Diversity 2019: Christine Carmody and Doreen Nichols

PUF's Steve Mitnick: Chris, what is your typical day like at Eversource?

Chris Carmody: I'm responsible for the Human Resources and Information Technology organizations at Eversource. This includes developing and implementing talent and culture strategies to acquire, develop, and retain a diverse, empowered and engaged workforce that safely delivers great customer service. I lead the employee & labor relations, talent & organization development, diversity & inclusion, human resources consulting, compensation, benefits strategy and human resources operations & service delivery functional areas. 

I also partner with leaders to devise and drive the IT plan to ensure that technology is effectively deployed and facilitates the achievement of company goals. This includes IT business solutions, IT security & compliance, IT project management, enterprise architecture & quality assurance, and IT infrastructure teams. In a nutshell, that's HR and IT here at Eversource.

PUF:Doreen, what do you focus on?

Doreen Nichols: Along with my team, I focus on supporting and executing the talent and culture strategies to acquire, develop and retain a diverse, empowered and engaged workforce, and as Chris stated that safely delivers great customer service.

My role is to align the talent and culture strategies to our business strategy, attract, develop, and retain talent, and weave diversity and inclusion in everything we do as part of our commitment to building a diverse, empowered, and engaged workplace. It means that I can't rest on something I did yesterday, instead I continue to create an environment that ensures when employees walk through our doors every day, they have the tools to do their jobs, know that they are valued and have experiences that matter to them. Focusing on the basics, I believe, gets to desired outcomes of being an employer of choice, employee commitment, happy customers, and strong business performance.

PUF:What is Eversource doing to be diverse in the workplace and for the employee base, but also on the utility spend side?

Chris Carmody: Diversity and inclusion are core values at Eversource, so we look to embed diversity and inclusion into everything we do. We have a D&I strategic plan where we focus and measure our progress in the areas of: diverse workforce, inclusive workplace, leadership commitment, diverse suppliers, and supporting the diverse communities we serve.

In terms of diverse spend, we're always looking for opportunities to embrace women and minority-owned businesses. We have a dedicated supplier diversity manager who sets and communicates goals, identifies opportunities, and works with business leaders and suppliers to diversify our vendor and spend portfolio.

We also have a Managed Staffing Partner that works to identify diverse contractors to place at Eversource.

Doreen Nichols: To expand on comments from Chris, D&I are part of our infrastructure. I frequently say they are part of Eversource's DNA. Our D&I strategic plan is designed to approach this core value holistically. In other words, leadership commitment, diverse workforce, community and workplace are important to how we think about D&I.

Supplier diversity is also an important element of our D&I plan. We measure our spend with diverse suppliers and ensure that suppliers are aligned with our D&I commitment, including when they work with subcontractors. I'm happy to say that Eversource has been recognized for our partnership with diverse suppliers.

Chris Carmody: In terms of diversity and inclusion in our company, one of the things we're particularly proud of is that we set challenging goals and measure how we're doing against them. We are constantly raising the bar on our targets, and therefore working to improve how we're doing year over year. For example, we measure the diverse slate of talent that we're recruiting and passing on to our hiring managers. We measure our diverse external hires and the diversity of our leadership promotions and hires. Our leaders' incentives are tied to progress in this area.

Our commitment to D&I starts at the top with our leadership, beginning with our board and CEO. Eversource's board of directors is one of the most diverse boards in the nation, and the board is very committed to diversity inclusion. Doreen and I provide regular updates to the board on our D&I progress.

We're pleased with how we're progressing in terms of the diversity of our workforce. Doreen will tell you that one important metric is the quality of hire because we don't just check the box and hire anybody just because they happen to be a diverse candidate. We emphasize the quality of the people we're bringing into our organization. We know we can have both diversity and quality.

Through our talent management processes, we have a close eye on our talent pipeline and are making sure that our key talent, our high potential talent for the future, is diverse, and that we're providing the right development opportunities for key talent so that they develop, grow and stay with Eversource. We're always looking to our diverse talent pipeline to become the leaders of the future at Eversource. 

Doreen and her team have done a lot of work in leveraging partnerships, both within Eversource with our business resource groups, and our diversity inclusion councils, as well as externally with our community colleges and universities, to tap into diverse sources of talent.

Our business resource groups and our diversity inclusion councils help us identify diverse sources of talent and represent Eversource at career fairs and other forums. We're thoughtful about the partnerships with universities and colleges that we engage in to make sure they reflect our customer demographics and the diverse communities we serve so that they become sources of diverse talent for us.

