Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Our Commitment
The EERC is committed to healthy diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices within our workforce. We strive to remove and prevent systemic discrimination and stereotyping in our hiring, promoting, and supervising/managing employees as related to race, sex, age, gender identity, tribal identity, financial status, and any other diversity in our humanness that should instead be celebrated.
In Unity with the University of North Dakota
EERC stands proudly in unity with the overarching initiatives and policies of UND's DEI strategy, whereby all students, faculty and staff have intrinsic value as human beings and should be treated with respect. UND is committed to steering learning, discovery, and engagement activities around creating an inclusive and equitable working and learning environment that respects, acknowledges and celebrates diversity and individual differences.
DEI in Action at the EERC
The EERC has observed how consistent attention toward DEI in our high-tech organization creates well-rounded teams with great ideas resulting in higher workplace productivity and employee happiness. In addition, the EERC’s culture of a family-like organization aims to provide our employees with a welcoming, safe, and transparent working environment. As a result, EERC employees can express themselves freely and appropriately, enhancing workplace engagement, ideation, productivity, and thriving. The EERC's vision of providing practical, pioneering solutions to the world’s energy and environmental challenges is achieved only through this firm attention to DEI.
New employees at the EERC receive instruction on DEI principles early on in the orientation process through in-person and online instruction. Within the first week of employment all new EERC employees are assigned an ambassador who brings a personal element of inclusion to the new employee immediately; strengthening retention. Annual training is provided for all EERC employees in various elements of DEI no matter the job function through in-person professional training and through resources provided throughout the year by UND. Required and optional training for supervisors and all EERC employees includes topics such as recognizing and overcoming unconscious bias, diversity awareness, implicit bias and microaggression awareness, sexual harassment, sensitivity awareness, listening skills and empathy for leaders, communicating with respect, and other topics related to DEI and safety.
With respect to conducting the everyday business of research project development and execution, the EERC instructs all principal investigators (p.i.’s) and project managers to conduct tasks, people supervision, communication, and business with an eye toward DEI. The EERC has a stated DEI plan that can be submitted with proposals to funding organizations to demonstrate our commitment to not only delivering quality project results but doing so with sound respect for all our human interactions throughout the project.
Finally, the commitment of EERC to healthy DEI guidelines involves simple succinct adherence to EERC’s five core values as follows:
- Be Safe. The everyday aspects of employees feeling safe, respected, and included by fellow employees is just as important as all other occupational safety practices at the EERC.
- Be Ethical. Being ethical involves workers at the EERC being trained and inspired to be fair, truthful, and respectful of all employees, contractors, partners, and clients. Our employees come from a plethora of backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, and diverse persuasions. Our research is conducted with partners and clients who are people from disparate nations around the world and the EERC is committed to respectful ethical treatment of all.
- Be Engaged. An engaged workforce helps to promote good communication, understanding and appreciation of differing human strengths, cultures, norms, and personalities, and essentially allows diversity and inclusion space to thrive. We practice everyday employee engagement through training, activities, recognition, and a family culture of camaraderie and teamwork at work.
- Be Effective. We realize that diversity in the workforce produces innovation, creative ideas, effective leadership styles, and productivity; especially among our project teams. From the beginning, we have embraced a diverse workforce to attain the best, well balanced and creative teams that can effectively solve world challenges in energy and environment.
- Be Professional. Our employees maintain high standards of professionalism in accomplishing workplace goals and sustaining good research business; always maintaining professionalism in how employees relate to one another with sound DEI awareness and respect.