this conference will now be recorded okay great so welcome and thank you for
joining us for the first of three webinars that will be focusing on advancing gender equality just before we
get started I’m just gonna have a few housekeeping notes first of all as I mentioned this webinar will be recorded
and a copy of the presentation will be available afterwards on the EHR si
website and there will also be a quick Q&A session after Kathy’s presentation
today so people will have the opportunity to ask questions okay I just
heard a quick thing that was probably made sorry so let me introduce myself my name is Marie mold and I am the manager
of stakeholder engagement here at 80 HRC we are delighted to do this today in
partnership with Natural Resources Canada and to support the equal by 30 campaign which you will hear more about
momentarily I want to give a warm welcome to Kim choong-soo who’s the senior policy advisor in the
environment and energy policy division at in our camp we are also very pleased
to welcome our speaker today Cathy Laurette senior vice president of business transformation at Elektra who
will talk about sorry okay I’m sorry I thought somebody was asking a question
Cathy Laurette senior vice president of business transformation at Elektra who will talk about her organization’s
experiences advancing gender equality and how they have utilized the signing of the leadership Accord for gender
diversity and equal by 30 to affect real measurable change okay so let’s get
started for anyone that’s new in the audience electricity Human Resources Canada is a
national not-for-profit organization that addresses the human resource and labor market challenges within the
Canadian electricity sector our vision is to build a highly skilled safety focused and diverse Canadian electricity
workforce for now and the future but while Canada has a strong and diverse
energy supply unfortunately the same not be said yet for our workforce as in
many technical sectors women working in energy represent a much smaller component of the workforce than they
should and in many instances they continue to face barriers that limit
their advancement or indeed their desire to remain in the industry we have been
working diligently over the last decade to support change and the leadership Accord was born out of that work it
provides a platform to create a culture of equality and inclusion throughout the workforce
it is a public commitment by employers labor and educational institutions to
promote the values of diversity equality and inclusion and increase the
representation of women in protect in particular in the skilled trades and
non-traditional positions it is the premise of the Accord that to effect systemic change a bold vision is
required by industry leaders that those at the top of the organization need to
set the standard for others to follow
studies show that diverse teams in the workplace lead to greater innovation a positive impact on an organization’s
bottom line a slew of recruitment and retention benefits an increased employee
commitment however as you can see on this slide the numbers tell a different story there are eight point six million
women working in Canada making up approximately 48% of the canadian workforce but still represent only 25
percent of the workforce in the electricity sector furthermore fewer than 13% of practicing licensed
engineers are women in the trades that number plummets to fewer than 5% despite
the rise in the proportion of women in the electricity industry and best efforts to tap in to develop and retain
this cohort the pace of improvement has been slow with the parity between men
and women in the industry remaining a long way off it is clear that we have more work to do I’d like to hand over to
Kim Chomsky who will provide an update on the equal by 30 campaign and then we will move to our keynote
presentation Kim over to you thank you so thank you so much Marie and right off
the bat huge thanks to e HRC for convening us today really phenomenal
example of a domestic initiative that we are so proud to have been able to partner with have really set the stage
and taught us a lot about how to move this work forward what I’d like to do
today very quickly is simply talk about equal by 30 what it is its relationship to HRC and why it might be something of
interest to people on the line today equal 9:30 is an international principles based campaign that looks a
lot like the leadership Accord it was launched under the banner of the clean energy ministerial which is an
international collection of about 26 nations who come together regularly to
discuss clean energy ring large within that body of work Canada is always led the charge on gender diversity since a
joint a couple of years ago this is important because Canada will be hosting
the clean energy ministerial this year and we see in that of opportunities to really present Canadian leadership
across a host of clean energy issues and most particularly on gender equality like the leadership record the campaign
ask for endorsement of very high-level principles and the areas of equal pay leadership and also turn opportunity the
second phase of that work was endorsed is to develop the commitments that help us demonstrate that we are moving the
dial the commitments are published identified by organizations they are
published online on our website and over time the intention is to show progress
against those original commitments we’ve been very delighted in their response
today we have over 50 private sector organizations signed on to equal by 30 on a glossary as of today and
internationally in for us that we tend to operate within there’s been strong
endorsement we were a centerpiece of the g7 ministerial and Halifax last year where
