Pioneer Profile: Brenda Kola & Shanice Tomlinson
Meet Brenda & Shanice, Co-Founders of Orbit, an organisation on a mission to make women to feel seen, heard and valued.
12th Nov 2024
It’s time that we recognise the people behind the evolving world of work. Our working lives have shifted to being more inclusive, more people-centric, more flexible, and just plain better for both employees and companies.
These changes didn’t just happen: they were put into place and upheld by individuals and teams working to create a better working future for everyone.
So we’re finally putting the spotlight on the people who make great companies great: the people-people.
People-people are crucial to the success of every company. They find you the talent that drives you forwards, and they’ve taken on an increasingly strategic role in the past few years – often taking on responsibility for mental health, diversity and inclusion, culture, EVPs, Employer Branding and team happiness.
Read more about the Pioneers List and go behind the scenes to understand how and why we’ve selected our Pioneers.
We were lucky enough to speak with Brenda and Shanice to find out more about the amazing work they're doing to empower women and create more inclusive workplaces.Tell us a little bit about your career history, and how you got to where you are now. What were the key milestones?
Brenda: Hi, my name's Brenda but you can call me B! I'm the Director and Co-Founder of Orbit. I always wanted to do something that would benefit women and children, I just never knew how exactly I would get there. I did a lot of work in my teen years wanting to develop a product that could automatically register a child's birth after reading into the number of births that don't get registered and the danger that places the child in. My idea of belonging and what that meant stemmed from there, it became a larger passion project when I experienced my first miscarriage, it felt wrong that the loss I faced would never be recognised and I wanted to change that. Whilst working on this idea at 19, I was nominated for awards and won! It was then that I realised I wanted to run a business that had an incredible amount of impact on the lives of women and children.
I worked primarily with young people and professionally I wanted to move from being on the frontline to being in a position of power and make tangible changes. That's when my love for human-centred design began. Working in the charity sector and working closely with young people, it was really easy to see how out-of-touch our services were; everyone operated on the idea that they thought they knew what young people wanted, without ever asking them. I started to question everything with my main question being, how can we design a service no one has actually asked for?
A key milestone for me in my career was when I became pregnant. It was the first time I was treated differently in the workplace. This was long before covid, there was no such thing as flexibility but I found myself needing that. My pregnancy was high risk and horrible, I was throwing up on my way to meetings, having to take an Uber boat to work to avoid packed tubes as no one offers their seat, but I was also fighting with my workplace to make reasonable adjustments, I waited 8 months for them to finally order me a new desk chair as the one they provided was broken. It wasn't until I experienced my water breaking at 28 weeks that I realised the working world in its current state just wasn't for me. My line manager at the time saw me being supported by strangers and paramedics and still messaged me on WhatsApp whilst I was in the ambulance, asking if I thought I would be in the next day, there was no care.
Orbit was born out of frustration. Whilst on maternity leave in the height of Covid, I was alone. I couldn't understand why my friends didn't understand this massive shift and transition in my life. I was 23, scared and I felt like I was sold the Instagram version of motherhood, not the real experience. After sharing my experience online, hundreds of women began sharing their stories with me and that is how the Orbit community was born. I wanted to make friends who completely understood if I couldn't respond to them straight away and didn't make me feel guilty for it. I didn't want 'mum friends' but I wanted to be friends with women who were a bit like me and just so happened to have a kid, the kid was a bonus.
After designing programmes and experiences for corporate partners for over a decade, helping hundreds of founders with their own business, Orbit became a necessity. Coming back from maternity leave I unfortunately faced horrible treatment and discrimination but I found my experience wasn't unique. We decided something had to change and I took my experience in programme and workshop design, DEI and my work on belonging to help make culture more inclusive. We've worked with some incredible brands such as Google, Glossier, Boston Consultancy Group, Innovate UK, Peanut and more in the 3 years we've worked on Orbit. The work we do has been so fulfilling and the impact we've been able to have has been amazing. My ultimate goal is for women and parents to feel seen, heard and valued in everything they do.
Shanice: My name is Shanice and I am the Co-Founder and Director of Orbit. We work with organisations to create an inclusive culture for women and working parents. For the majority of my career for over 9 years, I had a career in sales. I started off working B2C in a phone shop selling phones, tablets and accessories for 3 years before working my way up into management. At the time I lived at home, I didn’t have too many responsibilities, it was the perfect job for me at that time (a time was had!). After 4 years at the company, I decided I wanted a change of scenery in a new industry. That was my introduction into the corporate world. I bagged a role in recruitment doing B2B sales. The people I directly worked with were great, I could wear jeans and a hoodie, I was earning great money and had the privilege to travel to a number of countries. I was having the time of my life. Learning and developing new skills whilst mastering the ones I already had. I absolutely loved sales (and still do!). I really enjoyed speaking to people, building relationships, negotiations, closing deals, you name it and I didn’t just enjoy it, I was good at it! One of the early milestones in my career and confirmation that I was on the right path was when I was promoted to assistant store manager at 19, the youngest manager ever in the business! I learnt so much in this role and grew so much, in my journey I had achieved some great things and at that point had even become a mother. Shortly after becoming a mother, through our experiences Orbit was born. I spent so much of my time during maternity leave working on Orbit. Alongside juggling my 9-5, Orbit and motherhood, I took on the role as a facilitator on a programme to help founders to grow and scale their business. Unbeknown to me, the skills I was learning, developing and honing in on through the design and delivery of my sessions directly helped me to do what I do now and do it so well. It was a key milestone for me as it was a season of preparation and being a sponge which gave me the skills I needed to help take Orbit to the next level. A year after taking up facilitation, my 9-5 wasn’t supportive of my new responsibilities as a mother so I was pushed to take a leap of faith and work on Orbit full time. So that’s exactly what happened a couple of years ago and I haven’t looked back since, I’ve been working full time on Orbit ever since! It has granted me the privilege of freedom, the freedom to be present with my daughter. I’m living my dream!When did you become interested in the future of work?
