Portland General Electric (PGE) is well-known for its progressive policies and practices around workforce diversity. It didn’t achieve this reputation by accident. CEO Peggy Fowler believes that building and supporting a diverse workforce is critical to the long-term success of any business. In this interview with the OBLN, Peggy readily shared her perspectives on her company’s ongoing efforts to recruit and support employees from non-traditional sectors.

OBLN: Portland General Electric (PGE) is a recognized leader in the arena of diversity in Oregon – and in including people with disabilities in the workforce. Why is this so important to you and your company?

PEGGY FOWLER: It is our belief that when you create an inclusive workforce, you really do create an environment where employees feel welcome and dignified. When they are valued and respected, they contribute more to the company and you get the business results that you want. Employees become champions of your company. It has made good business sense for us – having everyone doing what they enjoy doing and doing it the best they can as individual contributors.

OBLN: So, in the case of people with disabilities, it is just matter of course that their differences are accommodated just like other employees?

PEGGY FOWLER: That’s exactly right! In fact, our employees have encouraged us to do this and our officers have been supportive of it. It is a bottom-up and top-down initiative.

OBLN: As the CEO of a large public utility you have many demands on your time every day and yet have found time to be a leader in the realm of workforce diversity. Can you tell our readers how you do that? Do you have a secret to your success that other CEO's should know?

PEGGY FOWLER: It is really pretty basic. I like people, I value people, and I really do believe that’s what makes everything work. So we just make it a priority.

OBLN: Where do issues of diversity in general, and disability in particular, fit within in a business plan? Are there bottom line benefits?

PEGGY FOWLER: I believe that there are bottom line benefits. I know that they are hard to measure; but with diversity of backgrounds in your workforce, you get different perspectives on ideas. Because of that, you get better solutions and better results going forward. A lot of business magazines are reporting on the outstanding performance of companies that have this kind of commitment. Also, I believe that good employees will choose to be employed by companies that have good values – including a strong commitment to diversity.

OBLN: In the context of your successful leadership in building an inclusive workforce, how do you gauge the success of your efforts?

PEGGY FOWLER: Diversity is one of those areas where you can never do enough - you can never be successful enough. There is always something that you need to be working on. However, we do measure what we do. We look at hiring numbers and retention numbers. We review complaints and how we respond to them. We look at the levels of participation of different groups in various positions in our company – including management. We do an annual employee survey and a biannual survey dedicated to diversity topics only. As much as we can, we try to gather information from our people that will help us.

OBLN: How important is the role of accommodation as a strategy for competitiveness in today's business environment?

PEGGY FOWLER: These days, you need to get all types of people into the workforce. In addition, your current employees may well need accommodations. We need to be welcoming and adapting to lots of changes out there. In that regard, accommodation is simply a competitive strategy.

OBLN: Reflecting on your employment experiences with folks with disabilities, is that working well for your company? Are you able to recruit people in significant numbers?

PEGGY FOWLER: Sometimes we have had success and sometimes we haven’t. We once formed a partnership with a community agency where we brought in people with disabilities as temporary workers – who might later become permanent employees. The partnership didn’t work out in the long run; but we did get a few placements from that. Some of the organizations that we have tried to work with just don’t have applicants with the kind of skills that we need in our company.

We have a couple of employees with disabilities who have been real activists for us – who have pushed us and helped us on addressing disability issues. Our company website has been designed to adhere to universal standards of accessibility for people with disabilities. We‘ve done some education using the video “The Ten Commandments of Communicating with People with Disabilities”. Each year we have a day where people with disabilities come into the company and “shadow” employees at their jobs. (We have also picked up a couple of employees from doing that.)

OBLN: Is there something outside of your organization that could help your company to be more successful in employing people with disabilities?

PEGGY FOWLER: Recruiting is always a struggle for us. We could use resources that could make it easier for us – to help us find people with disabilities with the right skills for our jobs. . OBLN: Is there anything else that you would like to comment on?

PEGGY FOWLER: You can never make enough progress. There is always work to be done. We need to see more people with disabilities and more minorities in the workforce. We still need to get rid of sexist and racist language. There is just always more to be done in this area. For a number of years, we have paid attention to issues of the gay and lesbian community; but now we are also considering gender identity as part of our diversity policy. Like I said, there is just always more to be done to make sure that we are making people feel welcome and developing as diverse and supportive of a workforce as we can.

Sue Hennesy is the Vice President for Health Plan Operations of Kaiser Permanente Northwest. With a strong personal commitment to inclusive workplaces, Sue has distinguished herself as a champion of diversity efforts – and, within the Oregon business community, her company has gained recognition as a true leader in workforce diversity. Recently, Sue shared some of her insights and perspectives with us - on workforce diversity in general – and disability issues in particular.

OBLN: Sue, you have played a significant leadership role in diversity at Kaiser Permanente, and made sure from the beginning that disability was part of that focus. Why is disability such an important part of diversity in your view?

SUE HENNESSY: Diversity in our workforce is very important to us. We want to cast our recruitment net as broadly as possible to create the best talent pool. We are working hard to welcome a wide range of skill and talent to our company and provide an environment where they can be productive and add value.

OBLN: What do you think is the most important thing (or things) a business can do to increase their success at employing people with disabilities and/or successfully serving the customer base that is represented by people with disabilities?

