In our latest Electronic Specifier Insights podcast, we spoke to Tabitha Upshaw, Head of Corporate Impact, and Shelley Gretlein, Vice President of Brand and Communications, Global Marketing at National Instruments all about their strategy aimed at diversity, education, and the environment
Electronic Specifier Insights speaks to Tabitha Upshaw, Head of Corporate Impact, and Shelley Gretlein, Vice President of Brand and Communications, Global Marketing at National Instruments
Electronic Specifier earlier this week and I launched an ambitious corporate impact strategy to make good on their new company identity and its promise to engineer ambitiously. In a drive to make the company and its impact on the world more diverse, equitable and inclusive. Anya is committing to 15 goals. These include by 2030, and I will aim for 50% of its global workforce, and people managers to be women. The company will invest $3.4 million globally over the next four years in STEM education in each tips that serve under represented or economically disadvantaged students by 2030, and I's goal is for 16% of its suppliers to be small or diverse businesses. And it will look to achieve Zero Waste at NIH owned buildings and reduce waste at least facilities. Electronic specify discuss this strategy with Tabitha Upshaw head of corporate impact. And Shelley gridline, Vice President of brand and communications Global Marketing at and I write a number of initiatives that I've seen. So maybe if we took them one by one, the first one is obviously about encouraging women and ensuring women get into more senior positions. And so I'm just wondering what sort of initiatives you've got to
pin there? I mean, I know there are things like
childbirth support, if you like, and, you know, helping with child care balance, but I guess there are other issues as well, that will help to move this initiative forward. So if you could just maybe if we could just kick off there, and it would be great. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it really starts off with looking at the data, right, and so to really understand what that path is, and where we currently are, and then we're doing a lot of work right now, just with unconscious bias,
to really understand how our systems are set up from how we're, you know, how we look at promotions, the pathways that we have. So we're still while we definitely have those programmes, we're really trying to do a lot of root cause and discovery. To understand Is there anything that might be getting in our way of promoting women or people of colour, and so I would say we're still, and there's so much opportunity there, right, just to really understand, and then you also have to look at this by region as well. So hungry is going to have different opportunities and challenges than, say, Malaysia or even in the US. And so that's really where we're starting at is to take a really deep look where we currently are, and then using that to inform any additional programmes and initiatives that we need to implement. could add something, Nick, yeah, sure. One thing I'd love to add, and you probably noticed this, when you see our corporate impact plan, these strategies are super intertwined, and very complimentary. So while you're both discussing the idea of you know, as a company as as a business, what can we do to help the diversity at the leadership level, we also have to go all the way back to the pipeline, right. And I can speak from experience, right, in engineering school. And growing up, there wasn't a lot of other students that looked like me. And that's what I was exposed to, you know, and it was different. I didn't have the role models. And so
Tabitha, and the team has done a wonderful job of saying, okay, here's what we can do today, we also need to start looking at that future pipeline to make sure the students that are interested in engineering and science are also seeing role models, models that look like them throughout the world. And these things have to go hand in hand because we can do all the things we want as a business, to remove bias and provide those opportunities. But if the talents not coming, we can't change the needle, right? We can't really change the face of STEM, which is a key initiative with this work. So I'm just I'm really blown away by how complimentary and again, intertwined. These strategies are. They aren't standalone. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But just going back to your point about unconscious bias, I guess, you know, a lot of this has to come from the top. So are you initiating things like unconscious bias training for managers, so they recognise, you know, some, you know, somewhere in the back of their mind, there is a bias that they didn't know. Was there maybe, and bringing that out? So what what sort of things you're doing in that respect to train people? Yeah, so super excited. Our HR team has initiated it's a year long training a real
A year long journey. And it's about unconscious bias. And it's also about inclusivity, which is really, you know, a key enabler of this as well. Because,
you know, we can, we can change the pipeline, we can recruit more women, we can look at our systems. But we also, it's so important that people feel included, right, or else, we're just going to have a leaky funnel, a leaky funnel, if you will. And so we've just started this. And so we've rolled it out to the leaders. And so every month, our leaders will have different conversations about psychological safety and the things that we could be doing, you know, that unconscious or unknowing bias that we have. And so
I've never seen this at any company that I've personally worked for. And it just makes me incredibly proud that we're willing to put this kind of investment in our people and our leaders.
And then also, I seen just the willingness, the receptivity of our leaders to do this as well, there's a recognition that, you know, we don't have all this figured out, and some of this can be a little scary, particularly when we were talking about unconscious bias, right? Because it's like, you don't even know what you don't know.
