DEI: Syska’s Perspective

One of the objectives of our Vision 2025 strategic plan is diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). When we created the plan in 2015, we identified DEI as a trait that would characterize the Syska of the future. As we noted at the time, “Great buildings are designed by people with different skills, ideas, and cultural backgrounds. Diversity = strength. We look to shape the present and future by being different.”

Shortly thereafter, we created Syska’s SHAPE committee (Syska Hennessy Advocating Professional Equality). SHAPE’s mission is to advocate for more diversity and equity in the A/E/C business.

Our commitment to DEI is especially meaningful today, given the nation’s ongoing social unrest and racial tensions. Recent events demonstrate just how important DEI is to the future of communities, the A/E/C industry, and Syska itself.

You can check out the new SHAPE video below:

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Strategies

As we continue to amplify Syska’s DEI commitment, we are pursuing several strategies:

  1. Increasing our diversity by recruiting and hiring BIPOC and female professionals.
  2. Continuing to foster and promote an inclusive culture that enhances the employee experience, engages staff, and supports a sense of belonging.
  3. Collaborating with leadership, our HR learning and development team, and SHAPE to further strengthen our culture of learning and mentorship.
  4. Expanding or establishing partnerships with organizations that increase opportunities for women and minorities. Examples include the National Hispanic Society, National Society of Black Engineers, the Society of Women Engineers, and the ACE Mentor Program. We also support organizations through funding: Syska recently donated to the National Association of Black Farmers.
  5. Working with owners, partners, and the A/E/C community to improve DEI in the design and construction of the built environment.
  6. Developing new initiatives in our business and with SHAPE to improve outcomes in DEI.

Business Benefits

We view these efforts as not just the right thing to do, but also as beneficial for our business. Simone Sloan, a consultant who moderated our August panel discussion on workplace DEI in the A/E/C industry, emphasizes that diversity and inclusion are strategic competitive advantages for organizations. Recent findings support her view. According to a report from McKinsey & Company published in May 2020, “the most diverse companies are now more likely than ever to outperform less diverse peers on profitability. SCORE, the nation’s largest network of volunteer, expert business mentors, published an infographic in February 2020 with statistics on diversity’s influence on business success.

Highlights include:

  • Companies that have more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenue due to innovation
  • Gender-diverse companies are 21% more likely to outperform
  • Ethnically diverse companies are 33% more likely to outperform
  • Diverse teams make better and faster decisions (They make decisions 2X faster with ½ the number of meetings, and their decisions deliver 60% better results).

Recent Progress

We are not at all surprised by these results. However, we realize that we still have a lot of work to do to promote DEI in the A/E/C sector and at Syska itself. Earlier, we talked about strategies. Here are some of the steps we’ve recently taken or planned as part of the implementation process:

We are currently working with SHAPE to develop training programs on unconscious bias, diversity, and bystander intervention. SHAPE also held an internal panel discussion on generational diversity at Syska. This lively discussion touched on motivators for different generations, why multi-generational teams are so strong, and best practices for communicating with colleagues from different generations.

Our initiatives extend to participation in events with the Society of Women Engineers and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. In addition, Mary Ann Hay, principal and director of Syska’s architectural lighting design team, recently participated in a panel discussion about equity in the workplace. This event was hosted by the New York chapter of Professional Women in Construction (PWC), the mission of which is to support, advance, and connect women and promote diversity within the architecture, engineering, construction, and related industries.

We’ll keep you updated on future events and our progress toward the DEI objective we outlined in Vision 2025. Thank you for your support as we continue on this journey.