Cover Features from Spirit Energy, PD&MS Group, Ethos Energy and Atkins

SPIRIT ENERGY - INCLUSIVE SPIRIT

Spirit Energy are creating an inclusive environment where people of all backgrounds feel welcome by building a balanced, diverse business, providing equal opportunity for everyone, representing the communities we work in, and delivering better business results.

During Covid-19 everyone’s wellbeing has been under pressure and it’s been diverse employees – women, the LGBTQ+ community, ethnic minorities, the young and old – who have faced some of the toughest challenges in the workplace and balancing that with their home lives. This has highlighted the importance of viewing inclusion through the lens of intersectionality to better support all of our people.

We are focusing on improving our gender balance and our 2020 gender pay gap report demonstrated continued improvements. We have invested in resources which support the financial, physical and mental wellbeing of our people. Our D&I employee resource groups have also provided support by facilitating discussions on topics such as “Black Lives Matter”, “Neurodiversity” and the barriers to equality faced by women in our industry. We are shining a light on a range

of inclusion-related subjects through regular podcasts where we discuss topics like LGBTQ+ experiences in our industry. Our D&I book club is also popular and our “Developing Professionals” network provided us with online social events during the lockdowns.

In 2020, Spirit Energy improved its “Disability Confident” status, moving from Level 1 to Level 2. We relaunched our LGBTQ+ Vibe network to include “Straight allies”, and continue to support the LGBTQ+ network, InterEnergy. We also recognised that young people have been impacted by the lack

of internships and graduate places during the pandemic and in 2021 we partnered with freelance internship provider, Udrafter, to offer microinternships, providing year-round opportunities for young people to gain valuable work experience. In order to take steps to become more ethnically diverse, we ring-fenced an engineering internship for Black, Asian and minority ethnic candidates, working with our partner the Association for BME Engineers to recruit from their members.

We introduced a transparent promotion process, with clearly defined career ladders making it easier for people to develop and achieve their goals and aspirations. Our employee surveys suggested that the different age groups we have in Spirit have different needs, so we are pleased to commence a partnership with Age Scotland on an age inclusion project, enabling us to better support people of all ages.

Finally, in 2022 we plan to produce our first ethnicity pay gap report – our D&I network groups are working to help us improve the quality of personal data sets in our HR system so that we can produce a quality report, allowing us to better serve the needs of all ethnicities.

The pandemic has been a challenge for us all, but one big positive has been that it has helped us to highlight that a continued focus on creating an inclusive environment is the right thing. By supporting employees of all backgrounds we create happier, higher performing teams that focus on ensuring the safety of our operations and the wellbeing of our people, whilst delivering on our strategy and corporate targets.

PD&MS GROUP -DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

We live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. At a societal level, we face one of our most significant challenges as a civilisation as we seek to reshape our global energy mix to achieve a more sustainable future. The range of possible issues and opportunities we face in this environment requires access to a deep collective mind with a diverse perspective.

Just like catching fish in the sea, having a wider net increases the possibilities of success. Homogenous groups tend to see problems the same way. They have very similar interpretations of reality, and

resultantly they share similar blind spots. It is in these blind spots that we believe the true innovation resides. Creating a wider net in the organisational sense requires heterogeneous groups overlapping their diverse experiences to eliminate blind spots and collectively “see” what cannot be seen alone.

The confluence of differing ethnic heritage, gender identities, races, sexual orientations, ages, physical characteristics, and mental characteristics, underpinned by personal and professional history, creates a far more powerful recipe for ground-breaking solutions than homogenous, non-diverse groups.

Socially responsible organisations seek to establish deliberate systems and processes to encourage diversity in the workplace. At a human level, it’s the right thing to do, and at a business level creating psychologically safe spaces leads to the best innovations and reduces any risky blind spots. It is therefore critical for sustainable success organisationally and societally.

We hope that the future of humanity brings organically occurring diverse and inclusive cultures across all areas of society. Society, though, simply isn’t there yet. It is therefore on organisations such as ours to play our part as agents for change. We have created a culture of diversity and inclusion through the establishment of systems and processes for deliberate change, supported by the fostering of an inclusive culture. By establishing our internal Diversity and Inclusion Taskforce and participating and sharing our voice in broader external forums, we aim to be a continued part of the solution for a more inclusive future.

This historical and ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion has allowed us to create a varied and broad workforce that has delivered numerous innovations that create value for our customers. Never in the history of our industry have we needed innovative solutions on such a massive scale. We need to work together to help each other see what cannot be seen alone. Most importantly, however, within the PD&MS family, we believe in creating a culture where everyone should be encouraged to be Proud to be You. It's what makes us Proud to be PD&MS.

