Continuing Our Commitment to DEI: A Recap of 2022 Work

We believe every person brings unique perspective and value, and collectively can make our world and workplaces better. We're committed to fostering a welcoming culture and workplace that actively values diversity, equity and inclusion.

It's our aim to continue enhancing our culture by creating a safe, diverse and inclusive space for associates, clients and community partners as we honor the diversity of voices and experiences within our team.

We have developed a multi-year DEI plan that includes the following focus areas:

• associate recruitment and hiring
• vendor recruitment and hiring
• policy and practices equity
• education and culture building
• external culture building
• leadership and associate engagement

In 2022, we made progress on work in each of these areas.

Associate Recruitment & Hiring

Grounded in best practices, we have established a standard recruiting and hiring process to help expand recruitment beyond traditional referral networks. The goal is to maintain this standard recruiting process through consistent and intentional effort.

We are creating partnerships with the following chapter organizations to expand our candidate pools for underrepresented groups:

• Society of Women Engineers
• Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers
• National Society of Black Engineers
• National Association of Women in Construction

Vendor Recruitment & Hiring

In August 2021, we hosted an external listening session in St. Louis. This listening session provided vital data and informed the actions for 2022.

In 2022, the following work was completed:

• benchmarking and research on supplier diversity programs in the public and private sectors
• internal listening session to understand the current state of systems, processes and practices for sourcing and hiring subcontractors and vendors
• hosted a Minneapolis external listening session

Following the Minneapolis listening session, a work team was assembled to develop recommendations for action. They identified tasks with immediate benefits that can be delivered quickly, and volunteers are investigating additional ways to make improvements.

Policy & Practice Equity

Evaluating policies, procedures and practices with a DEI lens is one of our commitments in the DEI Foundational Principles. “Applying a DEI lens means taking a look at policies, procedures and cultural norms to ask whether they work for everyone, and how they might be adjusted to embrace and celebrate the fullness of each individual." (Source)

This equity work began with an external consultant reviewing the current state of our policies and programs. The consultant interviewed about 20 associates from across the organization about their experiences and perspectives of the organization and our practices. Then a cross-functional sounding board team participated in working sessions with the consultant to dig deeper on key themes and topics learned from the interviews.

Currently, they are distilling findings down to next steps and prioritizing improvement opportunities. Then they plan to assemble an associate task force to work on solutions to those opportunities.

Education & Culture Building

Education drives awareness which drives action. We're enhancing a culture of inclusion and belonging through thoughtful, ongoing education and development of all associates. Our education and culture building efforts began in earnest with the following:

• We rolled out our DEI Foundational Principles, which detail the desired state for our organization's culture.
• We developed educational competencies for all associates and began an education program.
• We also participated in the secondConstruction Inclusion Week and began marking cultural and awareness recognitions.
• In June, we updated our internal system to allow associates to indicate their pronouns in their email signature and intranet profile.

Leadership & Associate Engagement

To be most effective, DEI needs to be embraced at all levels of the organization. There has been ongoing, active engagement with DEI at Executive Leadership Team (ELT) and Board meetings.

ELT has done the following:

• every ELT meeting includes a DEI moment on the agenda
• quarterly ELT strategic forums, discussing relevant education and leadership development topics
• multiple ELT members have worked with external consultant on regular basis

In 2022, we transitioned from a DEI Action Team to DEI Champions. This signified a shift in focus from opportunity identification and ideation to prioritization and implementation. While we'll always work to identify ways to keep getting better, we are in a phase of implementing our plan.

The Champions participated in quarterly learning forums and monthly open mic sessions. While we started with about 12 participants, we now have nearly 30 from across the organization, and it continues to grow. All associates are welcomed and encouraged to attend.

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Every voice brings unique perspective and value and collectively can make our world and workplaces better. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) serve to amplify everything we do; a culture and environment that actively values DEI makes us stronger, more creative, more competitive, sustainable, and just plain better. Learn more about our DEI work.