Leveraging HR for Inclusive Diversity - The Critical Partnership

Granite started as a small construction company on the Central Coast of California 100 years ago. Since then, the company has changed and grown and spread. There are advantages to being a legacy company, but also challenges: how to remain innovative? How to stay agile and relevant in a changing world? The answer to these questions is in the talent we bring to our company. We need excellence across the industry, administrative assistants to contract specialists, plant managers to IT managers, and everything in-between to foster a dynamic, inclusive, and creative experience that provides the best solutions for our company and the communities we serve.

The construction industry has not always presented itself as an attractive and welcoming workplace to all segments of our society. In the 21^st century, can the industry challenge itself to unlearn what it has learned about attracting the best talent? And can we relearn new and better ways to promote our industry? At Granite, we believe the answer is “yes”, but it will not happen on its own. We need to take deliberate action to demonstrate the value of construction careers to all. An essential piece of this relearning is integrating concepts of inclusive diversity into our companies. 

Corporate diversity efforts are often presented as “Diversity & Inclusion.” We believe that a stronger model is the concept of “Inclusive Diversity” or ID – namely, reorienting diversity efforts to focus on how we can be inclusive towards all the diversity dimensions of our people. Alignment of ID efforts and HR processes supports better integration of key DEI principles into the corporation. At Granite, early success around ID can be attributed to our partnership with HR, creating the understanding that ID and HR needed to collaborate to make meaningful change through a collective change management process. “Intent” from ID was not sufficient; the company, from the highest levels and with the help of HR, needed the courage to make an impact.  

This collaboration started with a call to action: keep ID issues at the forefront of our efforts. We were intentional about enhancing our recruitment, development, and retention strategies and in developing interview panels, selecting candidate slates, and engaging recruits. We expanded our filters to identify new pools of candidates and created Inclusive Leadership training and efficacy programming. Finally, we committed to reassessing our benefit offerings—all in the spirit of being inclusive of our diversity at Granite today, tomorrow, and into the future.  

"Alignment of ID efforts and HR processes supports better integration of key DEI principles into the corporation."

Fundamentally, we could not execute our diversity strategies without synchronizing HR and ID. The partnership was title/level agnostic. SVPs/VPs rolled up their sleeves with recruiters, HR Managers, and HR Business Partners. We opened communication channels to foster better decision-making, improve engagement, and accelerate innovation. The company now has a consistent, collaborative approach to embedding inclusive practices at the front end of our talent management processes.  

Ultimately, the HR/ID partnership has impacted how we hire, develop, promote, reward, and build teams throughout our organizations. We revamped processes that needed improvement and created new systems where required.  

Inclusive diversity will be an area of focus for corporations in the foreseeable future. At Granite, we learned we could impact more employees using this collective ID/HR approach than previous, siloed methods. Commitment to these efforts led to consistency, which led to the collective impact and improvement we desired.