all g7 countries on to equal 5:30 that puts a lot of wind in our sails but the work is not yet
done one of the things that was very important to us was to respect that
domestic industries have done a lot of work on in inclusiveness and diversity already the HRC has proof of that so
ours was not to replicate or reproduce we wanted to find a way to make sure that what we were offering was an
internationalized platform to showcase the things that Canadian organizations were already doing that’s why we have
worked to find a way to make sure that sweeter stories to the leadership record can be signatories to equal by 30
without reproducing the reporting burden existing signatories under the
leadership record when the cheers have been principles thereof they aren’t completely transferable to equal by 30
we are very much in sync so as we approach the clean energy ministerial
that’s May I would like to encourage the organizations here with us today to consider both the leadership record is a
strong and domestic presence on developing commitments around gender equality but also to leverage the
platform that we can provide as a federal government and as conveners and that happens in the clean energy
ministerial that’s me so I will throw it back to the guest of honor here Cathy
Lirette so pleased to have her here and hear about her first-hand experiences I am available to anybody who would like
to reach out and learn a little bit more about equal by 30 and how they might become involved and once again Marie
thank you so much for bringing so many great people together today to focus on equality hello doll Thank You Kim
just before Cathy gets started I’d like to do a brief introduction to Cathy it
gives me great pleasure to introduce our speaker today which is Cathy Laurette Cathy is 35 year engineering and
operations professional of the energy industry and is currently serving as senior vice president of business
transformation as a senior VP Cathy ensures that successful delivery of any
merger integration plans and in previous roles oversaw all aspects of engineering
construction and maintenance and supply chain management divisions she provides leadership for the continuous
improvement culture and initiatives that drove increased levels of performance in horizon utilities operations Kathy is
also the vice chair of the EHR C Board of Directors and is an influential and well-regarded voice for removing
barriers that contribute to under representation of women in science technology engineering and mathematics
also known as stem she works tirelessly as an advocate for the transformation of
the energy sector ensuring opportunities are created for young women seeking a career that may have otherwise be seen
as an unattainable today Cathy Laurette will share Electra’s experience and with signing the Accord as well as the equal
by 30 commitment has meant in real times for their organization Cathy I will
switch it over to you
okay just I’m waiting for that share button to come up okay I am clicking on
your name and it’s not allowing me to do it
just a second oh I’m just trying to figure this out okay you should be you
should be okay minnow see my screen yes
I can see your screen I hope everybody can see everybody see her screen yes
thank you okay well thank you I’m happy to be here today to talk about our journey at
Electra but before I get started in case people don’t know who Electra utilities
is Electra is an energy company that serves customers all the way from
Penetanguishene in the north down to st. Catherine’s in Niagara where the second
largest municipal I owned energy solution company in North America our head office is located in Mississauga
Ontario and we have over 1,500 very talented employees who manage almost 4.5
billion dollars in assets and we serve 1 million customers and just January 1st
we were fortunate enough to welcome Guelph hydro into the electric family so we are just that much bigger as of
January 1st so Murray talked a little bit about these stats and their opening
remarks but I just wanted to reiterate that these statistics are pretty bleak and they are really the driving force
behind the programs to improve gender diversity and gender diversity in the electricity sector is improving and it
certainly has improved since I started 35 years ago but the plate the pace is
way too slow and the parity between men and women is still a long way off so we
have some work to do so the business case for diversity is quite clear talent
outcomes and engagement greatly improve in a diverse and inclusive organization gender diversity is good for business
because it adds skill creativity and diverse thinking to organizations it
strengthens Team Dynamics proves the whole decision-making process at the end of the day the addition of
women will also increase women’s economical power through increased earning potential in STEM related jobs
women represent a very small number and the inclusion of women will help alleviate the pending resource shortage
as a large number of people will retire in the next five to ten years if you
didn’t know this 40 percent of skilled trades in Ontario are ready to retire in
2020 so god help you if you need a plumber because there won’t be very many of them around so we need to we need to
do some work on this but this is a huge opportunity to introduce more women into
the trades so I want to share Electra’s journey with you today and it’s a great
story we’ve taken a very practical approach to tackling the very large
diversity and inclusion issue our journey began with the signing of the
leadership Accord on gender diversity on February 24th 2017 at that time we were
not even one month old as Electra and Electra was the creation through the
