I’m an electrical engineer by training and then became a patent lawyer. In patent law you need to have a technical degree before obtaining your law degree, and so, even though I’m in the legal field, I see first-hand the diversity issues that tech companies are facing. The pool of diverse candidates in the engineering space is smaller than it should be, and so the pool in patent law is even smaller.
Continue reading “Dana Rao, vice president of intellectual property and litigation, Adobe”
I think it’s absolutely critical for a company to embrace diversity and inclusion. At Salesforce, we operate in a very competitive industry – one that is evolving every day and where innovation isn’t a ‘nice-to-have’, but a business imperative.
Diversity for me has been an issue I’ve been passionate about throughout my career. It’s certainly something which has evolved over time, but it’s rooted in my upbringing. My parents were very involved in the Civil Rights Movement back in the 1960s, so from an early age it has been ingrained in us as children that concepts like civil rights, diversity and valuing differences were the right thing to do.
Continue reading “Mark Roellig, general counsel, MassMutual”
A diverse workforce means you have a diversity of experience and a diversity of opinion, which translates into better products and better services. We service customers worldwide and our team has to reflect that in order for us to remain competitive.
A number of years ago, while interviewing an individual for an open position on my team, he shared a very personal concern with me. He told me that he was gay and that was causing him concern about how he would be perceived, should he be out in the workplace with his colleagues. He also worried that he may be treated differently because of his sexuality.
Continue reading “Mike Cammarota, senior director of legal services, Accenture”
Rhanda Moussa: ‘Bring your whole self to work’ is our team’s new lens in which we define, progress and measure the strategic direction for diversity and inclusion across legal. We broadly work from three guiding principles, focusing on attract, retain and develop.
As a white man, I don’t scream diversity. But as the first-generation son of Russian immigrants who came to the US in the 1950s, I know all too well what it feels like to be a minority. When my parents came to America, they didn’t speak a word of English. Despite being highly educated (English was their fifth language), I saw them be treated as if they were stupid simply because they struggled to express themselves in a language other than one of their own. This experience shaped my character and how I think about diversity, both personally and professionally.
Continue reading “Alex Dimitrief, general counsel, General Electric”
Maternity policy is a conversation that has been around for decades; the problem statement is our most valuable resource is our people. We have a group of working women who are assets to the organization. We invest in them via time, finance and development, and we lose that tremendous value they have with the insight, the skillset and experience because someone chooses to have a baby.
Continue reading “Megan Doberneck, general counsel, Vodafone Americas”
The idea for the Denniston Fellowship originated from my own frustrations with other diversity and inclusion initiatives. We participated in a diversity summer internship program in 2013 where a law student spent a few weeks of the summer with a law firm and three weeks with our team.
Continue reading “Tom LaFrance, general counsel, GE Transportation”
GC: Within Arcadis, how important is diversity and what value does it bring to the organisation?
Margot Day: From an organisational perspective Arcadis has a global strategy to continue to improve diversity and inclusion (D&I). We refreshed and re-launched our D&I programme two years ago, trying to encourage a diverse workplace that is equal for everyone regardless of sexual orientation, gender, race, ethnicity, age or disability; and one that reflects the culture we want as an organisation and the culture that our clients want as well.
The question often posed is ‘why have a D&I agenda?’. I think that having a diverse workforce assists in our design for a globalised world; it broadens the breadth of knowledge we have as an organisation and increases the skills we can offer our clients, while improving our ability to innovate. I have heard it said that ‘strength lies in differences, not in similarities’; and I believe this to be true – a team that has experiences from diverse perspectives, cultures, ages, gender and race is more likely to come up with innovative solutions than those where there is only one ‘type’ of high ability problem solvers.
GC: The initiatives that you’re running in-house at Arcadis – how did they come about and where did the directive to really get involved with D&I come from?
MD: At a regional level in the UK, I sit as part of our UK leadership team and all people in leadership positions have taken up the helm to develop and invest in the D&I programme. For me, I am involved in the race and gender equality agenda, looking at these from both a legal perspective and as an organisation, asking what do we want to be as an organisation and how should we present ourselves in the market. Most importantly we look at how we attract and retain staff, and how we can ensure that we continue to encourage a diverse workforce.
