Embedding a culture diversity and inclusion

Posted: April 20, 2020

Attracting and retaining a diverse pool of talent is a universal challenge for global businesses. So, creating a culture of inclusion is essential to allow everyone to feel they can be themselves and contribute their best work.

AVEVA has 4,700 people working in offices across the world. Each individual employee contributes unique knowledge and experience, attitudes and ambitions. To benefit from this diversity, we have introduced a framework to help accelerate diversity and inclusion initiatives and projects. It is based around our values of integrity, collaboration, transparency and excellence. The framework enables the company to assess opportunities and measure results and build on research and best practices.

There is no single solution to diversity and inclusion. Critically, at AVEVA, we have been clear that D&I is not an HR topic – it is a company topic. All employees across the company should feel responsible for diversity and inclusion. Pooling knowledge is the optimum route to best practice. Our partnership with the WISE Campaign and the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) has delivered access to resources such as industry best practices for talent acquisition and development, statistics, knowledge sharing events, professional development activities for female employees, annual conferences and speaking opportunities.

To provide some structure around our ambitions for greater D&I, we carried out several initiatives against a six-pillar framework:

  1. Talent Acquisition: We have set up KPIs measuring applicant gender throughout the recruitment pipeline. We have facilitated diversity and inclusion roundtable meetings with industry peers and benefited from resources and job boards from organisations including WISE and Society of Women Engineers.
  2. Talent Development: While more women are rising to senior levels in their organisations, women and staff from minority backgrounds tend to progress to senior and leadership roles at lower rates than white men. In 2019, AVEVA has committed to increase the number of women in leadership roles. We have an active Women in Engineering group to build a community of professional women within AVEVA. Externally, we have sponsored and attended women’s networking events and participated in conferences including the Society of Women Engineers conference in Anaheim, CA, WISE conference, Women of Silicon Roundabout and the Girls In Tech Catalyst conferences. We have also sponsored the RisingWISE programme, led by Oxford and Cambridge universities, to retain and progress women in STEM careers.
  3. Learning and Culture: We have showcased more women and role models from diverse backgrounds in brand materials and social media. For International Women in Engineering Day 2019, a campaign highlighted some AVEVA female engineers. We have also hosted speakers in offices around the world to speak on topics related to diversity and inclusion.
  4. Outreach: We support employees who become STEM Ambassadors and volunteer to run STEM outreach activities such as hosting work experience students to inspire them to consider a STEM career and running science, and coding clubs.
  5. Analytics and Research: Internal diversity and inclusion dashboards monitor progress. We have also commissioned independent research of diversity and inclusion best practices.
  6. Communications: Externally, AVEVA projects a more diverse set of images and stories, while internally we share stories and activities that support diversity and inclusion. We have enshrined in Business Conduct Guidelines a written commitment to fostering an environment of diversity, inclusion and individual development, human dignity and respect.

In addition to the framework, AVEVA’s global diversity and inclusion committee, which includes global employee representation endorsed and supported by AVEVA leadership team, is also working to bring diverse voices to the programme from around the world.

Our success today is attributed to our ever-expanding global presence and working together across cultures to develop our innovative products. And we are proud to highlight that our workforce has more than 50 nationalities and over 60 languages spoken.

Our multi-year strategy and programme for diversity and inclusion, as with many companies, initially began with gender, but we are continually looking to go broader across each demographic that we can. It’s still early days, but we are encouraged by the level of interest and engagement across our international workforce.


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