And then it's kind of scary, once you realise what you don't know, and how you can do things differently. And so I just say, our people in our culture and the rest of receptivity of that, and then the tops down, leadership have in support of implementing this is just really something very special. I guess one of the things as well is that, you know, some people might feel a bit threatened by this. So you have to overcome that obstacle as well. You know, I'd say, I'll be honest, the best boss I've ever had was, was a woman, she was absolutely fantastic. But I knew other people, he felt a bit threatened by this. So
is that included in this kind of psychological, if you like, look at how people think. Absolutely, it is. And, and it's really a, that is part of the training, is to really, you know, talk about if, when we think about this is sometimes you know, we're, as humans, we're a zero sum game.
Thinking, right, like, if, if for other people to get ahead, then somebody has to lose. And so this is really about talking about, you know, opportunity for everybody. And I'll even look at our, you know, we have a goal around pay equity. And this is a pay equity for everybody. Not just women, not just people of colour it is looking at, you know, there could be men who are not getting paid based on their performance, or their job level or their market value. And so this is really supporting and raising everybody up. And just making sure we all have equal opportunity. Okay. And so you started those initiatives. Now, is there a time frame to start building towards a bigger percentage of women in senior positions? Or?
Yes, so we we've said 10 year goals. And so what, one of our goals, and we're considering these moonshot goals, so these are incredibly ambitious goals, we, we fully understand that. So our 10 year goal is that 50% of our workforce be women, and 50% of those are leaders. And then our second goal is that 50% of our US workforce are people of colour, or excuse me, 40%. And then we've got specific targets around black and Latin x. And so really, the spirit of that is that our representation matches that of the communities where we operate. Right. So really, our representations should reflect that of society. And so, where I was going with that, to answer your question is we need to know year by year, what those targets should be. And so we do have some internal targets to hold ourselves accountable of how we get to get to that 10 year. Time target. Okay. Okay. And again, I guess, similar to the initiative with women, the initiative on BMA ba Emmys.
You know, I kind of I follow the NFL over here. And I know that the Rooney Rule, which, you know is for for teams to to hire BMV coaches, which
I'm not sure he's working that well at the moment. So I guess he said the same thing there with the unconscious bias comes in, which is completely wrong, obviously. But it does seem to me sometimes to kick in.
Absolutely. A guy when I was coming back to was, you know, this unconscious bias. And I just, I just use the NFL as possibly not a very good example, but it's there, and how that works within an AI to make sure that you don't have again, that unconscious bias when somebody sits down in front of you. And they're not white Caucasian bluntly. Absolutely, yeah. And so we're changing some of our recruitment systems, and to, you know, make sure that we're eliminating bias. And in the recruitment system, we're opening our aperture in terms of the universities that we work with,
we really want these moonshot goals to activate our ecosystem, really, and to inspire them. And so we realise one company alone, we're not going to change the stem pipeline by ourselves, right? Like this is truly, we all must come together to work towards this. Right. And, and to tackle them, these are systemic issues, right, like, unconscious bias is absolutely systemic.
And so yeah, I mean, this is we're kind of dissecting as I was going earlier, right, like, we are looking at, you know, every phase of our recruitment, and what can we do differently? How can we take unconscious bias out of this? And the same thing, as I mentioned, earlier, universities and things like that, it's just like, how do we? How do we look at this differently? Right, the stem pipeline hasn't changed in 20 years. So that means the current systems or processes that we have in thinking that we have in place today,
we fundamentally have to do it differently. And so what does that look like? And so we don't think we have all the answers. But we do want to work together with universities, and,
you know, well into NGOs, well into the stem pipeline to figure this out. It's so important. Okay. I'm just gonna
make Yeah, sure. Yeah. One comment on that. I would love to make sure that your followers here, right is is I heard an invite from Tabitha, right. We can't do this as one company. So what are other businesses that have similar goals and aspirations? And how can we join together? Again, we don't have all those answers. But we know it's going to take a lot of us in doing this well, and and making this
making this something we actually want to change, not just a nice to have. And the second piece of we're talking a lot about recruiting, and interviewing, but we also have to think about, again, not only before the pipeline, but then after, we may do a great job getting this talent in, because we know how to interview and recruit. And then if you get a
person of colour, you got a woman in a leadership position, and then they don't feel supported at work every day. That's not going to work either, because then they leave. So there's also some really great again, data and, and studies and examples of employee resource groups of building work so that once you've got the talent there, they're able to grow and nurture and then find other communities where they fit in where they feel belonging. And so we can't just look at one piece, right? It's a pipeline, it's the recruiting, it's the, it's removing the bias, and then it's making sure you're you're nurturing and growing and investing in those people
on and I guess some of these feeds him with
STEM as well, in terms of what you're doing there. So can you can you just give a broader overview of how that's going to work in terms of working, I guess, with colleges, schools, universities,
we have a couple things. So from a giving standpoint, or philanthropy, we're announcing a $3.4 million commitment to diversifying the stem pipeline,
we were announcing a couple of us recipients as the first grant recipients Project Lead the Way and could to college.