Brenda: I became interested in the future of work while I was pregnant. I was roughly 3 months pregnant and wanted to change jobs but I became worried as to whether or not I would be accepted for any role because of my pregnancy. Soon after wanting to change jobs, the organisation I worked for went into administration and I found myself doing a telephone interview whilst I was in labour. I desperately needed and wanted things to drastically change. It wasn't until my last employer where I faced discrimination and kept hearing countless stories from other mothers and women that I wanted to design the change I wanted to see. Being a black woman, DEI, advocacy, inclusion, are all part of my daily life, I will always be affected by systemic racism and also discrimination. I believe the solution at work is simple, the difficulties we face when trying to overcome the barriers tend not to come from the people but from senior leadership.
When my friend told me that she had to leave her job as a victim of DV, and another friend couldn't get back into the workplace because her daughter has complex needs, for me it was shameful that no organisation that they did want to work for would treat them as human first and provide them with the support they need to thrive outside of work and help keep them safe whilst at work. When I was the head of the department at a previous workplace, I had staff share with me that they couldn't afford public transport and were running over 10k to save money and get to work. Experiencing toxic positivity and the nice-nasty nature of the workplace is where I felt things desperately need to change and I want to help change it.
Shanice: The future of work and what working culture looks like really came to the forefront for me when I returned from maternity leave. Like many other women, returning back after having my daughter was an extremely exhausting experience. Exhausting because I wasn’t given the support I needed in order for me to thrive within my workplace which resulted in me being forced out of the workplace, having to choose my daughter over work. My experience paired with Brenda’s horrific experience of discrimination and the mass other stories from women within our community about their experiences within the workplace infuriated me. Why is it when women have children we are pushed out of the workplace? Why are we made to feel incompetent despite returning with an array of new skills? It’s questions like these that made me question so much within the workplace that needs changing and what that future could look like. We really want to make an impact, challenge people’s thinking and change the way we work. We see and want a version of work that is human centred, allows everyone to show up to work as their authentic self and doesn’t push mothers out of the workplace but instead embraces them.What is the most impactful change that you’ve implemented?
The most impactful change we've implemented at Orbit has been shifting the way we approach understanding our partners’ real pain points. Instead of just looking at surface-level needs, we've driven a push to dig into what really bugs people – those deep, often unspoken frustrations that make someone go, “Right, I need a solution to this, now.” It’s been about getting the team to think less like advertisers and more like psychologists, really figuring out what’s in partners’ heads.
What that’s done is it’s turned our messaging into something that genuinely resonates. Suddenly, our partners feel seen, not sold to. They see our product or service as the answer to their real problems, not just a nice-to-have. In constantly looking to learn and understand our partners' needs, we've built trust that allows us to experiment and deliver our services in a way that creates the most impact. Honestly, it’s been a game-changer for how effective we are.What’s the biggest challenge of being in your role/industry right now?
The hardest part of this job right now is keeping up with how fast people’s expectations are changing. We're finding that more people want that transformative change in the workplace yet senior leadership are risk adverse. You've got incredible, passionate people who want to make a difference in their world of work but aren't properly enabled to do so; they don't have the budget or the resources. Employees are also looking towards senior leadership to take a lead or simply just participate with DEI activations, there seems to be a real battle between the historical image people have of leadership and what it means to be a leader in society today.
Plus, consumers are getting savvier. They know when they’re being marketed to, and they’ve got no patience for anything that feels insincere or pushy. So, the challenge is balancing authenticity with creativity, cutting through the noise without feeling gimmicky. It’s a tightrope walk, and staying on top of it means constantly reinventing strategies, being ahead of trends, and making sure we’re as genuine as we are innovative.What do you think the next big trend is in working culture?
I think the biggest trends we'll see would be with happiness, flexibility and culture. People want things that not only work for them but make them happy, employees are looking at work differently and I think we have millennials and Gen Z to thank for this. Organisations have to prove that they are worthy as well, the interviews are starting to feel more like a balanced assessment as to whether prospective organisations are progressive, inclusive, diverse and responsive enough to the needs of their employees. None of this “we’re flexible, but only if it’s 9-5 at your kitchen table” nonsense. People want to be able to work but also to live and to live well, as long as the job gets done, it no longer makes sense to place so many restrictions around how an employee works. It’s not just about remote work; it’s about finding a balance that doesn’t make you feel like work’s creeping into every bit of your life.
Wellbeing plays a big part in this too. This isn’t just yoga on a Wednesday or a Calm app, it’s resilience but there is also prioritisation with rest. People are stressed, burnout’s real, and companies are getting clued in that they need to help people handle all that pressure. So, we’re talking real, tangible and sustainable support, such as courses/employee programmes, mental health days, feeling psychologically safe at work and an acceptance and understanding that things that happen outside of work will impact work. People also want to feel included and feel like they belong, whether they’re working from home, the pub, or a beach somewhere, inclusive work culture is important. Companies are realising they’ve got to do more to make sure everyone feels like they belong; employees can see through tick-box exercises. Workplaces are getting wise to the fact that happier, balanced people do better work – and they’re making moves to actually make that happen.