Recently, Raytheon Company received the 2007 Women in Engineering Programs & Advocates Network (WEPAN) Breakthrough Award, which honors an employer for creating a work environment that enhances career success of women engineers. USBE Online spoke to Lori Berdos, president of Raytheon’s Global Women Network, a company wide employee resource group about diversity.
USBE: What steps does Raytheon take to make every woman employee feel like she belongs?
Lori Berdos: We have an environment where we are all included. All of our ideas are welcomed and encouraged. There is no barrier, where people ever feel they can’t bring something to the table or speak to a senior leader. We empower our women to branch out to all different areas of the company.
We have a lot of flexibility in moving from location to location, another step that brings women to Raytheon not just in engineering but also in other disciplines. Thirdly, we don’t have a glass ceiling.
USBE: How do you ensure that what you do hits Raytheon's bottom line?
Lori Berdos: We’re always looking for clarification or enhancement to what we’re doing. We go to employees and say, “Are we hitting the mark in these things?’ We measure employee opinion surveys every year, bounce each year against the next. We are always looking to make sure those numbers increase in areas that we need them to.
Diversity is one of the biggest milestones we measure ourselves against. We’re always checking out the number of women in leadership, trying to make sure that we are as competitive with other companies in those areas as we can be. And receiving this year’s WEPAN Breakthrough Award certainly makes us feel we are delivering on what we say we are doing.
USBE: How has the retention rate of women employees changed?
Lori Berdos: Over the last five years we have had a huge increase of women in our hiring. We have wonderful initiatives for attracting and retaining not only women but also all employees within the company. I myself am on a team in our organization that develops that program, so that we are ensuring our Gen X and Gen Y employees [stay] instead of taking off every two years.
Raytheon has a talent retention/acquisition strategy; diversity is a core component of that initiative. We have the Tuskegee Pipeline Initiative (which has hired 66 graduates from Tuskegee University since 2004) as well as the National Defense University Partnering Strategy to recruit and retain a diverse workforce. They are all part of retention, growing and exposing employees hired by Raytheon in terms of location, opportunity and career growth.
USBE: How do you provide work-life balance for Raytheon employees and how does that apply specifically for women?
Lori Berdos: We have the opportunity to do telecommuting. We have a lot of mentoring peer- to- peer. One thing we just instituted was a reverse mentoring program where Raytheon’s CEO Bill Swanson is mentored by one of our employee resource groups to show him more about that culture and way of life.
USBE: Nothing is ever perfect. What needs to be done to make Raytheon even more productive with a diverse workforce?
Lori Berdos: One of our big initiatives for engineering and getting students involved in math and science is our “Math Moves U” initiative. The women’s group in particular has really jumped on that and goes to middle schools. We’re out there trying to promote it so that we can get girls at a young age interested in math and science and, hopefully, convince them that a career in engineering is cool and fun.
We also work with employee resource groups on breaking down cultural barriers. We have had employees with Middle Eastern backgrounds meeting with our business development teams to teach us about the culture, and the Raytheon Asian-Pacific and Hispanic groups helped rewrite a proposal.
