The goal: To hire the best and the brightest.
The process: Gray, the director of Station Services, and other managers on the team looked at workforce challenges, psychological safety, inclusion, and workplace, to better understand why they weren’t achieving their desired hiring outcomes.
To help guide their conversation, they asked themselves:
- Who’s our ideal candidate? Who are they and what does their profile look like?
- How do we see those profiles on a resume, and how do we make sure those resumes are brought to the table?
- When considering diverse candidates, how do give ourselves permission to look at those resumes as they truly are – different, but in the best possible way?
The outcome: To-date, the Station Services apprenticeship program has 30% women and over 50% diversity.
"Our goal is to hire the best, and ensuring we consider diversity makes that possible," she says.
"We do amazing work and getting a job at Hydro One is like winning the lottery," Gray adds.
"We know these are premier jobs and we should be recruiting as such. When we bring in individuals with diversity, we (as an organization) actually get more information, more power, more knowledge, and a different way of thinking. And that's a win-win."
Diverse employees improve the customer experience
A diverse workforce promotes a stronger perspective on customer needs, service and improvement, and brings insights that they can use to empathize with customers (or colleagues) that they’re trying to help.
Building a diverse pipeline of talent is critical at Hydro One to achieving its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) goals. As found in the 2021 Sustainability Report Energizing Life for People and Communities, Hydro One is continuing to transform the way we develop leaders and nurture talent to not only support our strategy, but to build a workplace that reflects the diversity of Ontario where we live and work.
While the report highlights significant progress, there is still more work to do to keep challenging the status quo not only at Station Services, but across the organization.
Gray reiterates that while 30% of women in the apprenticeship program is "a huge uptick" she wants to see a diverse workforce not only in entry roles, but subsequent roles, too.
"We need to create the feeder pool for our leadership roles," Gray explains. "Our leadership roles don’t quite have the diversity we should have. My objective is to focus on the frontline employees and support them so that they naturally cascade upwards and that we’re not putting barriers in front of them. Hiring the best doesn’t just apply to our front line roles but all of our positions."
2021 DEI Goals and Performance
- Advancing Women in Business: Hydro One exceed its Catalyst Accord commitment by having over 30% female Board and executive-level presentation.
- Representation of women in the executive ranks increased by approximately 5% which positions us well as we strive to achieve at least 30% women executives by 2022.
- Hydro One signed the BlackNorth Initiative Pledge and is committed to achieving 3.5% Black executives and Board directors, and 5% Black student hires by 2025.
- Our 2021 annual average of executives and Board members identifying as female was 31% of executives and 50% of independent Board directors.
Learn More About Our Sustainability Goals
