Importance of Diversity

Importance of Diversity in the Utility of the Future

Workforce demographics continue shifting, and it is crucial for an organization to become accustomed to this shift to enable success, and the ability to be a 21ST century leader. Diversity in knowledge, culture, age group, and sexuality should be welcomed in the workplace to foster innovation and collaboration between employees. An open, diverse environment fetches many talents, strengths, and weaknesses that can be leveraged. This large pool of talent leads to exposure, varied viewpoints, and inevitably, grants success in many different areas.

Diversity will be described in 2 different ways- internal diversity, and external diversity. Internal diversity involves the employees that work within a company. To permit internal diversity, the entire company needs to have a communicated bold vision, that’s uniform across departments to allow collaboration amongst a pool of employees to achieve the goals. This means breaking down silos and leveraging cross-departmental participation for different projects. This increases ideas, perspectives, and addresses issues and risks in a collaborative manner. With this increased creativity, team members are more equipped to make technical decisions, financial decisions, communication plans, increase productivity and handle conflicts that strengthen the project and company. The strength the teams bring to the company influences the reputation of the utility. The utility is now more confident about results and risks that are taken.

External diversity promotes exposure, and collaboration with other utilities, vendors, industries, academic institutions and standards organizations. The utility of the future needs to expand beyond the utility, and partner with other pioneering businesses to promote learning and a different perspective. This exposes the utility to the accelerating rate of change, and increases the ability to adapt effectively. The utility is able to participate in a...