merger of inner source horizon power stream and Hydra when Brampton the
accordant was really a launching pad for us to move to a more broader diversity and inclusion initiative and when I’m
out in the industry promoting the Accord I always talk about starting with gender before moving to a broader DNI platform
it’s really easy to wrap your arms around the gender issue because the
diversity and inclusion platform is so big that I find that people just get paralyzed with they don’t know where to
start and this is such a huge initiative that they don’t have end up doing anything so you know in our industry
specifically gender is a great place to start and something you can really make
some progress on so I was so thrilled that Electra was the first company to
sign on to the leadership Accord and I have to say that we had overwhelming support from this initiative our board
of directors were very supportive but they did question at the time we signed it what about the larger issues of
diversity and inclusion while gender diversity is the main issue in the electricity sector and based on where we
were the merger was very new it was a great place to start to get our feet wet before we tackle a larger agenda we have
mass of integration underway so we didn’t want to tackle too much because our you know the majority of our
resources are focused on the integration of the four companies so I want to talk
a little bit about the process for those of you who don’t know about the Accord because it does kind of set you on the
right path right out of the gate so after you sign as a signatory as we did the process is quite easy and we felt
that this was a great way to kick-start the formation of our new culture at Elektra so our CEO signed the accord and
made a commitment on behalf of the organization and the signed Accord is actually posted in the lobby of our head
office so we completed a baseline assessment of our current practices so
since we were new and we still had you know a lot of new people I kind of
spearheaded I did the first cut of the baseline assessment and then I got an HR person from each of the four legacy
utilities and we sat down and we completed the baseline assessment so you don’t need IT systems to track this kind
of stuff as really as a conversation with the right people to do the baseline assessment and we looked at the three
areas policy and government governance practice education and workplace readiness and recruitment and retention
practices and as you go through this exercise you score yourself from zero to
three in each of the questions and as you go through the evaluation tool it has an action planning guide that really
prompts you to create an action plan for the top three areas that you really need
improvement in and then every two years you will reassess your practices and measure your improvement so this is
really all about just moving the needle on gender diversity and the beautiful thing about it is you can move at your
own pace because you’re just measuring yourself against yourself right so you just do as much or as little
you can handle so our initial self-assessment scored us a tattoo which
put elector in the achievement or intermediate level so I gotta say we’re
very competitive electorate so we immediately landed on a goal to achieve outstanding by 2019 so we’ve got our
revaluation coming up at the end of February in 2019
so for us moving to excellence means that practices are embedded into the corporate culture and values and that’s
really where we’re striving to get to so Elektra had strong diversity scores for
the following things so Elektra actively participates in Champions networking
events and opportunities to further promote the attraction of women to the sector Elector also has a very strong
pool of capable and talented female leaders that we commit to attracting and
retaining and developing for the future we scored high marks for 30% of women on
our Board of Directors and we have over 35% of women in senior leadership positions Electra’s new culture and
supporting values respect of our skills thinking and new ways of work working a
culture that we can continue to nourish and grow and we’re really excited about
that but we’ve got some work to do in some of the other areas so because we
are a new company ensuring policies are inclusive we had to review key HR
policies to ensure gender diversity but it was really good timing for us since
we are integrating companies and policies it was actually good timing for
that we needed to develop specific programs to better support women in the workplace and so our initial focus was
on networking and mentoring for women because we know those are two areas for women that holds them back we wanted to
strive to hire more women in non-traditional roles and that is easier said than done because if you don’t have
the candidates to begin with it’s a very difficult process so I’m going to talk a little bit more about that later but I’m
happy to say that we do have female line maintained errs in the field we have two female system operators and
many female engineering technicians and technologist so but it’s it’s still not
enough and we want to get those numbers up so I’m very proud of the work that we
do in the community my personal passion is to get more women into STEM careers and trades and I’ve been trying to get
that pipeline filled with more women for some time but here’s a list of some of the programs that we’ve been involved
with for some time and I often take our female technical and trades people to these events like
these women from Elector really do provide leadership and mentorship in the
hopes that we can really increase the future pipeline of women in the electricity sector and young women
