective at what I am actually here for. Not shrinking. Getting good.

However, in this work specifically, inclusion, culture, belonging, our roles have gotten wider. A lot of things get put on our shoulders. Some of those responsibilities raise a real question that is worth asking out loud. Is this even ours to carry?

I am not sure we have been having that conversation well, because so many of us are burnt out, tired, frustrated, fed up, and whatever other adjective you want to add.

Here is the part that is harder to say.

Some of it is a little bit of our own making. We have taken on things that may not have been ours to carry at all. That is not a criticism. Most of us said yes because nobody else was going to, and because saying no felt like abandoning something that mattered. I understand the instinct. I have had it.

But a widened role is not the same as a bigger role. Widened means thinner, and thinner means less effective at the part that was actually yours.

So the question underneath all of this is not whether you should stay in your lane. It is whether anyone ever told you where your lane was.

You might have missed this conversation, but there are two more I am hosting with the Forum on Workplace Inclusion, alongside Bylone and Joun. Follow the The Forum on Workplace Inclusion so you catch the next one on November 5th, on getting the work done when policies and politics are making it harder.

We tell employees to protect their mental health while many are navigating layoffs, smaller teams, heavier workloads, re...
10/11/2026

We tell employees to protect their mental health while many are navigating layoffs, smaller teams, heavier workloads, return-to-office changes, economic uncertainty, and the pressure to prove their value in an unpredictable job market.

A meditation app cannot solve all of that.

Neither can telling people to be more resilient.

On World Mental Health Day, there is value in talking about individual resources and support. There is equal value in examining the environment people return to after they use those resources.

Do employees feel safe asking for help? Are workloads reasonable after a restructuring? Can someone set a boundary without being viewed as less committed? Do managers know how to recognize when someone is struggling? Are people expected to remain constantly available because the team is understaffed?

This is where mental health and inclusion intersect.

People experience work differently, and not everyone has the same capacity, responsibilities, resources, or sense of safety in speaking up. An inclusive workplace makes room for those differences rather than requiring everyone to cope in exactly the same way.

Supporting mental health at work should not mean asking employees to become better at enduring unhealthy conditions.

It should also mean asking what leaders can change about those conditions.

Whether someone can set a boundary without being seen as less committed is not something you can answer about your own team from the inside. Your people already know.

The Leadership Reality Check measures that gap, free and in five minutes, across five dimensions, including Psychological Safety. Link in bio, along with my unconscious bias course for leaders.

A workplace can have employees across five countries and still expect everyone to communicate, lead, collaborate, and su...
10/06/2026

A workplace can have employees across five countries and still expect everyone to communicate, lead, collaborate, and succeed according to one cultural norm.
That is something worth thinking about during Global Diversity Awareness Month.

As organizations become increasingly global, diversity is not only about who is represented. Leaders are managing people whose experiences with hierarchy, communication, disability, religion, caregiving, gender, feedback, and even what is considered “professional” may be very different from their own.

What works in one office, country, or culture cannot automatically be treated as the universal standard.

That does not mean abandoning organizational expectations. It means becoming more thoughtful about which expectations are necessary for people to do their jobs well and which ones simply reflect what we have become accustomed to.

Global inclusion requires curiosity before assumption and enough cultural awareness to recognize that different does not automatically mean wrong.

This month, I hope leaders look beyond workforce diversity and ask a deeper question:

Have we created an organization where that diversity can actually influence how we work?

The gap between having a global workforce and actually letting that diversity shape how you work is rarely visible from the top of an organization. The
Leadership Reality Check measures that gap, free and in five minutes. Link in bio, along with my unconscious bias course, if you want the foundation underneath all of this.

I said this on the DEI After 5 podcast with Thompson.When the job market turns, employers start acting like employees a...
10/02/2026

I said this on the DEI After 5 podcast with Thompson.

When the job market turns, employers start acting like employees are interchangeable. There are plenty of people out there, so let one go and get another. That thinking is treated as hard-nosed business sense.

Run the numbers and it falls apart.

You lose the institutional knowledge, which never appears on a balance sheet and is the most expensive thing in the building. You pay more for the replacement, because the market rate has moved since you last hired for that role. You pay to recruit, either in your own team's time or an external fee. Then you wait months while somebody new gets up to speed.

All of that instead of the raise that would have kept them.

So when a company says it has to cut jobs because there is no money, and then approves a package at the top, the question is not whether the money exists. The question is who was decided to be worth spending it on.

Retention is a series of decisions leaders make about who has value, and those decisions are visible to everyone except the person making them. The Leadership Reality Check measures that gap, free and in five minutes. Link in bio, along with my Recruiting Foundations course if you want to go deeper on the hiring side.

A lot of leaders have decided that having someone in the room whose job is to ask "how will this land, and for whom?" is...
09/29/2026

A lot of leaders have decided that having someone in the room whose job is to ask "how will this land, and for whom?" is a liability.

Too political. Too woke. Too much friction.

Here is the flaw in that logic. People do not leave their beliefs and their blind spots in the parking lot. They bring them to work, into the design review, the buying meeting, the approval chain.

So when leadership signals that questioning bias is unwelcome, you do not get a neutral company. You get one that ships exactly what its people already assume is normal. And you find out what that is when it is on the internet with your logo on it.