Her focused on helping to diversify the stem pipeline and really attract more girls and people of colour, because you're given the hardware and software engineering fields
and so on. So our giving will really help, you know, bolster
the stem pipeline, again, we invite more other people to do this and other organisations to do this, right. So, three 3.3 point $4 million. Well, it's significant, especially for a company
Mr. Size is going to take a lot more than that. We, we also look at government relations, right a lot in the future then. So how to work with, you know, think about locally, right, like our local school systems. And then, you know, Texas policy, US policy, there's so many things that we can do. I mean, still sports are prioritised over, you know, stem or just education in general. Right. And so there's just things that we need to rethink there.
And then also,
you know, we think about universities as your you were talking about, and so is, what are they doing, not only to recruit, but support girls and people of colour at the university, right. And so, you know, there's just, there's just so much work to be done. And then also, I'd like to talk about just identity. So Shelley talked about this earlier. And
it's really where girls and people of colour see themselves as an engineer, and I think, particularly the hardware engineering, there's a specific persona to that, right.
And it's kind of, you know, you think about it as really a left brained,
you know, cat hard calculations, right, you know, your pocket protecting,
you know, the guy with the pocket protector. And, you know, we're even as a company and as a brand, we're trying to change that, right? We're trying to humanise engineering, we're trying to tell the stories like how engineering can really change the world from a societal perspective. So you'll see and even some of our branded content about the Berlin heart, and how you know, it's engineers that are behind this life saving technology. And so, and we're working with some nonprofit organisations. And so even when you think about projects and curriculum, okay, is this project about robots? And don't get me wrong, we love the robots we love first, and we support the robots. But, you know, how can you change your curriculum and your projects to be have a more social impact? And so those things are more attractive to girls and people of colour? And so, again, we've had to tackle it on so many fronts since so.
Okay. You mentioned talking about
local taxes, local government, I mean, is there an advocacy policy here, where you work? You know, you're you're based in Austin, in Texas, where you can work with the local authorities there to try and one obviously encourage more women and VME people to to get into engineering, but also support those schools that are doing that I read somewhere that many, not to be fair, just women MBA me, but most engineering students
get into it via maybe an inspirational teacher or somebody like that, somebody absolutely think, wow, you know, this is where I want to be. And I, I'd like to hear how maybe starts to infiltrate that and help that that sort of enthusiasm, bubble in well, locally, as well as obviously outside Austin.
So lots of work to do there. We're hiring a government relations person starts on February 1. And so we've already started to have conversations, even though he just said I work here yet. So really looking for this, this impact strategy to inform our government relations already got lots of ideas, just after talking to a lot of nonprofits, and NGOs locally.
So I think, you know, so much work to be done there. But it will absolutely be part of our, our broader strategy that will enable this
example, Nick, to show people that I think can scale. So University of Texas, we're fortunate to have that right here in Austin, right? With some really talented engineering programmes. But every year they host an event that'll be virtual this year, but introduce a girl to engineering. And it's a way to bring in young girls, I think the it's fourth grade through sixth grade, I think is the target type of thing you might know. But basically, the goal here is to exactly go against those stereotypes, right? These aren't nerdy, boring classes. When you think about engineering, it's all hands on. The girls come in and they get to see other women that are professional engineers working with them. And they build aerodynamic aeroplanes, right. They build the robots. They do the programming, they do the mechanical engineering and the computer science, and they go room to room and this is sponsored by companies like any other tech companies in town, and you're really starting to try to create
break down some of those perceptions in these young girls so that as they're in middle school, which the data shows is some of the most formative years for girls either leaving stem because it's all academic, and it's not interesting, versus it's hands on I'm building I'm seeing I'm being creative. And and steering them towards at least you know what stay in that advanced math class, it's going to open doors for you, even if you don't pursue that career. And so that's just one example that scales across the universe, in Europe, in Asia, that that's a really, really great programme. And we can, again, it's not just us alone, are partnering with the university and all these other tech companies, and there's so much power in that with no IP, when I people go into the universities and schools and, and help this process.
