I am an ally who chooses to challenge

Last week we celebrated International Women’s day with events almost each day on the theme of #ChooseToChallenge. We celebrated the achievement and highlighted some of the challenges with inequality that women face.

I was honoured to be asked to support our celebrations for in a ‘fireside’ chat about ‘Allyship’ of the Centrica Women’s Network and why it is important to me. Hosted by Sue Gregory-Phillips, I spoke about how as a leader and a father of three daughters that equality, diversity and inclusion is top of my agenda.

It’s vital to me that we #ChooseToChallenge on the challenges faced by women in the modern workspace. However, women continue to remain underrepresented in the workplace, I am pleased that we are starting to make serious inroads into levelling the balance. I have committed that in our KPI dashboards, to share the gender and ethnicity mix of our teams and work to rebalance.

As well as that, we’re focusing on women in STEM, and promoting activities such as International Women’s day, in my monthly Townhall sessions we have a section on diversity and inclusion. Calling out the great things and contribution that women are making in our business. I was really pleased to hear Rebecca Sparrow, talk about her career, some of the challenges she’s faced, and how she overcame these in Centrica’s first ‘choosing to challenge’ discussion as part of this year’s International Women’s Day.

In our fireside chat we also spoke about the importance to recognise top-performing women from across the technology space and provide inspiration for younger women looking to build a career in our industry. Centrica’s co-chair of Women’s Network, Joanne Rose’s article on her career in tech, such an inspirational journey and a true advocate for equality. Joanne shares her views on how technical industries need women to ensure that technical developments suit everyone.

I couldn’t agree more and have said many times that successful customer-facing businesses represent the communities they serve and get the best from their people by respecting and valuing differences and breaking down gender stereotypes that have existed in the past. To ensure that we are focused on inclusion, diversity and engagement with our employee networks and just generally with each other.

Providing a platform and a voice is important for me, and the only way that I can understand the pain points for colleagues and customers.

I encourage employee voice in a number of ways. I hold a weekly drop-in, which is an informal time with me, where colleagues can ask me anything. I have no agenda; the call is completely open.

We run quarterly employee engagement surveys to understand how colleagues are feeling and what they want to change. My team and I, then ensure that we tackle these points through actions.

We’ve created guilds, colleague lead open forums which operate from the grassroots and give people the opportunity to learn, collaborate, and have open conversations that span organisational boundaries. There have been some amazing discussions that have challenged the mindset and lead to changes in the way that we do things in my business unit from how a project may run to how we really get underneath things such as gender equality and unconscious bias.

Last week, as a Leadership team we discussed how we build a culture of Allyship. What can we do to role model and lead from the front to encourage everyone to be an ally?

I believe that Allies are key to helping every voice to be heard. For me an, ally is someone who has your back and will stand up for other’s rights whether that person is in the room or not. We can all be an ally.

We’re championing allyship to our employee-led networks, we can ALL advocate on behalf of others. We can encourage everyone to be an ally and how as leaders we can help colleagues to understand what allyship means through sessions like today. small things every day that you can do.

For example, as a father to daughters, I am clear with my daughters that they can do whatever they put their minds to doing. I will do all that I can to help them to do this as a father, as an ally and as a business leader to break down the barriers before they encounter them.