There is a unique alchemy that happens when queer nightlife meets the boardroom. Fluorescent lights seem to soften into something warmer. Shoulders drop. Laughter arrives earlier than expected. The script of corporate professionalism – often stiff, guarded, and inherited from people who were never asked to explain themselves – begins to loosen.

For Safiya Bashir, that shift is everything.

Make It Werk, the company she co-founded, is a queer-led consultancy firm that brings inclusion work to corporate spaces through creativity, performance, and lived experience. Through talks, workshops, and immersive sessions, the company aims to move beyond traditional diversity training by creating environments where people feel engaged, connected, and open to change.

As co-founder, Safiya shapes both the creative direction and delivery of this work, drawing on her background in music and nightlife to transform how these conversations are experienced. “We hope people come away learning a lot,” Safiya says, “but it’s more about leaving people feeling a lot.”

Originally from the UK and based in Amsterdam since 2017, Safiya has built a career that moves fluidly between music, nightlife, culture, and inclusion. Through Make It Werk, she brings those worlds together – transforming corporate spaces into something closer to a dancefloor: alive, participatory, and human.

When asked how her experience as a DJ creating more inclusive spaces translated into corporate work, Safiya smiles. “It’s the same skillset,” she says. “It’s just a different room.”

When stepping into the corporate arena, “we’re not just delivering information,” she says. “We’re creating an experience. We want people to feel something in their bodies, not just nod along.”

That instinct – to move people emotionally, not just intellectually – comes from somewhere deeper than strategy. It comes from her own story.

Growing up in the UK as a queer South Asian woman, Safiya learned early the importance of representation. “You’re always scanning the room,” she says. “You’re always asking, ‘Where are the people who look like me?’” It was a question that followed her into nightlife.

Living with her brother who was a DJ in London, Safiya immersed in electronic music, and began learning to DJ herself. The scene was electric – dark rooms pulsing with bass, bodies moving in sync -but something felt off. Lineups stretched across posters and screens, but rarely reflected the diversity she knew existed.

“When I started DJing, I was constantly looking,” she says. “Sometimes I was looking for someone South Asian. Sometimes I was just looking for another woman. And it just… wasn’t there.”

That absence became a catalyst. Together with her brother, Safiya co-founded RepresentAsian, a platform dedicated to amplifying South Asian voices in electronic music and nightlife. Through podcasts, events, and community-building, she began reshaping the landscape she had once felt excluded from. “Spoiler alert -we exist.”

When asked why we started it, “it’s simple,” she says. “We wanted to make it impossible to ignore us.”

That same drive – to build what doesn’t yet exist -runs through everything Safiya does.

Before Make It Werk had a name, it had a rhythm. In Amsterdam, Safiya and her co-founder Charlie Robertson were already creating together in nightlife. Their drag night, God Save the Queers, was a riot of colour and sound -glitter catching the light, basslines vibrating through the floor, performers commanding the stage.

Safiya was behind the decks, reading the room, shaping the energy. “You learn how to hold space,” she says. “You learn how to bring people together, how to shift a mood, how to make people feel safe enough to let go.”

The turning point came when Charlie was invited to give a Pride talk and asked Safiya to join. There was no grand plan – just two collaborators stepping into a new space with the tools they already had.

“It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s start a company,’” Safiya says. “It was just, ‘Let’s try this’.”

It worked. Then it worked again. And again.

Soon, Make It Werk was born- a consultancy firm that brings the spirit of queer nightlife into workplaces through talks, workshops, performances, and facilitated conversations. But at its core, Safiya insists, the mission is simple.

“We’re trying to change how people feel in these spaces,” she says. “Because if you can change how someone feels, you can change how they act.”

For Safiya, inclusion has never been abstract. It is lived, felt, and often complicated. “Being a queer brown woman, you’re navigating multiple things at once,” she says. “You’re thinking about visibility, safety, belonging – all the time.”

That awareness shapes how she approaches every room. Make It Werk’s sessions are not lectures; they are invitations. People are asked to participate, reflect, and engage with each other.

“When asked what success looks like, it’s not just applause at the end,” Safiya says. “It’s people continuing the conversation after we leave.”

