At Entuitive, our mission is to reflect the diversity of the societies in which we live and work, achieving a welcoming and inclusive place for people of different genders, orientations, ethnicities, ages and abilities, and skills through the company, from entry level positions to our leadership and ownership groups. 

To further support building our inclusive culture, we launched four Employee Resource Group Pillars in 2021: ENable (Barrier Free), ENPride, Gender Balance, and Multicultural and Indigenous (MC&I). Each pillar is co-chaired by two individuals and has a volunteer group of staff to help execute a range of initiatives, events, and priorities.  

Recently, we asked the leaders from our pillars to reflect on their successes, vision, and hopes for our future.

It’s been almost two years since the pillars launched. Can you tell us about your initial overarching goals for your respective pillars?  

Pamela Mahal (MC&I): Our team was driven to raise awareness and education of the various cultures and ethnicities that make up Entuitive. It was important to ensure we were focusing on all cultural groups. One of our initial goals was to get involved in the community by developing partnerships with Indigenous and Multicultural organizations within our communities. 

Alison Wood (ENable): Our goal was, and still is to create a barrier-free workplace by 2030, which means we’re hoping to create an environment where individuals feel comfortable seeking accommodation for any barriers they might be facing. These can relate to physical, cognitive, mental, or other types of barriers. In the first couple of years we have pursued this through greater education and awareness and accessibility audits of our Toronto office and our website.  

Tanya Luthi (Gender Balance): Our team’s overarching goal was working toward achieving gender balance at Entuitive, seeing 50% female representation at the firm level, technical level, and at the ownership level – both in terms of shareholders and shareholdings. Essentially, we are focusing on five areas to help us achieve our goal: awareness, recruitment, retention, professional development, and succession planning.  

Misha Vickar (ENPride): Our goal was to promote the representation of LGBTQ2S+ people, both internally within Entuitive and externally to the broader industry and communities. With our internal goals, we wanted to encourage and demonstrate a safe space within the organization for employees and leaders to feel like they belong and can thrive in their careers. Externally, we hoped to also promote educational and awareness of the LGBTQ2S+ community while driving the conversation on diversity in the  industry.  

How do you feel the progress has been toward accomplishing the goals? 

Pamela: We’re currently in our second year, and I believe we’re making great progress. Our first year was a bit challenging with less participation in our employee resource group. This year there are many hands on deck pushing forward a packed agenda including our quarterly MC&I Talk series, the internal communications on Enid (Entuitive’s staff intranet) and ICYMI (our internal newsletter) to create awareness, and our growing involvement in community groups and events such as Indspire, Dixon Hall, and the ACE Mentor Program of Canada. 

Alison: Beginning in 2020 we have distributed an inclusion, diversity, and belonging survey that goes out to all staff members. For our first year, a lot of people said they might have an accessibility challenge but not many people were disclosing what that challenge was.  

In the second year, we saw an uptick in disclosure of both people sharing that they have accessibility challenges and actually identifying what those challenges are. It’s our hope that we’ll continue to see these numbers rise as we continue to spread awareness through internal communications and events that ultimately foster open communication and safe spaces.  

An example of the types of awareness building we create as a pillar is a mental health panel we held in May 2021. Many of the people on our pillar sat on the panel and shared our own experiences with mental health. I sat on the panel and many colleagues reached out to me afterwards to discuss and share our experiences. The conversations I had with these colleagues following the panel strengthened our relationships and, in my opinion, that can help contribute to the creation of a culture of safety. 

Misha: I’m very excited about our progress, I went from knowing zero LQBTQ2S+ people when I first started with Entuitive to having a small group of queer friends spread across all our offices.  

We now have pride flags displayed in our offices year-round and we have hosted multiple events throughout the year for our colleagues to have open discussions about the community.  

Tanya: Our progress has been exciting, especially with the support from our People and Culture team who have been helping us train our leaders. The Board of Directors now tracks diversity and inclusion as one of our key performance indicators, which is a relatively recent addition. This change is indicative that leadership at Entuitive is making diversity a priority.

