Yaruba Tate Discusses the Expansion of Inclusion & Diversity in EMEA

The culture and the brand of Convergint are the most important. The inclusion aspect of I&D is how people who currently work at Convergint feel. Is there an opportunity for their careers, for their voice to be heard, and for them to be appreciated and involved in conversations regarding the business. What the vision of the business is and how the individual impacts that vision and what the future holds for them in their local CTC and Convergint as a whole. It is important for colleagues to know it is a family culture and there is an opportunity for them to grow at this organisation.

The diversity side is demonstrating that it is an open organisation that offers opportunities to folks of different races, genders, and backgrounds. Convergint is intentionally wanting individuals to bring those differences to our organisation to help us grow and make an impact to protect lives, assets, and information for our customers.

The value of the I&D council to Convergint is the point of inclusion and that you need those different voices at the table. When we put together to I&D council there were many people who raised their hands and volunteered. Over 180 colleagues wrote very good reasons why they should and want to be on the I&D council. We looked for people in different sections and levels of the business with different backgrounds. But the importance was when all those people came together and began to build out the initiatives, goals, and start to do the work, how all those intentionally different voices cause you to get a different optic and perspective on everything you are looking at. Ultimately, you walk away and get the optical solution with consideration from all backgrounds, ethnicities, ages, and races. If you think about certain segments of the business, for example, if I meet with the sales team they’re going to have a different opinion and view than if I met with a team of engineers. But if I walk into the I&D council I have all levels of the organisation with different professions, ages, and backgrounds so you get all these unique perspectives, ultimately landing on some of the best results and solutions for the business challenges we face.

My biggest motivation was two things. First, I took a look at my own career over the last 19 years and said if I can duplicate what I had, which was support, opportunity, and the ability to gain experience, for anyone else at Convergint and force multiply, then that is ultimately what I want to do. The more I thought about it, if that is done and done well, we will be our customer’s best service provider and have the ability to deliver on all the mission statements that we have. So, reason number one was to duplicate my own success across Convergint nation.

Secondly, I just recognised that the goals that we have and the levels that we are growing at, it was virtually impossible to do without becoming a world-class training organisation. I wanted somebody to be able to step into our industry without any prior knowledge of systems integration and learn and get up to speed on with we do in a welcoming environment. Also thought we could open it up and communicate that we are welcoming individuals of all various backgrounds to come work at Convergint.

I would say the future goals across EMEA are expanding the I&D council and increasing the consistency of frontline listening sessions and furthering that among other professions such as engineering and the sales team, going above and beyond the frontline. Also, continuing to increase the visibility of what’s happening in the space. I’ve met with the EMEA leadership team and went over strategies for the culture, brand, and I&D next steps. But now I think putting out publication’s quarterly newsletter where all of EMEA has visibility to what activity is happening in I&D and how they can participate, and support is what is coming up next.

I wanted to get to EMEA to further expand inclusion and diversity from an understanding aspect, talk about introspective and the exponent of inclusion and diversity, and what I mean by that is, in the U.S. we are looking for colleagues to be able to bring their voice to the table to be able to feel that they have a place that they can achieve their best and give training and development, I also wanted to put a focus on the external which is the Convergint brand. So here in EMEA one of the things that is a challenge is our brand being recognised in this market and people being potential colleagues, customers, even our product partners. What are they saying about us? What do they know about our brand? For inclusion and diversity in this space, we have the opportunity to write articles and to have representation in the community so that when people see our brand, when they see us on the website, or see a truck go by with our logo, they associate that with something, and we want to impact what that feeling is, and ultimately we want that feeling to be what Convergint represents which is caring for our colleagues, customers, and communities. I wanted to put a focus on our culture. Every CTC across the globe, it is important that we keep our talent, and in order to do that we want to retain colleagues, so we want to put a focus on culture. That’s why here in EMEA I wanted to do the local focus in Ireland and the UK, I wanted to make sure that we have the right skill set to keep and retain colleagues, and in turn have an enhanced culture and the understanding and ability to impact our brand so that the external party is reflected positively.

I hope that EMEA sees that every day we are going to put our heads down and get to work, we are going to resolve issues and take care of problems for our customers. We have to be deliberate about putting a focus on the culture and on the brand, and I think the one way to be deliberate is certainly being aware that these are things that I can do to positively influence each of those, these are things that I need to keep in mind and be considering often. These are effective ways that I can impact positively the culture and the brand. So, I think that it’s about awareness and I think it’s also about practical actions that can be taken.

The next steps are for EMEA to put a focus around inclusion and diversity and by that, I mean expanding the I&D council. We have done the inclusion assessments and the front-line listening sessions, we are listening, we now have a good understanding of where we need to put our priorities and where the challenges are for the time being. So now it’s getting leadership that visibility of what that looks like, and then giving them the skill set to take those matters on, and now, your question, what do we do now, is expanding the council, putting a focus on that on a daily basis, and continues that listening process, and continues identifying the initiatives, and taking action.