Promoting Diversity in the Workplace

Dome received survey results in early 2018 that indicated that women do not see as much professional growth opportunity for them at Dome as men do. Internally we discussed this issue and the fact that we believed we were doing all the right things, yet women were still leaving the company, getting stalled on the career ladder, and indicating general dissatisfaction. We decided to use our Lean Thinking hats and go direct to “the people closest to the problem” and formed a Women’s Leadership Team with ladies from all departments, offices, and levels along with a few male sponsors.

In our first meeting of this committee, we started by creating a Force Field to identify negative and positive restraining forces and used Affinity and Multi-Voting to identify the key problems. From there, we developed potential solutions to those problems and used an Impact/Difficulty Grid to identify where we could put our focus to have the greatest impact.  We chose the areas of Mentoring, Unconscious Bias, and Recruiting to focus on and formed a committee for each. Each committee started by using an A3 to dig into the topic and to set goals. We have been on this journey for (2) years now and we have seen the impact of our committees starting to take effect on our culture. Moving forward we are expanding into the Diversity & Inclusion Committee, we plan to continue to do PDCA until women and minorities see as many opportunities as men at Dome and until our top leadership truly reflects diversity.

By Melissa Berg (Dome Construction) & Remy Behl (Dome Construction)