One example is Volvo Buses. They have started their journey to increase diversity and inclusion by giving it a higher focus on their strategic agenda to increase success in business performance and to become an even more attractive employer.
A unique action for Buses is to secure an inclusive and diverse work environment by setting a target to hire 50% women out of all newly employed people in their recruitments.
“We strive to have an open culture where people work together and share ideas. To keep us competitive we need people with different genders, age, nationalities, and cultures – simply different kinds of thinking. It's through our different experiences, backgrounds and thoughts that we create an unbeatable team”, says Håkan Agnevall President Volvo Buses.
More female project managers
There are also several initiatives ongoing in the Volvo Group’s global truck technology and product development organization, GTT, towards increased gender-equality. One of them is to increase the number of female project managers on the top vehicle projects within the organization. The purpose is to attract the talented women who are still hesitating to enter into project management career and also to increase the business performance.
”We think that increasing the number of women in project management is a way to increase the diversity of perspectives and by that to decrease the risks we could take in a project”, says Bruno Venturi, Vice President Project Office.
How to attract women
Other actions taken by the GTT organization is for example to address all stages of attracting and recruiting. They have looked into the process of how they attract women entering in the project managers pipeline, the job advertising, the selection process, the promotion and retention of talents and the trainings associated to each career step.
“We recruited some highly skilled women from targeted universities directly in project management positions. We also separately, started a study to better understand what could prevent women to start or to continue a project management career”, says Bruno Venturi.
This is how we work with diversity and inclusion.
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