cannot be what they can’t see so that is very important for all women in our
sector to get out there and show young women young women what’s really possible
so um so we first launched the idea of a
more robust diversity and inclusion initiative with the board of directors and you know they were waiting for it so
we got really good response then we introduced the concept to our employees at one of our town hall meetings in
November of 2017 we just kind of put out a little teaser out their CEO talked
about it briefly about what we were thinking about and I gotta say we had immediate response from the employees on
how to get involved in this initiative so that was a very positive step the
video I’m gonna show you was launched in July of 2018 and really demonstrates the commitment
from our CEO and got the momentum going for this initiative and employees were eager to sign up so have a look at this
since we became a lender we’ve been pulling together to truly become one company one tape one coach you want to
create a workplace that attracts the best penalty regardless of gender race sexual orientation or religion the gun
intentions aren’t always enough we need to act decisively we’re doing
just that I mentioned on a recent Town Hall’s that were working on a diversity
and inclusion strategy it’s essential to our success and it’s the right thing to
do we announced the plan to build a
stronger and more diverse workforce the new diversity and inclusion Council will
lead these efforts the details of which will be shared in the days and weeks to come members even council will be a
known short include an executive sponsorship and senior leadership they’ll be responsible for providing
governance over activities stemming from this initially employees will be invited
to join the effort to participation on committees while the council will eventually explore all aspects of
diversity and inclusion they’ll start with gender women are underrepresented
in their sector especially in careers connected to science technology
engineering and mathematics they’re particularly under represented in leadership roles including supervisors
managers and executive leadership we’re working to change this having a
workforce that reflects the diverse communities we serve well may have some heating employed and
a top choice for the best health let’s show our customers future employees in
our sector that diversity and inclusion and the excellent it brings is the key
to Electra success as an industry leader thank you
so our first step was to form a government structure that reports up to the CEO and the board because we want a
lot of visibility to this initiative so the CEO and board are really responsible for providing sponsorship governance on
the mandate and the structure etc and they actually appointed the DNI Council so the DNI counsel was appointed at the
end of July and I was appointed as the chair of the DNI Council five other council members were appointed and these
were cross-functional senior leaders appointed based on performance and potential to move the DNI agenda forward
Council was also supported by the learning and organizational development team these senior leaders are expected
to make a visible commitment and will be accountable for driving DNI best practices throughout elektra they will
also provide leadership and guidance for the ERG and work together to create a
multi-year diversity and inclusion strategy and plan the ERG slips the ER
G’s or employee resource groups our voluntary employee led groups organized
based on social identity shared characteristics or life experiences the
ERG will identify DNI opportunities and practical solutions these are really the culture
champions and ambassadors for diversity and inclusion in our organization so
energies are designed to develop a sense of community and strengthen employee connections with one another sponsored
by a member of the DNI counsel each approved ERG will be responsible for
promoting inclusion awareness specific in their areas of focus while enhancing
employee engagement and supporting Electra’s DNI strategy so there’s two
mandates for each employee resource group one identify the purpose of the
group and the reason for existing and provide a work plan of what you want to accomplish how and when you’re going to
execute so our original intention was to
have a women at Electra ERG due to the focus on our gender diversity and
applications outside of women Elector would be reviewed and additional energies would be formed if there was
enough interest well I got to tell you we had such a large interest in the women at electric ERG that we decided to
break this down further to allow for quicker decision making and implementation so we ended up having
four ERG focused on women we have mosaic stem networking and events and
mentorship and leadership the fifth ERG is mosaic and visible minorities and
that’s for all employees so this picture on the slide was app it was from our kickoff meeting where we all got
together for the first time and we had some initial diversity and inclusion training because we really wanted
everyone speaking the same language and we organized into our groups to start
reviewing our go forward plans and I gotta say we are so happy to see so many
men sign up for the women’s groups too it was very very refreshing so I want to
talk about some of the things we have done since signing the leadership accord and now with our more Folsom of DNI
program so the people team has completed a review of all the people policies to
ensure they are inclusive so that that is now complete we have focused our recruitment for female engineers and
trades and I gotta tell you that’s still a very tough go because there are a few candidates coming out of universities