ETHOS ENERGY - POWERING OUR WAY TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE CULTURE

In the more than two decades I’ve been in this industry, awareness of I&D has grown exponentially. Companies now have a strong desire to bring in more diversity but the challenge remains the same; it’s not enough to just talk about it, we must do. It takes buy-in, and tremendous effort to increase awareness and implement programmes that actively drive progress.

Born to Turkish immigrant parents in Germany, I learned about inclusion, exclusion and cultural confusion early on in life. This is where my passion for inclusion and diversity (I&D) started. In many ways I have been fortunate to enjoy a varied and successful career, but it was not always an easy path. Entering a male-dominated industry 24 years ago, I started my career in an admin role and worked my way up by sneaking onto the turbine deck to learn the technology in real-time. I convinced local leadership to give me a chance as a field engineer, this made me the only female field engineer in the company at the time! I am pleased to say that this is no longer the case but with women accounting for only 26% (Boston Consulting Group) of jobs in the energy sector there is still much work to be done.

One way in which I’ve pledged myself to this is through coaching and mentoring of early career talent and women in energy. I have led employee networks, started and run coaching programs to retain existing female talent whilst creating an environment that welcomed new talent. Everyone has the ability and responsibility to play a role.

There are many reasons a company needs to take I&D seriously, reports have drawn a direct correlation between having a balance of voices in organisations and improved creativity and innovation; happier employees; a better understanding of our customers; and more talent to choose from. This has a significant impact on the bottom line with McKinsey reporting companies with more diverse leadership attain 73% more revenue in innovation.

At EthosEnergy, driving I&D has been fun. We are aligned, nimble and fast which allowed us to recently implement a robust I&D programme linking to our business strategy. This included launching our I&D Council and kicking off our Women of Ethos employee network. I&D forms part of all our company updates, driving awareness and using it as a lens through which to view our business. For example, we are training all employees on unconscious bias and implementing policies that actively increase diversity in our employee base through diverse interview slates, internal promotions and assigning mentors.

When considering I&D, my advice would be make it part of the culture and inextricably linked to strategy. It starts with simple things like looking around the meeting room to gauge diversity and ensuring everyone has the opportunity to use their voice – do our teammates feel like they belong.

Having driven and seen it first hand, making I&D part of everything we do, every day, is the ultimate success.

ATKINS - A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO INCLUSION AT ATKINS

As winner of OGUK’s first ever Diversity & Inclusion Award in 2017, Atkins has been on their inclusion journey for some time now. The group has been part of a sustained and successful campaign at Atkins to measure, analyse, track and plan progression towards a more diverse workforce, demonstrated by clear year-on-year improvements in their graduate intake diversity, and progression at each grade step thereafter.

A driving force behind these efforts has been Karen Blanc, Atkins’ UK Operations Director. Karen is also chair of Aberdeen’s cross-industry gender balance group, AXIS Network, and supported the establishment of OGUK’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force. Since taking on the role of Operations Director as the pandemic hit last year, Karen has been leading a campaign within her business section to identify and remove hidden bias in Atkins people process, and to embed inclusion into everyday business practices.

Karen says, “As a young woman growing up through our business, I was aware of the ways in which our system wasn’t perfect and could be considered to rely on self-confidence and selfpromotion to get ahead. It’s not easy to call out the system which you yourself have benefitted from, but while it’s too early to measure any resulting progress, feedback from within suggests that the changes we’ve implemented have helped to make our promotion process more transparent, fairer, and more inclusive. Ultimately, I hope that these changes will allow a more diverse workforce to thrive, giving us the best chance to be part of teams that we really enjoy working in.”

Some of the changes that the business has introduced include openly advertising all internal roles and opportunities, overhauling how projects are resourced, clarifying grade requirements, explaining the promotion process, shifting from a recommendationbased

process to quarterly all-staff promotion reviews, mandating gender diverse interview and promotion panels, and introducing mid-grade career presentations to support developing staff with building their network and peer set.

The group has also required that all staff set an inclusion objective in their annual performance reviews, and added a D&I behaviour requirement at every grade. Every member of the leadership team has a reverse mentor, and a responsibility to embed inclusion into their daily business. Of note is the fact that the group have continued to deliver these changes over the backdrop of the past year, when others may have deprioritised ED&I efforts due to the pandemic, and challenging low oil prices.

As Karen tells us, “Diversity & Inclusion can’t be an afterthought. Inclusion is simply good leadership, and it’s in how we do everything – how we plan meetings, how we build project teams, how we match people to high profile opportunities, how we communicate with each other, and how we live and breathe our truly flexible working culture. Living our values on this is essential if we are going to meet our goal of playing a starring role in delivering the energy transition – it needs the best people and true diversity of experience and approach.”