Like many organizations, Southern Company had traditionally lacked a formal workforce training policy on the subject of diversity, even though its 25,000-employees reflect the racially and culturally diversified population within the southern United States. If the issue had been featured at all within training courses, it was limited to leadership classes for certain management staff.

Then came a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by employees of Southern Company subsidiary Georgia Power. The issue was suddenly in the newspapers, in the courtroom, and on the radar screens of top management.

Atlanta-based Southern Company is a holding company with 10 energy-related subsidiaries, including five electric utilities. Its workforce includes power plant workers and linemen, call center representatives, a sales force, and corporate management.

The lawsuit, filed in late 2000, has since been denied class action status. But recognition of the importance of diversity and inclusion has become a key priority of Southern’s new president and CEO, David Ratcliffe, the former top exec at Georgia Power.

The company began creating a diversity training policy even before the suit was filed. “On the day the newspaper reported the lawsuit, there were pallets of brochures on a loading dock designed to reinforce the company’s commitment regarding diversity,” reports Kathy Harber, Southern’s principal internal diversity consultant. A full-time employee, Harber reports to the senior vice president of HR.

Harber says the plan called for exposing every employee to diversity awareness training between 2000 and 2004, and inserting new hires into existing classes. But as the classes wound down, it was agreed that the organization would need ongoing training to accommodate the 2,000-plus new hires that joined the workforce each year. Harber says addressing the subject of diversity to this group was a priority issue for the company. “The diversity of our new hires, ranging from coal handlers and line crews to accountants and lawyers, also made flexibility of application important.” 

Going online

Southern Company had used three different suppliers for the initial training, but the company decided to consolidate its use of training suppliers to provide a consistent message on diversity throughout the organization. One subsidiary had been using an e-learning diversity training program provided by Cincinnati, Ohio-based Global Lead Management Consulting, while another had employed that supplier’s classroom application. Global Lead was selected as the sole supplier because it offered the desired teaching elements at reasonable cost and flexibility of application.

The goal of the training exercise is simple, says Harber: “to introduce new hires to the concept of diversity that we follow within the company, and explain why creating an inclusive workplace is important to us.” (It defines diversity as “the full range of human and/or organizational differences and similarities,” and inclusion as “the process of leveraging the power of diversity to achieve a common goal or objective.”)

The course is broken into two parts: an online training portion called Dialogue on Diversity I and a one-day instructor-led classroom training session named Dialogue on Diversity II—Southern Style. New hires are automatically registered in the online course and given 60 days from enrollment to complete it. They must complete the in-class portion within another 60 days. Southern’s enterprise-wide Employee Learning Organization handles maintenance of the online portion while the class is delivered by a Global Lead trainer.

An important part of the online orientation is active follow up by each new employee’s manager, who is required to meet individually with the employee and review issues covered in the course. “This follow up is important because studies show that people believe most from the person they report to,” says Harber. She says HR representatives in the field check regularly on the follow up session. Other follow up activities include a questionnaire to solicit the opinions of new hires about the course and a regular survey of employees on diversity issues.

Managers receive additional awareness and leadership training on diversity, including instruction on how to discuss it with employees. Workers who interact directly with customers also receive more ongoing training than others.

Although diversity training is not required by any government regulatory agency, Southern Company makes it mandatory for all employees and ties it to year-end performance goals. To reach “above target” in year-end goal performance in 2005, each subsidiary company will be required to have 100 percent of its new hires complete the class or be scheduled to take it by year-end, says Harber. The corporate level goal has a 10-15 percent impact (as part of the total diversity goal) on annual bonuses for all employees. It thus impacts the size of the bonus pool rather than individual performance.

Southern Company’s new hires are not the only individuals exposed to the diversity training. Suppliers also have access to the training, says Harber. It is conducted as part of a supplier diversity program that includes mentoring and helping develop minority and female-owned businesses throughout the region, she says.

Sam Lynch, a managing partner of Global Lead, says the diversity and inclusion courses are an eye-opener for new employees. The day-long classroom portion is an interactive course tailored specifically to the company with a curriculum molded around real-life situations that can occur there. It is taught to groups of 20-25 people. “Global Lead designed it together with the customer. It reflects time spent walking in their shoes,” says Lynch of the customized course. “What we create for Nokia or Proctor & Gamble does not work for Southern Company.”

The Dialogue on Diversity I e-learning course is a self-paced exercise that introduces the principles of diversity and inclusion in a user-friendly format that includes focus group simulations and interactive exercises. Equipped with a virtual moderator and participants, the course integrates diversity related awareness and skills content into four distinct modules. Participants also answer questions online about the learning they experience.

Bottom line

Harber and Lynch agree that the subject of diversity extends well beyond race and gender. “As we work to create an inclusive workplace, we try hard to encourage people to not focus solely on those visible differences,” says Harber. “We are stressing other forms of diversity, such as ideas, background and perspective, for example.”

Harber believes the challenge facing Southern Company and every other organization is to also recognize these disparate elements in creating truly diverse teams. She says many companies, including Southern, measure their managers on how many women and minorities are placed in leadership positions. “Those are the most visible differences between us, so we need to first make sure we have that visibly diverse workforce,” Harber says. “Until we fix that, it will be more difficult to move into other forms of inclusion.”