Diane Antishin

“We know that diverse teams and inclusive organizations result in higher employee engagement, much more creative thinking, greater innovation, and ultimately better financial and business results.”

“And we know that when people feel valued and included, their energy rises. So fundamentally, diversity, equity and inclusion is deeply embedded in our reason for existing as a company. It's fundamentally what we stand for.”

“So we're measuring our culture of inclusion through progress on our engagement survey. We launched mandatory training for all of our leaders in the organization called ‘Connecting with Others Training’. And in our Onboarding, we began to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion from day one. So myself or others from our DEI department were brought in to new hire orientation in a couple key junction points and really helping to emphasize expectations for every single employee within the company to engage in our DEI work. It is really critical to embed DEI in some important places through the organization.”

“In 2019 we launched our first diversity scorecard and you can see the types of categories that we have measuring our culture of inclusion and equity, measuring equity in action, which is primarily our external work on supplier diversity, foundation spend, workforce development, and how we're advancing economic progress in the community. We measure and focus on how we're connecting and creating opportunities for adults and youth with barriers. And then of course, we measure and have targets for our employee diversity and how we're conducting outreach to diverse candidates, the composition of our diverse interview panels and candidate slates, and of course, looking at the top of the house in terms of diverse leadership within the company.”

Q: “So you're being intentional about hiring persons of color, hiring LGBTQ individuals. If someone were to challenge you and say, that's reverse discrimination, how would you answer that?” A: “Yeah, well, this goes back to one of the biggest challenges in diversity, equity and inclusion work overall and a view that many people have, unfortunately, perhaps, that it's a zero-sum game, that when I win or when you win, I lose and vice versa. And what we continuously try to reinforce and do at DTE is show that by working in this we all become better, we become stronger as an organization that leads to growth within our organization. And so we really pivot from this idea of it's a zero-sum game to the benefits of diversity, equity and inclusion broadly and helping all of us to become stronger as individuals, as organizations, and clearly as a society as well.”