SUE HENNESSY: I don’t want to sound overly-simplistic here; but I do think that one of the things that we often don’t do is simply inquire. As we seek to extend our customer base, we need to inquire about which disabilities are represented in that base and what would attract these customers to purchasing our products and services. On the employee side, you have to have a very broad recruitment net in place. The more you restrict your requirements for your applicants - the more you are going to screen out rather than in. If you are serious about inclusion, you have to first put out large nets and once you have accumulated applicants from that very large pool, you can start to narrow that pool based on the capabilities within that pool. If you don’t start by creating a larger pool, you are going to exclude too early. That’s a lesson I hope we all learned early in recruiting women and people of color into our workforce.

Likewise before the ADA and the other legal requirements surrounding employing persons with disabilities, I fear that we often narrowed our net. If we saw someone in a wheelchair, we made assumptions that they wouldn’t be able to do certain jobs. Now we know that we can move desks up and down, build ramps, make elevators work in buildings. I don’t think the intention was to exclude. I think we did it out of ignorance and not opening up our minds to ability.

OBLN: One of the driving purposes of the Oregon Business Leadership Network is to address those kinds of issues and to raise people’s awareness of the contributions that people with disabilities can make to a workplace.

SUE HENNESSY: The other thing that I feel personally challenged by these days is how to get inside that part of the paradigm that is about “I don’t know what I don’t know”. Disabilities are not always apparent. For example, we are becoming more aware that people with learning disabilities or with mental heath problems may have disabilities that are not immediately apparent. The way that disability may appear may not be recognized for what it is. If the behavior related to the disability exhibits itself as an odd social behavior, it will set up assumptions, perceptions and expectations about that person that may not drive at getting the best productivity from that person or making the best accommodations. Instead of getting to the real issue, we might just surmise “That person just acts a little odd” – and our confidence in them goes down a notch. It is very subtle.

An employee with a head injury may be really tired at 4:00 PM in the afternoon and not at the highest level of their ability to do a complex intellectual task in a noisy room. If we just see that person at that point of time and out of the context of the disability that it stems from, we may draw the wrong conclusions about the person’s overall ability. Instead, if we come to understand the context in which the employee is able to offer their best, we can relate in a whole different way. And that is a form of accommodation. If I am working with a group of employees and I know that three people in this group have that kind of fatigue related to head injuries, today, I’m not going to ask them to come to a meeting where we are going to do a lot of brainstorming on an issue. Rather, I’d likely ask them to help me construct that meeting – What is the best time of day? What is the best process? What is the best way to X outcome? If we don’t have basic awareness, we don’t know how to ask those questions.

OBLN: Do you have a group of employees with disabilities that is formalized?

SUE HENNESSY: Yes we do. We have a number of Staff Associations. One of our Staff Associations is for people with disabilities. They are advocates for this group of employees and they sit as members of our Diversity Council which is advisory to the senior leadership on our Diversity Program. They advise on a number of levels – employment issues, emerging issues in our customer base, the education that our staff needs, etc. Our Staff Association on Disabilities is a terrific asset to help us better understand and respond to issues faced by persons with disabilities.

OBLN: Can you comment on the role of accommodation as a key business strategy for competitiveness?

SUE HENNESSY: We have to have our definition of accommodation move from the protective and legalistic definition to the view that we are all able along a broad spectrum of talent. What accommodation means in a legal sense is very different from what it means in a social sense. In addition to looking at what the legal requirements are for accommodation, employers should view accommodations as methods to utilize the full talent of your workforce. There is a bigger win in here for business if we look at “How do we utilize all the talent?” in addition to “How do we comply with the requirements of accommodating?”

We have to move from a philosophy of tolerance to one of inclusion – really embracing this notion of inclusion. We have to keep asking ourselves “What differentiates us amongst other employers?” I think that differentiation will come from those employers who really figure out how to use all of the talent that is available to them. Health care is an industry that is in a period of rapid growth at a time when there are worker shortages. The average age of nurses at Kaiser is 47. Many of these people are ready to retire in the not-too-distant future. We also have increasing needs for a workforce with high technical skills. If we don’t figure out a way to take advantage of all of the available talent, we aren’t going to be able to meet the market demand or the societal demand for health care.

As these factors converge, I would hope that we look more deeply for a whole range of accommodations so that we can take advantage of talent that perhaps we haven’t in the past.

Why is it that leading US companies like IBM, Nordstrom, Marriott and Microsoft are putting so much effort into recruiting and retaining employees with disabilities? Why are major companies targeting people with disabilities as an important market for their products? The Oregon Business Leadership Network has answered these questions concisely in its new document, “The Oregon Business Case for Inclusion of People with Disabilities in the Competitive Workplace and Consumer Base”.

Developed over several months, with valuable input from progressive Oregon companies such as Intel, Oregon Health Sciences University, and Neil Kelly, Inc,, the Oregon Business Case is a compelling statement of the importance of people with disabilities to Oregon’s economy.

Companies that know how to properly accommodate people with disabilities have a distinct business advantage. They are more adept at employing the talents of the 20% of the American labor pool that have disabilities. They are more capable of retaining the skills of their experienced employees as they begin to acquire disabilities associated with aging. They can effectively reduce the timeloss costs associated with long and short-term disability.

The OBLN is hosting a timely (free) seminar on this important topic. For several years now, PCC Structurals, an OBLN Member company, has put considerable and rewarding effort into their accommodation strategies. On March 9, their experiences will be featured in a lively panel presentation.

Join us! Wednesday, March 9 from 7:30 AM – 9:00 AM. The Cascade Plaza/OAME Building, 4134 N. Vancouver, Portland, OR.