It's impossible to imagine a world where everyone is exactly like the other. Some of the world's most significant advances happened when people from different backgrounds united and worked together. The same happens in workplace situations, where diversity and inclusion have become essential values every company must enforce.
Practising diversity and inclusion in the workplace means giving equal opportunity to everyone, no matter what their gender, race, religion, disability is, or class background they come from. It has been found that the impact of having a diverse workforce goes beyond simply creating representation within the corporation. Diversity and inclusion have proven advantageous to boost a company's growth; as Juli Oktarina, the Director of TBS Energi Utama stated, "Our difference is our strength to progress and develop continuously." We'll discuss the whys and hows below.
For TBS Energi Utama, diversity is a source of creativity and innovation. Creating a synergy between people from different backgrounds will foster new ideas and push unique solutions to existing problems. The more diversity there is, the more ideas can be gathered, as everyone can bring their own distinctive perspectives to the existing problems. From these ideas, new innovations can be made. According to Juli, data has shown that diverse companies perform better financially than those who don't or barely practise it. BCG’s 2017 research on workplace diversity and innovation supports this statement, revealing that companies with high leadership diversity experience 45% revenue growth compared to the 26% reported by those with below-average diversity.
While it's proven beneficial for the company, you might think "how will this affect me as an employee?" Working in a diverse environment doesn't only stimulate innovation and creativity. It also enhances cultural competency as employees become more aware and respectful of cultural differences. "Working around people with different experiences and backgrounds who may think differently than we do will help us grow and expand our perspective. In addition, diversity allows problem solving to be more holistic as more aspects are being accounted for given the different perspectives," Mrs Juli exclaimed.
Achieving diversity and inclusion in the workplace is not an easy task and comes with challenges. Unconscious bias frequently happens, and companies now face the challenge of creating a sustainable culture and sense of community among employees. But despite its obstacles, we at TBS Energi Utama continue to believe that diversity and inclusion are energies that can bring growth to the company. Hence we are committed to supporting a diverse and inclusive work environment by implementing five core strategies.
First, our hiring practices are designed to be inclusive and free from bias, as each candidate is judged purely based on their competencies. Second, we support our employees by providing them with training to create an inclusive work culture. Third, we not only implement policies that promote inclusion, such as equal pay, but we also have strict procedures to handle acts of discrimination through our Whistleblowing Procedure. Fourth, we actively support open dialogues for all members of TBS Energi Utama. Open communication promotes understanding among one another, and we frequently gain feedback directly from
employees on their personal experiences. Last but not least, our executives and senior management are also required to have the ability to become role models who can model inclusive behaviour and encourage employee participation.
Through these five strategies, TBS Energi Utama aims to uphold diversity and inclusion, which is also one of the main pillars of the Towards a Better Society 2030 (TBS2030) agenda we launched in 2022. We are currently on track to achieve this agenda as employee representation has become more diverse in several aspects, specifically in education levels and demographic age.
Nevertheless, there is always room for improvement. In the gender criteria, men still account for more than 80% of our workforce. We acknowledge that men have dominated the energy industry for decades. This situation encouraged us to include gender representation as one of the main points in our TBS 2030 agenda, where we measure both equity and equality by the percentage of women in our leadership and total workforce. Through the TBS 2030 agenda, we continue to support and implement workplace diversity and inclusion by guaranteeing equal opportunities for everyone to grow together with TBS Energi Utama.
