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UNDERLINING A NEED FOR DIVERSITY UF’s Unstoppable Minds Podcast, Episode 6 ESSIE associate professor Denise R. Simmons, Ph.D., was featured on UF’s Unstoppable Minds podcast, hosted by Kyla McMullen, Ph.D., and Jeremy Waisome, Ph.D. Dr. Simmons discussed how being a Black woman in a maledominated field has taught her some hard truths about diversity. DR. DENISE R. SIMMONS My specialty is in project management. But my research looks at workforce sustainability and evaluation with aspects of inclusive culture. DR. JEREMY WAISOME Denise specializes in the intersection of civil engineering and the behavioral sciences. We all have our own stories to tell, and our experiences are unique to ourselves. And it really does influence how we show up at work every single day. Denise began her research looking at two different kinds of success found in the workplace.
you’re also limiting your ideas. It’s our different life experiences that drive creativity and have novel solutions like that come out of it.
DR. DENISE R. SIMMONS There was the organization’s perspective and then the employees perspective. The organization’s perspective included things like productivity and profitability and then create an environment that’s safe and inclusive. And where these two things, I think, overlap is that people or companies are just looking for the right people. And when companies began to task me with the thing of looking for where we’re losing money, I almost always found it wasn’t really about a technical failure. It was about maybe a human or person related failure. And so, it began to help me think about if we have these two competing but overlapping things about success, and the Venn diagram there was, it was really about people, what they understood, how they were able to perform, if they felt valued. I felt like if we could solve that problem first, both sides of that equation of success could be satisfied.
DR. JEREMY WAISOME It’s really the company and ultimately the customer that’s losing out on the best product that they could receive. The University of Florida has already kind of established some best practices that support our faculty and staff who are people of color, but also faculty and staff who aren’t to help them engage in conversations that, you know, may be difficult to talk about. We have a group that’s trained in crucial conversations and that helps those who participate develop communication skills, that allows people to be their authentic selves and discuss inclusivity, diversity, equity and access. The other piece is, we have these affinity groups and they are for underrepresented people on our campus to kind of connect with each other, to connect with like-minded individuals. We see them in an industry environment, and we don’t often see them in academic environments.
DR. KYLA MCMULLEN Yeah, that’s really stifling to be someone in a place where you can’t show up as your whole self to work because
DR. KYLA MCMULLEN What happens when there isn’t diversity like in teams and in companies?
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ENGINEERING SCHOOL OF SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE & ENVIRONMENT