Yes, I'm sorry.
Our culture is just such a.
Everybody's just ready to help. Right. So we've been doing, we, you know, we've worked with first for over 13 years and have
we're widely recognised for the amount of volunteers that we have. And so, but it's the same, you know, we're expanding our partnerships with Coca Cola college Project Lead the way we've got in Malaysia, we're working with USM, and a lot of universities. And so
we are absolutely, already have a strong volunteering programme. But we're setting specific goals as part of the strategy, both from how much we focus on STEM, volunteering, specifically, as well as just broad volunteering, either being, you know, traditional kind of hands on types of volunteering. So we're really hoping to unleash our volunteers. Even more, but we have such strong support from from the top. So we're about to have our very first high school interns that are coming. Yeah. So yeah, again, we're trying to reach well, down into the, into the stem pipeline.
Would you also look at schools, if you like in in the poorer neighbourhoods? Because that's one area that does suffer? Yeah, we found that in the UK as well, that the teaching maybe is not quite as good as it should be. So getting into those schools and inspiring kids with talent, which might otherwise go untapped? Seems to me very important. Yes, absolutely. So you'll see in our goals that we stay either underrepresented, as well as economically disadvantaged, unfortunately, in the US, and maybe in the UK, I mean, it's, it's it's largely on racial lines as well. Right. So not obviously, not every person of colour is economically disadvantaged, of course, but unfortunately, there is, you know, you know, quite quite a disparity there. And so, yes, absolutely, economically disadvantaged. And then
there, there's even wraparound services that you have to think of there, right. And just in terms of support, and one of the focus areas for us is, okay, we want a lot of our work to be centred around the schools, right? So we want to go to where the students are and work with organisations who are going to the students, which again, is either after school or during school, because, you know, it's
a mother who's working two jobs and expecting her to get her child to these, you know, different places, right? We can't do that. It's like, how do we make this as easy as possible?
to support these kids? just covering two other things, 60 16% of companies you do business with small to medium sized enterprises? How are you going about that? Are you looking out there, I think you find company is inviting them to come and see you encouraging, they're not quite there in terms of some of their some of their initiatives. How's that working? So the first thing that we're doing is going to where they are, so there's, you know, a lot of places and kind of support,
like associations and things like that, to active and events to actively recruit small and diverse businesses. It's working with
small and like chambers of commerce, local chambers of commerce, like black and Latin x Chambers of Commerce. And so and then it really just educating the organisation right training and education,
training and educating the organisations. Just setting policy of like, you know, have we, you know, when we put an RFP out, just even understanding what the diversity is, of the companies that were that we're looking at, right? I guess it's a question of not it's too easy to go to the bank.
A company with the if you like the bigger cloud, it's making sure you take a good broad look at companies and maybe find a nugget in there that wouldn't come out otherwise. Absolutely, absolutely. Yes. Right on zero waste. What sort of initiatives? Are we looking at there? I mean, there's a whole host of issues around zero waste, from reuse, recycle foodways. So how are you going about that? Yes. So a lot of this is looking for opportunity to keep these resources working in the economy, right. And so even thinking about, okay, when you know, we're about to run out quite a bit of Austin's facilities, or at least the inside. And it's like looking at every material and figuring out like, where, what's another, either a waste stream, or a stream to keep this working, like office equipment and things like that, to keep it working in the in the environment. So it's really kind of looking at what those partnerships are and where they are. And then is simple, but it's hard, looking at food waste, right. And just making sure, particularly for us Americans, that we're sorting our waste correctly,
from composting and recycling and things like that. And so,
actually is in the US, I'll say Hungary and a Malaysia a little more advanced than we are, quite frankly. And so a lot of this education, we're super excited about this goal, because again, I'll keep going back to and I and our, and our people just excitement to lend a helping hand. And so we'll educate folks. And we're really hoping to unleash a lot of creativity and innovation within the company within these goals. And so Amy and Shelly have heard this a million times for me, but this is really about our employees coming to us with ideas. Right? So this isn't, we don't want to set up a hotline of, you know, Tabitha, how, you know, what can I do to support these goals? This is we want to unleash our employees creativity. And so it's like, Okay, guys, we have this goal, you know, your job better than I do, what can you do differently, to support a zero waste goal, or some of the other goals. So we look at zero waste is an opportunity to engage our employees in this effort, so everybody can be a part of it. And there are bigger issues out there, I think, you know, things like power, the amount of power you use, and whether that's absolutely necessary, would be will be certainly one of them. And I guess the other thing is just recycling equipment, whether that be, you know, it goes to