What achievements have you and your team been the most proud of so far? 

Pamela: As mentioned previously, we’ve started a MC&I talk series where we have people from various communities come to share their personal experiences and stories to help create awareness and education. Some of our speakers included engineer Danilo Caron and architect Samuel Oboh. It’s important to learn about their experiences, impacts, and how they affected them. We’re also taking part in more community events and building partnerships.  

Alison: Last year, we had a great collaboration between the ENable and MC&I pillars. We held a joint fundraising run in support of two charities: the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund and the Rick Hansen Foundation. The Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Foundation supports the creation of a path toward reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, while the Rick Hansen Foundation works to create an accessible and inclusive world where people with disabilities can live to their potential. 

Our run happened during the same week as the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, so it was an honour to run in support of reconciliation and wear orange shirts to show our support. While both pillars earmarked funds from our budgets, our people at Entuitive participated in the fundraising and the run on an entirely voluntary basis and we were so proud of the level of participation and support we saw from our people.  

Misha: We worked with the Gender Balance pillar last year to include pronouns in the organization’s email signatures, and almost half of the company and counting has participated. We were very excited this year to sponsor the development and launch of QUIN, a new networking group for LGBTQ2S+ people in the engineering and construction industries.  

Tanya: We’re really excited about the internal mentorship program that’s about to launch. We’re also rolling out some changes to the way that we interview candidates, such as making sure we have more women on interview panels. Another example is working on standardizing the interview questions to ensure that there’s less opportunity for unconscious bias in that process.
 

Do you have any upcoming initiatives you’re excited for this year?  

Pamela: I’m looking forward to our next two Multicultural and Indigenous talks. The next talk in July will feature a member from an Asian community group in the industry and how their background had affected them personally and in the professional sphere. In September, our speaker with an Indigenous background will discuss how they climbed the ranks to become president of a construction company and all the work they’re doing to give back in support of their community. 

Alison: We’re just about to complete our first infrastructure audit at our Toronto office through the Rick Hansen Foundation. We’ve been making many upgrades to our space to comfortably meet the requirements for certification. These include things like more wayfinding signage at various heights, visible contrast on our flooring and carpets, and accessible handles on kitchen cabinets.  

One of our people, Julia Pannolino who’s a pedestrian modeller, is pursuing her Rick Hansen Foundation certification as well. In the future, she’ll be able to perform accessibility audits for our clients. 

We’re also planning to hold an empathy building accessibility exercise this year for our people across all offices. The goal of the exercise will be to expose people to different kinds of accessibility challenges and physical barriers that others in our communities face every day.  

Tanya: I already mentioned our mentorship program, but I’m also looking forward to collaborating more with other pillars. I agree with Misha that our joint effort on including pronouns in people’s email signatures was a big success. 

Misha: We’re currently reviewing policies of the company and recruitment practices to make sure representation is a core part of Entuitive operates. We’re also planning on sponsoring social events amongst all offices, such as going to a drag bar or marching in pride parades.

Are there any areas you’re hoping to improve or put more attention toward in the near future? 

Pamela: The challenge to maintain this momentum while continuing to raise awareness and not being afraid to put in the hard work. 

Alison: A challenge among all the pillars is communication and finding the right balance since we’re all volunteers. 

Specific to ENable, it’s important for us to keep the momentum and keep moving forward with our accessibility audit work. We hope that all our offices will have the same level of accessibility for our people.  

Misha: These pillars are something new that Entuitive is doing so we are very much learning as we go. Every pillar member is so passionate about what we are doing but it can often be a challenge to add to our already busy work schedules. I’m hoping to keep learning in this spacing and growing the representation.  

Tanya: Likewise, we’re all busy people and it’s hard to find the right way to get the message out to people in a way and at a time that they can hear it. We will continue to work toward raising awareness and keeping each other accountable.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to share your great work with the Employee Resource Group Pillars. We’re excited to continue seeing the progress you and your teams will accomplish!