An equal world is an enabled world. I’ll go further - an equal world is an empowered world. I want to play my part in helping the women and men in Centrica make the most of all the opportunities available to them at work.
I am a strong believer that the small things add up, it’s habits, attitudes and actions that lead to change and help create high performing teams. We’ve much to do to make sure we play our part to challenge any potential biases, whether you are working as an engineer, leading a DevOps team or implementing Agile ways of working to make better products for our customers.
I’m very proud to have been appointed as the Chair of the Centrica’s Women’s Network and a key part of this role is to act as an advocate for women across Centrica. I am also part of Centrica’s technology leadership team; a team of mainly men and together we are working with some of the world’s leading software companies to drive technology and culture change across our company. As we transform our teams, using agile ways of working and DevOps, we have one key outcome in the forefront of our minds - we want to create an empowered, open and collaborative culture.
To do this, we need to work together – in a series of bigger and smaller moves to make it easier for everyone to work in a more collaborative way. We are doing this in three key ways. Firstly, through our women’s network where we are currently looking at the internal barriers that women face and the practical ways we can make their working lives better. My boss, Mike Young told our global team this week that if people spot barriers that are within his gift to solve – he will take them on and try to resolve them. This is good news for everyone, that he is personally committed to do this.
Secondly, we are lucky to have a thriving mentoring scheme in our tech teams, led by Joanne Rose. Joanne embodies everything that we are striving for in terms of empowerment – no-one has asked her to do this, she knows it will make a difference to both men and women across Centrica.
Finally, a key part of our transformation is creating a more collaborative culture and through a series of small actions we are striving to do this. We’ve got a thriving guilds network led by Chris Patten and these regular open forums give men and women a place to learn, collaborate and improve their performance. Working together they are making a series of smaller moves that will improve how we work, show up and deliver for Centrica.
Throughout this coming year, I am looking forward to working with my teams to make sure we continue to make small changes empowering women in our teams to deliver the changes we need to make. This is an everyday activity and one that I am personally committed to. To make this happen I will work with both men and women across our technology teams and meet others to understand how I can play my part to make Centrica a better place to work for everyone.