Seven strategies to make your solar workforce more diverse

In February, 2015, GRID Alternatives announced a new initiative, in partnership with SunEdison, to increase diversity in the solar industry and connect communities that need good jobs with an industry that needs good people. While the RISE initiative – Realizing an Inclusive Solar Economy – focuses largely on bringing solar training into underserved communities and helping create a more diverse pipeline, we also know that companies need good strategies to achieve their diversity goals.

At the Solar Power International (SPI) tradeshow in September, we convened a panel of diversity experts from the Solar Foundation, SolarCity, SunEdison and PG&E to talk about the benefits of a diverse workforce, and what their companies have been doing to support diversity in their own workplaces (listen to the full discussion here). We learned a ton, and wanted to share the top takeaways:

1. Think Diversity Early

If you’re a young company, there’s no better time to start building a diverse workforce than right at the beginning. According to Otis Collier, the Diversity & Inclusion Manager at SolarCity, baking diversity into your company from the start has long-lasting results. “It creates an early-adoption culture,” Mr. Collier said, “it fosters new ideas and concepts based on different viewpoints, and it attracts top talent.”

2. Begin Where You Are – and Measure What You Have

“Always look at the gauge and the yardstick of where you are with respect to diversity,” said Mr. Collier, who said that every SolarCity manager can see at a glance the gender and ethnic makeups of their teams. “We want hiring managers to be able to see how many women they have working for them, how many African-Americans, how many Hispanics.”Even if you’re not a young company, it’s never too late to start diversifying your workforce. The first step is to take stock of where you are at this moment. Andrea Luecke, the president and executive director of the Solar Foundation, has spent years tracking the diversity figures of the solar industry as a whole. And while the news is good – and better than the rest of the energy industry – there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Recognizing areas of the company that are successfully diversifying helps to build momentum behind diversity and inclusion efforts. Zeina El-Azzi, (former) VP of SunEdison Frontier Power, explained that the company last year launched its first annual Diversity & Inclusion awards, honoring people who are changing the diversity of the company through their work to help inspire others.

Companies that already have good racial and gender diversity can work toward “Diversity 2.0” – moving beyond gender and racial/ethnic identities and to explore intersectionality, working and leadership styles, sexual orientation, ability, age, religion, nationality, languages spoken/accents, education levels, and much more.

3. Get Senior Leadership on Board

While a culture of diversity at the staff level is important (see below for more on this), getting full buy-in and a company-wide mandate for diversity and inclusion from the highest levels of management is the surest path to success. It should be an easy sell to your board and leadership: Diversity is simply a good business strategy. According to research by McKinsey and Company, companies that are more diverse with respect to gender and race/ethnicity, are more likely to financially outperform their competitors. Click here for our recent article on why diversity is important for solar.

SunEdison’s Ms. El-Azzi said: “Our CEO is driving diversity and inclusion because diverse teams make better decisions and better understand our diverse customers. By broadening our search our company can attract the best talent.  Finally improving diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do.”

4. Give Managers the Tools to Succeed

Once the mandate from top leadership is in place, companies need to provide their hiring managers with the skills and tools to help them achieve their diversity goals. Helping them understand and overcome their own biases and adjusting hiring and evaluation procedures to include more diverse perspectives are good strategies.

SunEdison, which is targeting a significant increase in workforce gender diversity, brought in outside experts from Root Learning to educate managers around unconscious biases in hiring and promotion. The company also instated a policy of interview panels for every hire; for leadership positions those panels are required to include at least one woman.

Tamara Mullings, SunEdison’s chief of staff to the CEO, says of her learnings from top diversity and inclusion experts: “Most companies that are trying to improve their workforce diversity are not actively discriminatory. More often, a company struggles with unconscious policies and attitudes that hinder the attraction and retention of diverse talent.”

5. Leverage Partnerships for Success

One sure way companies can increase the diversity of their workforces is by partnering with groups that can connect them with talented prospects to hire. Laura Butler, PG&E’s Vice President of Talent Management and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, discussed the ways that they have used partnerships to bring in a more diverse applicant pool.

Ms. Butler mentioned PG&E’s partnership with university programs to attract qualified applicants, such as their work with the National Society of Hispanic Engineers, as well as the company’s long-running support of GRID Alternatives. But she went further to stress the importance of supporting an entire pipeline for workforce development.

Ms. Butler said that supporting STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education programs beginning at the kindergarten level is all part of thinking about the long term. “We’re building a talent pipeline for the future,” she said.

6. Engage employees

Employees can be a great asset for a company’s diversity efforts, especially where some diversity already exists. PG&E organizes Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that not only help individuals connect with others they identify with within the organization, but can also help bring in new talent through referral programs.

Ms. Butler explained that PG&E’s veteran-focused ERG made a big difference in hiring new staff. “ERGs are fundamentally important,” she said. “Our veterans ERG helped us recruit a large number of veterans.” In fact, 11.2 percent of PG&E’s recent hires were veterans.  The ERG was fundamental in making that happen, she explained.

At the same time, companies that don’t already have a diverse staff should use caution when using employee groups as referral programs because, as Mr. Collier of SolarCity pointed out, “employees tend to refer people who look like them.”

7. Hire Veterans 

Mr. Collier also highlighted the importance of focusing on military veterans for diversity outreach in his eight-point program for making diversity happen.  “Veterans are a racially diverse and ethnically integrated community with a great variety of highly technical skills,” he noted. The solar industry this year committed to employing 50,000 veterans and their spouses by 2020.