Still, she is clear-eyed about the challenges.

One of the biggest misconceptions companies have about queer inclusion, she says, is the belief that the work is already done. In the Netherlands, where marriage equality has been legal for 25 years, some organizations assume that Pride celebrations and legal milestones mean there is no longer much to address. “There’s this attitude of, ‘Haven’t we been there, done that? Aren’t we all equal now?’” she says. “And it’s like -no. Not even close.”

At the same time, she’s watching a growing hesitation around diversity and inclusion work. Safiya points to the international ripple effects of political rhetoric, particularly from the United States, where companies have begun cutting DEI budgets, avoiding inclusion topics, or becoming afraid to engage with queer programming at all. The impact is not theoretical. Make It Werk is seeing it directly.

The impact is tangible. “There’s definitely fear,” she says. “Companies are worried about saying the wrong thing, or they’re cutting budgets altogether.”

Fewer conversations. Less investment.

“And that’s when the work is needed most,” Safiya adds.

She is equally candid about the realities behind queer cultural work. Drag queens and music often mask a more fragile ecosystem—one built on passion, but not always on sustainable funding.

That tension between joy and sustainability is something Safiya navigates constantly. Through Make It Werk, she’s found a way to bridge the gap. Corporate budgets, when used thoughtfully, can support queer artists and communities in ways grassroots spaces often cannot.

Looking ahead, Safiya is thinking about longevity. “Right now, we come in, we create this spark, and then we leave,” she says. “But how do we make sure that spark actually turns into something lasting?”

She imagines deeper partnerships with companies, more sustained engagement, and a wider network of collaborators -artists, performers, and facilitators who can bring their own perspectives into the work.

There is serious intention to redistribute resources, to uplift others, and to ensure that queer creativity is not just celebrated, but supported.

The glamour of queer cultural work often hides the administrative reality: emails, logistics, bookings, strategy, proposals, budgets, and the daily grind of trying to build something sustainable in an industry that is both necessary and underfunded.

What makes Safiya’s work compelling is that she refuses to separate joy from strategy. For Make It Werk, joy is not decoration. It is methodology. It is what allows people to listen, participate, and imagine something different.

At the heart of it all is a reimagining of professionalism itself.

The work is not about inviting marginalized people into pre-existing rooms and asking them to adapt. It is about changing the conditions of the room to make it more collaborative and inclusive.

In one of Make It Werk’s talks, “Why We Should All Be Like Drag Queens at Work,” drag becomes a metaphor for inclusive workplace culture. Charlie leads the session, in full drag, and asks what professionalism actually is, where it came from, and whom it was designed around.

In her first jobs, Safiya remembers trying to emulate a narrow model of professionalism shaped by white men who had been privately educated. She was not white. She was not a man. She had not been privately educated. But like so many people entering traditional workplaces, she understood that professionalism seemed to have a look, a sound, a posture, and a code that no one taught, but always had a presence. “No one tells you the rules,” she says. “But you feel them.”

Now, she’s rewriting them. When asked what professionalism means to her now, Safiya doesn’t hesitate. “It shouldn’t mean shrinking yourself,” she says. “It shouldn’t mean fitting into one mould.”

Safiya and Charlie bring different perspectives into their work. Charlie is a white gay man and drag performer. Safiya is a queer brown woman with a background in music, culture, and nightlife. Together, they represent two different experiences within a community that is too often flattened into a single acronym or a single Pride campaign.

That range allows Make It Werk to push against the idea that “the queer community” is one uniform experience. Their sessions invite people into conversation rather than positioning inclusion as something delivered from a stage to a passive audience. The room becomes interactive. People are asked to participate, reflect, and connect.

Through Make It Werk, Safiya shows that professionalism can be expansive. It can include humour, creativity, vulnerability, and joy. It can look like someone standing in front of a room, fully themselves, and still being taken seriously.

“You can be yourself and still be excellent at what you do,” she says. “Those things aren’t in conflict.”

That belief is what she carries into every space they enter.

Rooms shift. People relax. Conversations open.

And somewhere between the laughter and the reflection – something changes.

Because for Safiya, authenticity, representation and joy aren’t accessories to the work.

It is the work.