Anyone in business will tell you that who you know is important in any industry. Sometimes, getting your foot in the door takes some time, but if you are not meeting certain expectations it takes longer. For example, some women find it tough to get into certain industries that are known to have a ‘boys club’ mentality. Thankfully, companies these days are exploring diversity more and are working on inclusivity as much as possible.
There are plenty of family ties still hanging around in the energy industry, and companies like Twin Eagle are out there trying to break the mold and do things differently. There are still people that need to have the door widened to include a new pool of talent. It’s nice to pass business ethics from family to family but if your business that you work for still has the diversity policy of the 1880’s, then there’s something wrong with that.
Energy companies are doing more these days to embrace diversity and include people from different backgrounds. Energy businesses are focusing their time and money into building the right programs to improve their diverse pipeline. So, how are energy companies doing it? Let’s take a look!
- Ask the right questions. To begin to understand what your energy company needs, you need to ask the right questions. Your employees need to feel equally represented and the only way you’re going to figure out what that is is by asking. Get together with your employees and have a conversation about what they need for better representation in your organization.
- Move to education. Once you understand the needs of your employees, open a forum with a range of people at all levels in the business. All backgrounds, all wealth priorities and more need to be considered. Educating your workforce is important and you need to find ways that the entire team works better together. Training in inclusion and diversity is so important here so that people can share common struggles and come up with solutions.
- Move into the community. Once you know how to educate everyone on diversity, you can then engage your community and show them who you are as a business. This is vital if you want to improve the way in which you relate to different diverse backgrounds. If you make sure that the community is involved, you will build your customer base and really improve the way people see you.
- Make it a habit. You need to engage people but you need to make it something you do regularly. When you do that, you need to think about supplier diversity, employee development and engagement and the talent pipeline. All of these things are going to help you to craft the best diversity and inclusion plan possible.
If you don’t have the right diversity strategy in your energy company, it’s something that you have to work on building. Take your time with this one – it’s vital that you get this right so that everyone benefits.