and trade schools but we are working hard to get involved with these educational organizations to increase
the number of women we partnered with Conestoga College to create a pre trades
program for aboriginals and right you know early after signing the accord we
worked with our procurement documents so our our procurement documents and our master service agreements now include
language that we are a signatory to leadership Accord on gender diversity and really to promote our public
commitment to gender diversity and it brings awareness to other companies who don’t know about that as well we held
our first networking event in December that was sponsored by our women at Elektra networking and events ERG one of
our female board members spoke about work-life balance and it was such a great event attended by men and women
and this will be first of many events at Elektra we were an early adopter to enter Cannes
equal by 30 campaign we really wanted to participate in this because it promotes gender diversity on an international
stage we created the creation of the DNI Council in July last year followed by er
G’s in the fall and we’ve also written a diversity and inclusion policy for Electra now we just recently launched a
multicultural calendar and we thought this was a great tool that would bring awareness and education on all the
multicultural events that occur occur throughout the year when we acknowledge the observances that are celebrated by
our diverse workforce we create an environment that demonstrates respect and inclusion and that’s very important
as part of our program so it is still
early days for our DNI Council and ERG groups but the strategy and work plan is
really critical to our success and right now we’re at the final stages at this
point in time and we hope to roll out the strategy and plan and the next month or so but I’ll give you a flavor for
what we’ve been working on and what we have in mind so we’re developing this plan from the ground up we engaged the
er G’s to do some brainstorming and bring opportunities forward for our plan
we focus them on three areas on awareness and education develop programs
and engage employees and recruitment and retention and we also didn’t want to
lose sight about our obligations under the leadership Accord because we will be doing that rebase lining in the next two
months really our goal with the strategy and plan is to make sure that we align
what we do with our corporate values we want to create champions across the organisation for diversity and inclusion
we want to create general awareness for sure we want to set some very specific
goals and measure our progress and we want to communicate that to the organization so they know where we are
so some of the some of the the items in our plan of course we’re going to have a
training plan training as a big point part of the education and awareness we
need a robust communication plan because we have a lot of things that we want to get done and we want to make sure that
the organization is aware of all the great things happening we want to do
formal and informal mentorship programs we’re going to hold some surveys continue with our partnerships with
external organizations and we will do a number of HR practice reviews so there’s
a number of things on the HR front that we want to we want to look at going forward as well so we truly believe at
Elektra that diversity inclusion is critical to our business success and we’re using many different mediums to
communicate the DNI programs and initiatives at Elektra and I’m going to show you a second video because videos
have been very great for us and getting the momentum going on this initiative so
I want you to take a look at this this video of our employees who are giving
their unsolicited views of what diversity and inclusion means to them
[Music]
companies open to bring anybody from any
part of the world and I cried when I
moved over to utility again I was maybe one of five people of color in the
building and now when I consider Elektra and where we are on our journey in terms
of diversity and inclusion it’s so fun coming so heartwarming a real diverse
community that’s come into the workplace from all different forms of life where they live back languages girls are just
as hard these guys and usually we have to work twice as hard to prove ourselves [Music]
the same way and I think as long as we both try to understand that there’s differences there’s a way we can both
kind of work together Loveridge both our strings to kind of talk about or you know the issues
responsible you have so many different people from different backgrounds different cultures who are all confusing
those ideas up and having experiences that they’ve had into that project or
that work that you’re doing and that’s me brings perfection to work especially
at the office I’m located it’s vastly diverse and when you bring that together
I think it makes it makes you more more effective as an organization and you
leverage that correctly and it makes you a better competitor against people that may not be as diverse you know the
lecturer I find it refreshing that there’s a lot of programs that versatile being one of them but even if I look at
the leadership there’s a lot of focus on women in the a big focus on keyboard different
ethnicities and I’m happy that I can
bring the organization towards a new way of thinking about out-of-the-box more
creative more innovative thinking we want to engage everyone in the organization inclusive that’s possible
do you want this to be a grassroots movement that’s gonna take our company and build a strong team so we understand
each other we celebrate our diversity and we move forward together and the end goal is