PUF:These resource groups are important because while you can recruit diverse folks, these groups can be vitally important in making everyone feel comfortable.

Doreen Nichols: Yes, you are absolutely correct. Our business resource groups are an important part to creating a welcoming environment. They also promote career development and build relationships through networking and mentoring opportunities. 

What's exciting is that we have almost seven hundred members who make up the women, multicultural, young professional, veterans, and new hires business resource groups. This year we will be introducing LGBTQ and differently abled BRGs. Getting back to our leadership commitment to D&I, all of our D&I councils and BRGs are sponsored and led by an executive of Eversource. 

We want to reflect the communities we serve. We want to create a welcoming environment, so from day one, when a person comes in, they feel like they belong, and that they are part of the Eversource family.

PUF:Why is this important? Why is this valuable for the company?

Chris Carmody: We know that the most successful companies are those where all employees bring their full selves to work, where diverse perspectives and experiences are leveraged, and where differences are celebrated.

Doreen Nichols: It's the uniqueness of each person; diversity of experience, race, gender, thought, or culture that come through our doors, with different perspectives, and solved a problem or expanded on a great idea. An example is we have hired Spanish speaking customer service reps to reflect the voice of our customers. I think how easy we have made it for our customers. It really does make sense to hire with diversity in mind. If we only hired one way, we would never be creative and innovative to move forward.

Chris Carmody: There are a couple of recent examples of where we're benefiting from leveraging multiple perspectives, internally and externally. Eversource recently created a customer online community that is comprised of a diverse mix of customers who give us feedback on things that we're doing or we're about to do. We want to get customer service right and make it easy for our customers to do business with us. They are in the best position to give us that insight.

We also have an employee online community that consists of a diverse group of several hundred employees at Eversource. We're leveraging that community to get various perspectives on projects we are implementing, or changes we are pursuing. This has been a useful tool that has helped us improve and enhance things based on real time and diverse input from our team. 

We also have a multicultural business resource group that's helping to put in place a new multilingual website that's going to serve our diverse customers better. Again, we are tapping into many diverse experiences and perspectives to get better results.

Doreen Nichols: Recently we've embarked on an initiative to create customer transformation that's called plus one: creating great signature customer experiences. The feedback we've received from a diverse workforce, our employees who work out in the communities that we serve, or as I call the boots on the ground, give us information on how do we create a great experience for that customer?

If we just relied on one group of people, we would not get the different perspectives. Some of our employees are customers as well so it does impact business. It impacts our brand. If you have a bad experience you get negative press. Thinking about diversity and inclusion holistically does make a difference for the Eversource brand.

PUF:Where's all this going? If you had to look out three to five years, do you have some aspirations or how you want to progress this?

Doreen Nichols: We've thought about that very question, but I have more questions than answers. We're looking at the workforce and the workplace of the future. We know that our workforce will look different.

And how we approach attracting talent of the future will also be different. We can't hire just one way. People will learn and work differently. We will need to be ahead of that to understand the different perspectives of that future candidate and look at our existing employees.

Technology will play a bigger role in attracting talent and we need to think about how we will continue to attract talent through technology.

We may have to teach future talent who may not have the required skills through in-house programs, or do what we are doing today, enhancing our partnerships with high schools, community colleges, colleges, specialty schools, and universities. I'm looking at staying ahead of the curve and reminding myself that the workforce and the world is changing. How do we address this from a workforce standpoint?

Chris Carmody: My aspiration is that, in the not too distant future, we won't be talking about this anymore, it will just "be". Demographics are changing such that the workforce will be diverse, and we must be ready to embrace that diversity by fully embracing the experiences and perspectives of every employee continuously. We won't be talking about diversity and inclusion anymore because it will just exist - in our workplace, our community and with our customers!

Utilities Spend and Workplace Diversity 2019 Conversations:

• Ralph Izzo, CEO, PSEG
• Richard Mark, Chairman and President, Ameren Illinois
• Charles Matthews, CEO, Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas
• Christine Carmody, Senior Vice President, Eversource Energy
• Doreen Nichols, Vice President, Eversource Energy
• Carmen Jandacek, Director of Ethics, Arizona Public Service
• Laron Evans, Diverse Business Manager, Burns & McDonnell
• Michelle Word, Business Diversity Director, Burns & McDonnell