Workplace Diversity Leads to Success

Whether a large Fortune 500 company or one of the many small businesses critical to our country and communities, we all face many of the same challenges and questions:

• Will we attract and retrain the workforce with the necessary skills to meet customer needs and business demands?

• Do we have a workplace climate and culture that builds effective and engaged teams, encouraging creative ideas and innovative solutions for competitive advantage?

• Can we continue to build strong customer and community relationships with a focus on market opportunities?

• Do all of our employees have an understanding of expected workplace behaviors that result in respectful treatment and productive use of manager and company resources?

How we answer and execute on these questions can mean success or failure in business. I believe that business leaders who address these questions with an understanding of the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace can greatly improve a company’s success.

At Williams, we have had a strong focus on diversity and inclusion in the workplace since 1998 when our then President & CEO Keith Bailey stressed the value of growing our understanding and skills related to attracting, retaining, and engaging a diverse work force. As the American Council on Education reported in 2007 that in the 10-year period between 1994 and 2004, minority enrollment in higher education rose by 49 percent, to total more than 4.8 million students, while white students during the same period increased by 6 percent, to total 10.6 million; During that same time period, growth in Hispanic enrollment increased 67 percent.

Since then, we have made changes, and we have made progress on this journey to inclusion. And, indeed, we’ve come to understand that this journey is a marathon, not a sprint.

We started with an in-depth training for all of our employees and have continued to push ourselves, leveraging the work of our Enterprise Diversity and Inclusion Council, which I chair. We defined our Diversity Mission so that there would be no question as to what we expect of each and every employee.

We have seen the results that an inclusive work environment creates -- a place where people can be themselves and where we’re all treated with mutual respect.

Whether Gen Y or Baby Boomers, people who feel they are respected and valued members of the team will perform better. They will be your best recruiters. We’ve witnessed the discretionary effort that employees bring to their work when they know they are valued and that their differences will be appreciated and leveraged

- - rather than merely tolerated. Creating this inclusive culture as a leader is simply the right thing to do.

There are some basic steps to beginning this work: 1. Understand what “starting a diversity initiative” means; Long-term change management; Changing the company cultures (there are usualy more than one); Commitment to assessment and measuring results; Wilingness to communicate, communicate, communicate; Resilience to ride the inevitable highs and lows; Taking the time to define your vision of success 2. Develop a work force profile that reflects our communities 3. Build a climate and culture that motivates and engages employees for better retention, engagement, innovative solutions, and teamwork 4. Partner with our diverse customers, communities, and shareholders, resulting in increased business opportunities and a strong image and reputation 5. Promote mutual accountability and ownership among our leaders as champions of diversity and inclusion in the workplace 6. Finaly, my direct reports, our executive officer team, stack hands and commit to be accountable for: Actively mentoring an employee who is different from him or her; they also hold their leadership teams accountable for doing the same; Requiring al leaders at the VP level and to include a female and minority employee on the succession/replacement plan for their position; They also ensure each internal candidate has a development plan to close gaps to get that candidate to a state of readiness; Including a Diversity & Inclusion Update as a standing item for communication at each Town Hal; Targeting areas for risk mitigation to improve awareness of expected workplace behaviors; Playing an active role as the executive sponsor of a diversity business resource group, diversity team, or Enterprise Diversity and Inclusion Council member, and sharing updates and experiences from those teams with other EOT members; Actively and personaly addressing personal blind spots or development needs to better understand the issues and to increase effectiveness related to leading a diverse workforce. Just as if this were truly a marathon, we measure our signs of fitness and fatigue and make adjustments. We understand that business and educational institutions still have a lot of work to do to reflect the diversity and demographic changes in our communities. So we continue on the marathon. We are all part of a global, fastmoving, highly technical economy, and we can’t afford to underutilize the talents of our employees if we are going to compete in the twenty-first century.