that we don’t need a diversity and inclusion program because well we call
that our Brady Bunch video it’s been it’s been very helpful to get employees
across in the organization engaged in what we’re doing so it’s been these videos have been very successful in the
launch and to gain some momentum for these programs so I think that’s that’s
for my presentation we want to open up to questions yes absolutely I do have a
couple of questions so Thank You Kathy for sharing Electress story I really agree I think the videos are really
wonderful so we know that all organizations that organizations are all
at different stages and their approach to this topic and are eager to hear from those who are leading the way great
segue into the questions so I’ll just start off with one that we got on the
web the first question here I have is I wonder if tracking the data and using IT
will help identify pain points and successes perhaps across the sector as opposed to each utility perhaps that
could and set the stage for a competitive mindset as Kathy you revealed and
mentioned is a good fit for the culture I mean I think it’d be great if we could
week attract stats across the province and even across Canada I think right now
I know that people who have signed the leadership Accord I don’t think we’re at the point where we’re actually sharing
specific data from companies I mean we may be able to share some consolidated data but I think that’s that’s is where
we need to go for sure and then if you can pinpoint people who are doing really great things and who have really good
spats they can start sharing you know how they got there but I think if you’re
going to start from a from a grassroot point you want to you want to compare
set some goals and compare what you’re doing internally and get yourself moving in the right organ rate direction before
we move maybe bite off too much mm-hmm great thank you
is there another question out in the audience
I think somebody is gonna be mentioning a question Nelson our dependent is is it
possible to get a copy of your presentation yep
well we’re going to make it available as well on the EHR C website okay thank you
you’re welcome Kathy I have a question can you let us
know what those organizations who are just starting on this journey do first is that getting executive buy-in or
should they be reviewing their current initiatives well I wouldn’t be doing a very good job as the vice chair of EHR
see if I didn’t tell people to sign the leadership record first that is actually
very practical advice to give to somebody because you do need something to get you started so obviously you need
the CEO support because these initiatives take resources time and
money and so you do need support from the top and that’s one thing the Accord really does it provides the CTO making a
public commitment on behalf of the organization so I think that’s a great that’s a great step but part of the tool
too and whether you do it through the equipment or through another way is you really should understand where you’re
starting from so unless you understand where you’re starting from and where the big gaps are on gender diversity or
diversity and inclusion it’s pretty difficult to start prioritizing what you do first you obviously want to do the
things that are going to give you a big biggest bang for the buck by taking a little bit of time to baseline your
organization and understand what you’re doing and what you’re not doing well I
think is an important starting point okay great I have a another question
from the audience what was your biggest learning and surprise when going through
the a this exercise during the assessment biggest warning um I don’t think I was
actually surprised by anything because we kind of had a good feel of where our
organization was right now I think the
biggest learning was just I think we probably didn’t educate the organization
broadly enough on the elements of the Accord and details of our action plan to
move forward we’ve kind of been doing it a little bit piecemeal and and we will be doing it more formally through the
DNI program but yeah so I wasn’t surprised at what we found but I you
know it does take a lot of effort to share details of that initiative with
the organization so they can never underestimate how much time it takes to communicate some of that stuff okay
thank you is there any other questions through the audience I wonder if I can offer one
please it’s Kim again Kathy would you be able to speak to why there would be an
advantage to being sort of a signatory to an international framework like equal
by 30 in addition to the domestic one sure so I think I briefly mentioned this
in my presentation but what we really liked about equal by 30 is that it provided an international platform so
electricty Human Resources Canada has a Canadian wide view but the the
international platform was very really interesting to us and we once we found
out that there wasn’t any additional burdens for reporting because we were a
signature of the Accord that was very very good for us too but it’s really the international record recognition and we
also know that the timing was great because Canada’s hosting the role of the
clean energy ministerial which happens next May and Canadians want to be on the
forefront of this stuff so we want to do we want to showcase all the great things we’re doing on our gender equality
great I am Thank You Kathy I have a few more questions from the audience as well
so the next question is has electric considered design tools such as role
playing or scenario building as a way to integrate diversity into specific departments are even across the company
no we haven’t but we haven’t specifically looked at that but that’s a
