Anyone out there with a pulse and a LinkedIn profile will know that now is a tough time to run a business. The economic uncertainty; the physical distance from your clients and colleagues; and the relentless Zoom calls, when you’re unknowingly on mute as you deliver your finest ever TED-worthy monologue. The challenges are real and many.

The Covid-19 crisis has, however, given many of us time to reflect. What will really matter as we slowly emerge from lockdown? What’s our purpose as an organisation? What will society and business really need from us next?

The Unmistakables – the consultancy that I run with my business partner, Asad – has never been clearer about that than we are now. We make diversity everyone’s business.

We have recognised the urgency of this in headlines that once spoke of coronavirus as the great “equaliser” but that now show it is a disproportionate killer of BAME communities. The UK government has begun to realise what many businesses already knew: to truly speak to diverse audiences, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’; cultural understanding and nuance is everything; diverse communications has shifted from ‘nice-to-have’ to a matter of life or death.

As diversity consultants, we are always looking beyond the headlines and searching for the stories that don’t always break through. While toilet paper has been stripped from supermarket shelves and buying flour for baking has become the nation’s only viable competitive sport, many of the more serious coronavirus crisis issues facing marginalised communities have been left lurking in the shadows of the mainstream. 

That’s why we’ve created a new A to Z glossary of Covid-19 terms, which looks beyond some of the most popular social media trends and aims to raise awareness of the social issues that are really affecting British society. 

The Covid-26: An A to Z glossary of the most glossed over terms of Covid-19 encourages people to:

• Look beyond#BananaBread and consider the disproportionate impact the crisis is having on BAME communities
• Take a breather from #PEWithJoe and inhale the news that nearly half of England’s doctors are being forced to find their own PPE 
• Stop shaking their #quarantinis and stir over the domestic abuse faced by some members of the LGBTQ community stuck in queerantine with perpetrators

While some of us have baked, memed and Zoomed our way through self-isolation, many marginalised members of society have faced far more serious issues, often disproportionately impacting their physical and mental health. We built this list to help burst people out of the ‘banana bread bubbles’ that are created by social media algorithms and that often make people miss the things that really matter. 

As with everything we do, this A to Z has been designed to make diversity everyone’s business, shining a spotlight on the minority trends that might otherwise have been missed by the mainstream. Other themes explored include disabilities over #DIY, grief over #gardening and homelessness over #homeschool. You can head over to our blog for the full list.