Every organization has an approval chain. Somebody signs off on the campaign, the job posting, the promotion slate, the product, the layoff list. In every one of those rooms, one of two things is true. Either someone feels safe enough to say "wait, should we?" Or nobody does.

That is not a values debate. That is an accountability and psychological safety question, and both are things you can actually measure.
So here is the one worth sitting with. What has been approved on your watch in the last year that you would not want screenshotted?

Every one of those approvals comes down to one thing.
Either somebody felt safe enough to say "wait, should we?" or nobody did. Most leaders assume someone would. Their teams frequently disagree, and that gap is invisible from where you are standing.

The Leadership Reality Check measures it, free and in five minutes. Link in bio, along with my unconscious bias course if you want the foundation underneath all of this.

Most microaggressions go unaddressed for a reason that has nothing to do with courage.They are small. They register late...
09/25/2026

Most microaggressions go unaddressed for a reason that has nothing to do with courage.

They are small. They register late. You are three sentences into the next topic before you understand what was said to you, and by then it feels too awkward to reach back for it. So it stays with you and never reaches the person who said it.

The P.A.U.S.E. method is what I teach in my book, and the reason it works is that it removes the deadline. You do not have to respond in the second the comment lands. You are allowed to take a breath, and you are allowed to come back to it tomorrow.

P.A.U.S.E. is one of the frameworks in Unbias: Addressing Unconscious Bias at Work, alongside the rest of what to do once you have named what is happening.

And if you are usually on the other side of these conversations, the question is whether anyone on your team has ever run P.A.U.S.E. on something you said. Most leaders assume they would have heard about it. The Leadership Reality Check measures that gap, free and in five minutes. Both links in bio.

People are talking about politics at work. Shutting that down does not work, because they will find a way to talk about ...
09/22/2026

People are talking about politics at work. Shutting that down does not work, because they will find a way to talk about it anyway, and expecting everyone to suddenly agree is not a plan.

So the question is not how to stop the disagreement. It is what happens to people in the room when they disagree.

That is mostly not about what you say. Body language gives away things our words do not. Who you sit next to. Whether you look up. What your face does. Whether the phone comes out at a predictable moment.

Nobody is going to file a complaint about any of that. But everyone notices it, and everyone adjusts. People learn quickly whose contributions get attention and whose get waited out, and they start deciding what is worth saying based on what they have observed.

This is worth examining before you look at anyone else's behavior, because it is the only part you fully control.

Most of us believe we listen fairly. The people in the meeting with us frequently disagree, and that gap is invisible from the inside. The Leadership Reality Check measures it for free and in five minutes. Link in bio, along with my unconscious bias course, if you want the foundation underneath all of this.

People love to tell me that something is not a DEI issue.Here is one I brought up recently on the DEI After 5 podcast wi...
09/18/2026

People love to tell me that something is not a DEI issue.

Here is one I brought up recently on the DEI After 5 podcast with Thompson.

There are managers out here denying leave requests. The person worked. They earned the PTO. It was allocated to them as part of their compensation. And a manager is sitting on it, deciding.

Somebody once said PTO means prepare the others, and that is exactly right. It is a courtesy notice that I will not be here in two weeks. It is not a request for permission to use something I have already earned.

Now watch how that plays out across a team.

Susie asks for her week and gets it, no friction, approved that afternoon. Marcus asks for his week and suddenly there are questions about coverage, about timing, about whether it works for the team right now.

He ends up needing three signatures for the same thing Susie got in one email.

That is not a scheduling difference. That is the same policy producing two different outcomes depending on who is asking.

And that is a DEI issue. It absolutely is.

You may not be able to fix the EEOC. You can fix this. If you are a leader in an organization, you control who gets hired, who gets fired, how people are paid, and whether you sign off on this person's leave request.
Start where your control actually is.

Most leaders believe they apply their standards evenly. Their teams frequently disagree, and the gap between those two things is where this lives. The Leadership Reality Check measures it, free and in five minutes.

Link in bio, along with my unconscious bias course for leaders if you want the foundation underneath all of this.

Online Learning Day is worth marking, because of who it let in.Professional development used to come with a set of requi...
09/15/2026

Online Learning Day is worth marking, because of who it let in.

Professional development used to come with a set of requirements that had nothing to do with wanting to learn. A travel budget. A conference badge someone had to approve. Three days away from your desk, which meant childcare, or eldercare, or a shift someone else had to cover. A city you could physically get to, in a building you could physically navigate.

Every one of those was a filter. And none of them filtered for talent.

What got left out was predictable. People in hourly roles who could not take three days. People raising children or caring for parents. People with disabilities for whom the venue was the barrier, not the material. People outside major cities. People at companies too small to have a training budget at all.

Online learning removed most of that in a decade. The course is now free through many corporate subscriptions. It plays at your pace, with captions, in multiple languages, at nine at night if that is the only hour you have. You can stop it and come back. You can take it from anywhere.

That is not a small change in convenience. That is a different set of people getting to build the same skills.

The knowledge was never the scarce part. The access was.

I have eight courses on LinkedIn Learning covering unconscious bias, recruiting, resumes and career change, all self-paced and available in multiple languages. Recruiting Foundations is eligible for SHRM recertification credits. Link in bio.

Pick one and send it to someone who would never have gotten the conference budget.

Address

Torrance, CA
90503

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 1pm

Telephone

+13106260196

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Rework Work posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Rework Work:

Shortcuts

Share

Category