great idea that I can feed into our our multi-year plan do you know anyone that
has done that does anyone actually tackle that in their organizations
it doesn’t I don’t have a response to
that question but I do have another question for you if you’d like to continue on how are you measuring the
return on your investment in diversity and inclusion so right now we do measure
very basic statistics on men versus women in the organization so we do have
some percentage but the diversity and inclusion Council is will be building a
diversity and inclusion scorecard for the organization which is not not done
yet so I can’t share what we’re measuring but we do want to measure things on many fronts for diversity and
inclusion and share that with the organization on our progress against those KPIs okay great
I have another question could you provide a bit more detail on how you establish the various er G’s if it is
voluntary who initiates the purpose and reason sure so we went we went out to
the organization we’ve actually provided a little bit of a short form application to the
organization on how to apply for an Arg and it asked them questions about you
know we gave them a baseline that for sure we want to do an ERG for women on
Electra because that was our starting point but we asked them for suggestions on what other areas of energies that
they wanted and why and we had a short questionnaire and then we evaluated all
of the questionnaires that came back in and as I said the majority of them were
focused on women at Electra but we did have a number that were for visible
minorities that we call mosaic so those are the two that we really started from
but we just took feedback directly from the organization from everybody who
actually filled out an application ok great
another question we have here from the audience audience can you give us some more details on the conestoga protect
program well I don’t have a lot of of details so
we had a partnership with Conestoga we sit on their advisory committee so we
worked with them to create pre trades program so we wanted we wanted the Aboriginal community to get a feel for
what it’s like working for a utility so
a pre trades program would be introduction to you know having laborers working on on line crews and teaching
them a little bit about Electrical Safety it’s really an introductory course to get them involved but I mean
when they take a course like this they could work as a ground men in a utility and it just gives them a kind of an
entry point into the program so we provided some guidance we provided
trainers for the program the only disappointing thing about it was that we
didn’t have any women in the group when we were hoping for both men and women to
be in that course okay great but I I
could always connect somebody with Conestoga if they wanted to find out a
lot more details about that okay great thank you
the next question I have is does Elektra have targets not yet but when we
complete our scorecard we will be setting some targets okay I have another
question here how do you balance the increase promotions and onboarding of
women while not minimizing their skills in qualification we have heard from some women and other EE groups that sometimes
these visible commitments minimize their success ie creating backtalk but she
only got the job because of this initiative how do you minimize the feeling reverse discrimination and in
brackets I hate saying that oh well I think well it’ll be part of our people
practices review on how we how we kind of counteract that I understand where this part where the
question is coming from and I think it’s uh it’s about transparency and I think
understanding what we expect upfront through the whole job process posting
process and evaluation process so people think is a transparent unfair process
and I think you know as people get on board with the whole diversity and inclusion I think some of this back talk
is going to go away when they understand the process better okay lots of
questions here today which is wonderful the next question is is there any great ways you have to engage unions I don’t
we got a lot of buy-in for our right across the organization I mean I would if we did not get any Union
participation I would suggest that you go to the Union leads and start with
them with an introduction to our program we did give them a heads up that we were launching this program they were very
positive about it so we didn’t see that we are going to get any negative backlash or lack of participation but I
think it’s a good idea whenever you do anything across the organization is to give the union leadership a heads up
okay the next one I have is I’m not sure
if it’s a question it part of a question it looks almost like a comment but it could be a question suggested activities
for sitting under represented people in the energy sector on the path to careers in and energy starting at a middle
school level is there suggested
activities I guess so I so I did share one of my slides with the work that
we’re doing in communities I think it’s really important that we start engaging
young women in grade school so we’re involved in a program stem girls club through the YWCA that
encourages girls in grade five and six to work to get kind of acclimatized to
what stem means they introduced them to women leaders in stem in all areas so in
Hamilton for example the girls came here for a day and we did some activities with them they go to McMaster University
and they they meet doctors and scientists so it just gets their headspace and their awareness of what’s
possible in the in the area of stem and as we move into the high school we work
on a number of things with both the private and Catholic school board about