a recycling plant, or whether you can donate equipment to schools and universities, if it's feasible. Yes. And that's one of the key components of our strategy as well. And so it's that it's the Nii equipment, like the IT equipment, things like that, or even like office equipment. So we've got some more extremes there going on, we're looking to scale those efforts. And then we're looking at product donations as well like the products that we make, like our psi systems and things like that. And so, you know, there's equipment that we've used, then we could then donate or even donating new, either software or hardware. And so, you know, we Eric and I talk a lot about this, but it's, you know, in AI, we don't have a huge universe, smaller companies don't have a huge environmental footprint, we absolutely want to minimise as much as we can, when we think about how we can impact the world. It's really through our products and our customers. And so we really want to, we're looking at scaling a product grant programme so we can get more of our products via hardware, software services, in the hands of more educators, and more emerging innovators to really do this great work and, you know, develop our you know, Evie is renewable energy, and you know, the list goes on and on. But we really feel like it's our product story that can make a huge difference in the world. And I guess this must resonate with some of your customers as well as maybe looking at similar policies to and we'll look on companies that echo those more favourably. Yeah. So here's a good example from Schlumberger if you if you want to share that, that's, um, you can imagine many companies again, want to make an impact again for themselves, but they also have initiatives and I think this is the the ultimate Win win. We have shared fate. Here's what we care about as a company, our customers care about it as well. We also tend to have great technologies that can help each other so you know, we were in a call of slumber j about their digital transformation initiatives. And just in kind of the social chitchat, how are you doing? How's COVID how's working from home? sustainability came up and it wasn't the point of the of the call right? And quickly one, you saw this
This leader just just light up. Because you've seen how much his company's investing, we start talking about our initiatives and what they're building. And they're very complimentary. And so we went off on a whole different initiative now of how we can help each other, again, with our products with monitoring power, as you mentioned, right? Some of the software tools that can actually provide alerts with web services, and we geeked out,
you know, on how we can really make an impact. But again, there's a lot of neat connections there, that that are much deeper than just a transaction. It's not just a vendor relationship anymore. It's truly a partnership. And that that gets pretty exciting.
And finally, you've set these goals, and there are deadlines. Going forward, you review them consistently once every six months, how how will you assess your progress? So we've got three different, what we call working groups. And so the DIR Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, they've actually been around for a couple years. And so we're, we're setting up dashboards, right. So, okay, we've got the 10 year goals, but then we have to have the one year goals to get to the 10 year goals. And then here are each of the components, right, there's inclusivity, there's recruitment, there's employee engagement, so then you just kind of start to break it down and break it down and break it down. In each of them have targets and so they meet monthly to report progress and talk about how we're doing and say the same thing. We've got two Environmental Working Groups, one on the circular product design, managed out of r&d, and then one out of facilities, which has the the rest of the goals or commitments on sustainability. And then we've got a STEM education Working Group, that we're just standing up. And so really, each of those will follow that same process. So there's accountability, we have an impact Council, to that. And then we've got a diversity of dei Executive Council, and then our impact Council, who their quarterly governance, so we report progress quarterly to our leadership of the council's and then we'll do the same with Eric's team, the executive leadership team, as well as the board. So we just met with the board a couple weeks ago, to talk about this specifically. So we've got, we've got governance and visibility all over the company. So I'm really, you know, when I look at the environmental goals, there's still work to be done there. And so we've looked at this as,
so we're an agile company, or we're trying to be more agile. And so agile is about getting your product to market and then iterating. And so the environmental targets, we're going to take a little bit more time. And so we didn't want to hold up the strategy for another six months to a year to get those environmental targets in place. And so we said, okay, let's launch this, let's get this out there, let's start working on the diversity piece. And then we'll come back in a year's time, or however long it takes us to set more specific, like emissions targets, for example. And so that's the approach that we wanted to take with this. And then again, I'll just really close on and go back to the, to the to the diversity goals. This is really, this is going to take so many of us to work on this. And our ambition here is really we inspire other people to set goals that are really what's needed and may not be what's obviously doable.
And so we really hope that this is a kind of a call to action for a collective to really change the way we're thinking about this and really drive more innovation to change the change system pipeline
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