Melvin Gravely is CEO of Cincinnati-based TriVersity Construction and author of “Dear White Friend: The Realities of Race, the Power of Relationships and Our Path to Equity.” The opinions are the author’s own.
The recent Equal Employment Opportunities Commission report on discrimination in construction exposed what many workers in the workplace already know firsthand: racism is rampant in our industry.
Melvin Gravely
Courtesy of TriVersity Construction
But Construction Dive’s article on the report also rightly pointed out that some construction stalwarts have been paying more attention to the issue. Big business has set new expectations for behavior work places and we have drawn attention to the challenges in our industry for black workers and other people of color.
I have personally seen contractors take decisive and positive action in the face of incidents of racist symbols such as nooses hanging in workplaces and sexist and homophobic slurs written inside portable toilets, consequences that probably would not have happened even a few years ago.
The introduction of Construction Inclusion Weekorganized by industry players to increase diversity, is another visible example that a growing number of construction leaders recognize the need to tackle this issue head-on.
But while I applaud these efforts, the EEOC’s report should also make us wonder how far we’ve come. In an industry known for rising to challenges and getting things done, our progress so far on diversity is second to none.
Diversity efforts to date are often compared to our industry’s focus on safety and the gains that have been made in this area. That’s a wonderful comparison, but our progress with diversity doesn’t come close to how safety has become the starting point for workplaces.
If we hope to make similar progress in the culture of diversity, we will need to change our approach in at least three ways.
Diversity by default
First, we would establish a standard of inclusion in each project.
We seek long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with a variety of subcontractors that we can rely on for everything we build. Their abilities to work productively with us and us with them would grow.
We wouldn’t expect our customers to request inclusion and then create an awkwardly designed relationship that looks like a shotgun wedding. A minimum level of minority subcontractors would be part of the way we do business.
Diversity in leadership
Second, we would focus on the diversity of our leadership team. Leadership determines organizational culture and priorities. The lived experiences of our leaders represent the breadth of their perspectives. Go online and Google construction companies in your area. Then click on their websites and see pictures of their leadership team. Too often, this leadership still lacks diversity, even when diversity is an explicit company goal.
In the construction industry, the only perspective we have is often our own. The mistake is to believe that our thoughts are the only ones that matter, that what we value is the only thing that is valuable. A diverse leadership team helps expand our collective thinking and enables us to lead in a more inclusive way.
Take your leadership team on a learning journey. Construction is an industry with a top-down, get-it-done attitude.
However, we cannot keep our heads down so that they get stuck in the sand. If inclusion really mattered, we would study ideas like unconscious bias, the value of empathy in leadership, the importance of listening to understand, and the implications of our nation’s history with race in what we are experiencing today.
If diversity, equity and inclusion were essential, we would start with the leaders and learn together. We would listen to podcasts, read articles and books, do bias assessments, and make time for honest conversations with each other. We seek expert advice as we do with other areas of our business where we have limited knowledge.
Monitoring diversity
Third, we would keep score. You can call them goals, metrics, objectives, or whatever suits your business. The bottom line is that we measure what we value.
There are several significant elements that we could measure. For example, your level of inclusion through outsourcing, the diversity of your workforce, the diversity of your management team and executive leaders. Not measuring these results? I would say you should ask yourself how much you really value diversity.
The challenge isn’t that we don’t know how, it’s where the comparison with security comes in. The real challenge is our will as leaders.
The truth is that for many construction companies, diversity is still not as important as safety, or Lean or flow or BIM, or the many other places where we make significant investments. We do not act as if we believe that investments in diversity will generate positive results.
I ask the leaders of our industry to at least be intellectually honest. Maybe you care about diversity, but do you care enough?
Things like Construction Inclusion Week are a sign of interest. Responding to racist incidents in the workplace shows you care. But neither will move the bottom line for blacks and other people of color if they’re not on your payroll by default.
We will solve the challenges of diversity, equity and inclusion in our industry just as we have solved for safety. But as the EEOC report confirms, we’re not there yet.