encouraging young women to go into the trades and do an apprenticeship program so all these things that you do in the
community whether it’s getting your your females in non-traditional jobs out there talking to them or working with
school school boards colleges and universities to promote the
opportunities that we have in the electricity sector those are all really great things but what we’ve found
through some of the work that I’ve done is that yes the numbers are still low for engineers for example in
universities but there is quite a leaky pipeline for when these women get into
the workforce so if you’re involved in the development of culture or dni
programs at your organization developing a culture that really welcomes women
into non-traditional jobs is very critical for your organization if you want to attract and retain women in stem
or non-traditional jobs like the trades so what I’ve heard that pretty loud and
clear that through a lack of programs or just a negative culture in the
organization it really drives women out of the electricity sector so that that’s that’s a maybe a take away if you’re
working on a any HR programs or a DNI program to keep that in the back your
mind it really is about a positive culture and welcoming women into the workforce
okay that’s awesome Thank You Kathy so much I have one more
question here and it’s actually a great segue to continue on with the presentation the question is does the
equal by 30 campaign or leadership Accord have any sites that have organizations who are progressing well
and what they are doing so I will continue on because we do have that that
ant a brief answer in that regard but before I get to that we did questions
the slide you see in front of you now is copy logos from our Accord signatories
and advocates so for those of you who are perhaps on the call and not sure if your company is part of equal by 30 or
has signed the accord we even included this slide and the next slide for you to review and if you’re not there you may
want to speak to your CEO about joining the best club in town so the next slide
will represent the signatories of the equal by 30 and Kim maybe you’d like to
speak a little bit about that absolutely first to draw the obvious
aside there is a lot of crossover between leadership record an equal by 30 again that’s by design we think it makes
sense what you’re going to see me provide there he is that we are international so we have international
signatories from from around the world really and some of our partners are explicitly those international
organizations we work with you’ll see also that we recruit public sector this
might be where we’re a little bit unique in that we have the power to sort of compel federal and provincial and
territorial governments to consider signing on as well but to the earlier question are there
people knocking it out of the park oh heck yeah I mean the challenge is is
rich in that regard there are a lot of organizations do tremendous work and and
often without the recognition of being attached to a campaign like this one so
you know that principally why there’s an opportunity here under equalized very under the
leadership of court we’re already doing the work the truth is my experience has
been that a lot of the clean energy sector are already looking at diversity
and inclusion they see the connection between the bottom line and more importantly I think we have come to a
time where this isn’t just this part I think is the right thing to do
great thank you so to answer another part of that
question as well as if you wanted to find out more information about both initiatives you can visit our website as
electricity HR CA and you can also visit the website equal by 30 org so Kim I’m
gonna hand it over to you for some final remarks before I conclude the webinar today yes absolutely once again making
everybody on the line who came to hear from Cathy Cathy that was tremendous you
you are a textbook in terms of how to approach this the advice that you’ve given I think will give a lot of
organizations some really good starting points but I would wonder to underscore something that you said and that’s you
know all roads can lead to Rome there is no right or wrong way to begin a discussion on increasing diversity and
organizations it is we are not looking for the Cadillac in all instances that’s
not realistic it’s not what we want to do we do want to move the needle incremental E and a pace with what we
know about our environments about our organizations of other cultures that’s going to be different for everybody but
insofar as we can bring together people who are invested in the work I think there’s an opportunity to learn from
each other and to grow so Marie thank you so much ERD HRC continues to be
really just the standard in terms of organizing the sector’s who look at this issue seriously we’re delighted to be
partners with you we are available to anybody who’d like to talk more about equal by 30 first thing
I’m gonna tell you to do is find the leadership of course and then equal by 30 by proxy thank you once again everybody I know
that we’ve about four minutes to the hour so it’s a well run session and really phenomenal thank you so much
thank you Kim and thank you Cathy it’s been a real pleasure for you to both
participate in this webinar today and I hope that it was a valuable session today for everybody else that was
listening in so if you have questions after today please do not hesitate to contact us directly and we’ll look
forward to a second of this series that will be happening on Wednesday February the 13th where we will look at taking a
new approach and providing you with tools to implement a strategic diversity and inclusion program thank you everyone
and enjoy the rest of your day bye for now