Colt CEO puts diversity and inclusion in the spotlight

Telecoms companies could be as much as 20% more innovative and 35% more profitable if they have coherent diversity, equality and inclusion (DE&I) strategies in place from top level management down. That was one of the stark messages from Colt Technology Services CEO and chair of TM Forum’s Diversity & Inclusion Council, Keri Gilder, when she addressed the Ecovadis Annual Sustain Conference.

Gilder used the figures to demonstrate that DE&I is a strategic imperative.

As a CEO, this is something that Gilder has directly proven. “Every single time I’ve gone into a management role, and I’ve made sure that it is at minimum 50%-50% gender diverse, my performance has outgrown any other group’s performance within the area that I’m serving,” she says. At Colt, DE&I policy is actively applied in areas such as a transitioning at work policy for LGBT+ employees, a domestic abuse policy, and required annual unconscious bias training for all staff.

But progress remains to be made across the industry as a whole. Gilder says one survey found that of 31 top telecoms companies, only five had female CEOs, Gilder being one of them. Of those companies, out of 330 top managers only 60 were female, and 20 of those 60 were in HR. One UN official told Gilder that at this current rate, it will currently take 137 years to reach an equitable level for women in the workplace.

There aren’t enough women in R&D, and there aren’t enough women in P&L, says Gilder – the positions where decision making is made within companies. “If we put them in those positions,” Gilder says, “better decisions will be made because the diversity of thought is there, and group think just doesn’t tend to happen when you’re in a diverse environment.”

Not only this, but Gilder says the average age of workers in the telecoms industry is 44, meaning that 25% of the work force will be retiring in 2026. Pair that with the fact that 80% of the time, millennials decide on a place to work based upon how inclusive that place to work is, actively centering DE&I and advocacy in telecoms strategy is vital. We know that there will be 83% better engagement if these things put at the center of strategy.

So, what practical and workable things can be done to promote DE&I? Gilder has been working with TM Forum to build an inclusivity and diversity index. The index has five levels of diversity, and then five questions based on employee sentiment. They add up to a simple and actionable score that can be used to provide a benchmark across the industry. Once the scores have been gathered and validated, pain points can be categorized and form the basis for actionable interventions.

Monitoring through this index alongside profitability and churn, on a monthly and quarterly basis, is one actionable way to start driving real change in the industry.

“Right now, there are no universal and intersectional metrics that help us understand how we are progressing” adds Vicky Sleight, VP of Human Factor and D&I at TM Forum. “While C-level executives recognize the importance of DE&I, all too often execution is left with the chief humans resource officer. Only seven organizations in the top 100 global benchmarks are from telecoms, according to both Refinitiv top 100 D&I list and the FT Top 100.”

“Driving meaningful change, which we’re passionate about, not only requires leadership definition and determination, but also evidence and metrics,” explains Sleight. “Without those science-based and metric-based targets, we won’t get anywhere because we don’t actually know where we are today. So, we’re looking to create an actual industry standard in which we’re not just measuring diversity but we’re also measuring inclusion and human sentiment of the employees to understand if a company has an inclusive culture. This means a lot to TM Forum, as we want to create an industry standard so we can understand where we are now and help companies grow and progress on their D&I journey.”