In most in-house environments, the legal team tends to be quite diverse in terms of gender – perhaps more so than workforces generally. Arcadis as a global consultancy, design and engineering firm, is aligned to industry sectors which are not typically so diverse. There is an international legal counsel group consisting of the GCs in each region within Arcadis and while improving the way we work legally, we also seek to drive through initiatives like the D&I agenda. This approach ensures we can take account of cultural differences and feed the international perspective into the D&I agenda.
GC: Something we’ve heard from other GCs as part of this exercise, was that it can be difficult at times to separate genuine D&I initiatives from merely a box ticking exercise – how do you make sure that through diversity you find a way to impart meaningful change within your organization?
MD: In the UK, we have looked at supplier contracts for employment agencies that we use to try to make sure that such agencies tie in with our goals and put forward candidates that reflect a diverse range of people, so we can try and interview a diverse range of candidates.
Our global executive board is based in the Netherlands. The D&I agenda has been taken up worldwide among our senior management committee which represents our leaders across the globe. The D&I initiative was re-launched because there was a real need to not just show we have a D&I agenda but to actively try to address D&I issues within the organisation.
I think, if you look at the last five to ten years, every big company has said ‘we are behind the D&I agenda’. But it is important that an organisation actually reflects this, especially for new recruits and graduates, because they want an organisation to embody the right kind of values. You need to have initiatives and agendas that are actually followed through and implemented into the company as opposed to bland strategy comments made and posted around the organisation with no oomph behind them. We have seen a need to benchmark where you are now to where you want to go.
GC: From your perspective, how important are role models in driving diversity forward?
MD: If you look at anyone coming into the organisation, they will be asking ‘what is the real opportunity for me? Does this company model what they say? Do they reflect this?’. If people cannot see people like themselves in leadership positions, then it is just empty words. There has been a step-change at the leadership level of gender representation and this has been encouraged through mentoring and promoting participation in leadership-type programmes, and this allows people to see they can get to higher levels within the organisation. There is a need to ensure this mentoring continues to takes place across all D&I strands and that is the focus of many of the streams in the UK now. In addition to mentoring there is a need to focus on school children from the 11-16 range to show them the possibilities of what can be achieved as we regard this as a key stage to capture minority groupings.
Traditionally, support and enabling functions are more diverse than other areas of any business in the construction industry. Arcadis is trying to ensure diversity is reflected across all areas of the business and we are fortunate that this is an issue taken seriously by the CEO and the leadership team.
GC: What are the challenges you see moving forward, both from an Arcadis perspective and in the broader legal sector?
MD: Where next? Everyone talks about D&I, it has been a buzzword for the last five years, but you need to actually see a step-change from the top down: not just words, but something properly reflected. Over the last few years we have seen the appointment of women to board positions within FTSE 100 companies and while I am not convinced myself whether this alone drives the behaviour in terms of inclusion, it is a good start.
Now there has to be a wider agenda. In a way, gender was the easier one to kick off all of the D&I strands. But there has to be a constant reminder to people that it isn’t that gender was important and now we have addressed it and we can move on: instead, it is something that needs to be continually addressed.
On the race agenda, I think it was very much a box-ticking exercise in the ’80-’90s. There was a feeling that if organisations monitored their race relations they were satisfactorily discharging their obligations. I believe more has to be done to encourage people from ethnic minorities into our profession both from a legal point of view and a consultancy, design and engineering stance.
Encouraging people means taking actual steps towards inclusion. I have heard it said that if you do not intentionally include then you unintentionally exclude and that is why more credence has to be paid to inclusivity. You have to constantly reference back – for us as an organisation and for our clients – in terms of measuring improvements or where there has been ‘success’ in the company.
There is no one target that shows you have achieved D&I, you have to constantly feed back to the workforce what successes there have been, but still continue to strive to improve in all areas. I am excited to be involved in seeing the development of these initiatives over the next few years.