ConEdison: Inclusion & Engagement as a Business Enabler
By Robert Schimmenti, SVP Electric Operations
Consolidated Edison is one of the nation’s leading energy delivery companies with revenues over $12B and assets over $48B. We power the lives and livelihoods of 10 million people living in New York City and Westchester County.
Today, the utility industry is faced with many challenges such as improving the safety of our employees and the public, controlling costs, meeting increased customer expectations, managing the digital transformation, and a need to integrate more renewables and customer sited solutions. At Con Edison we see challenges as opportunities which requires a more creative and agile approach to long-standing days of doing business.
Within Con Edison the Electric Operations organization is responsible for delivering safe and reliable energy to homes and businesses. This Electric Operations team essentially powers “the city that never sleeps”.
Our Electric Operations leadership recognized that addressing culture change and employee engagement was key to our way forward. Historically, our labor force has been very homogeneous, both from a demographic and cultural perspective. In an operations-centric environment, a command and control culture supported a reactive and responsive approach – one that yielded good results during emergencies. However, we understood that we needed a forward looking approach to people, process and technology for the organization to evolve and innovate. After much study and consultation, we concluded that we needed to infuse our organization with an expansion of new ideas, new innovations, and new thinking in order to succeed. We must change how our workforce, thinks, collaborates, innovates looks and behaves. To get there, we needed to design and implement a customized multi-tiered, Inclusion & Engagement Initiative.
Our plan included a series of milestones. The first was to establish how Inclusion and Engagement is a business enabler to Con Edison’s three corporate priorities: Safety, Operational Excellence and Customer Experience. The second milestone was to showcase What’s In It For Me (WIFM) through the electric operations management team. The third milestone was to enhance relationships between mid-level managers and executives. The last milestone was to integrate the practices and principles of Inclusion and Engagement throughout Electric Operations.
First we knew we had to clarify the end goal. It became clear that Inclusion was the goal but diversity fuels inclusion. Increased employee engagement was a critical by-product. Most companies view diversity in terms of race, gender, age, and education. We aimed for a broader view that recognizes a person’s thought process, work experiences, personality, cultural background, leadership style, and work styles. Our Inclusion goal is a workforce that benefits from its differences as well as similarities; one where everyone feels part of the team and has the opportunity to maximize their contributions. An inclusive workplace is one where all our people are fully engaged, because an engaged workforce is more creative and willing to work across organizational silos, and take ownership for the tasks at hand.
Our second step was an intensive effort to train our management teams on how to become more inclusive by forming and leading effective, multi-dimensional teams. We focused over 75 percent of the training on our mid-level managers, who directly impact 80 percent of our 4,000-person workforce. We created behavioral profiles that highlighted their conative strengths so that these managers would be more self-aware of their personal work styles. We then developed customized training modules on:
Managing unconscious bias to advance Inclusion and Engagement
Enhancing team effectiveness by leveraging multiple identities
Increasing leadership acumen
Developing inclusive leadership
Unlocking ingenuity and innovation
In order for our management team to put their learning to work they created Action Plans that reflected alignment between their direct reports and senior leadership. A process was established to insure accountability through periodic updates.
Our third step was to leverage our Inclusion and Engagement training to drive better business results, develop more effective teams, and increase engagement. To solidify the link between Inclusion and Engagement training and business results, we created our Electric Operations Capstone Process. In Capstone, we formed teams of Inclusion and Engagement trained mid-level managers to come up with solutions for current, critical business challenges. Each team was selected based on diversity in demographics, backgrounds, conative strengths, work experience, area of expertise, and personality. Some of the team members had extensive knowledge of the challenge and some had none.
The end goal of the Capstone Teams initiative was to drive this diverse and talented group to come up with alternative viewpoints to find more innovative, impactful, cost-effective solutions to business challenges. We also wanted to determine the impact of Inclusion and Engagement training on team effectiveness, dynamics, and engagement.
To date, there are nine Capstone teams and we could not be more pleased with the results. Recommendations from our Capstone Projects, which are vetted and reviewed by our Leadership team, have allowed us to improve safety, reduce our cost infrastructure, enhance customer experience and increase operational excellence. But most importantly, Capstone is also helping us tear down departmental silos, improve enterprise-wide communications, identify new management talent, and make Inclusion and Engagement part of Electric Operation’s DNA.
One example of our Capstone team projects was focused on process management where the team looked at reducing delays that field crews experienced. Through an ideation process the team sought to optimize the management of our pre-requisites for planning field work. Activities like ensuring access to customer and company equipment in advance to reduce delays, enhance the customer experience and reduce costs. The team identified some simple enhancements such as creating a prerequisite matrix to standardize the process for field pre-inspections, prerequisite status and performance dashboards for field groups and schedulers, and system enhancements to improve the user experience for schedulers. In a few months delays were reduced by 20 percent.
In the fourth step, our Inclusion and Engagement trained managers are transferring their knowledge and experience to the rest of our 4,000-member organization through a series of Roundtables that focus on solutions impacting their local areas. We conducted a culture survey that has provided key information to the local management to assist in developing plans to improve.
In addition, there is a targeted Values & Respect component, designed to enhance inclusion and engagement. For measurement and accountability, Inclusion and Engagement is incorporated into our business planning as one of our Key Performance Indicators. Within two years, we expect that Inclusion & Engagement will be more than a program, but something that defines how we behave, interact, and do business. Based on our success to date, we believe this is a very achievable goal.
As the group’s Senior Vice President, I’ve committed to transforming my own leadership style far beyond the tradition of command and control, to one that’s more inclusive, engaging and encouraging. I’ve gained some invaluable leadership insights:
Business Impact - It’s Yours to Initially Establish: Early wins are important to gain confidence and alignment.
Say What You Mean, and Mean What You Say: The importance of consistent role modeling and messaging.
Discover Your Humble Side: Many will attribute ulterior motives and initially not get it…you have to be consistent and stay above the fray.
Invest in Your Own Learning: Habits are hard to break. It takes lots of work to not only educate yourself but to practice what you preach.
Release Control – Let the teams drive and innovate. They are closest to the issues and can realize greater impact if they own it.
Convey a Vision Greater Than Can Be Imagined: Shoot for the stars, yet allow for incremental wins.
Inclusion and Engagement becomes sustainable when there is buy-in from everyone across the board, when it is relatable to the person’s workplace realities and when there is broad leadership and personal accountability. What’s compelling about this transformation is that within Electric Operations’ Inclusion and Engagement has become the “new normal”.