In this episode, Andrew MacDougall, a partner in the Corporate Group at Osler and a co-author of the Diversity Disclosure Practices report, interviews Andrea Wood, executive vice president and Chief Legal and Governance Officer of TELUS, who also serves as Corporate Secretary to the TELUS Board of Directors. Andrea shares her perspectives on diversity, particularly at the executive level, and her role in advancing TELUS’ social purpose and global leadership in sustainability. In addition to her corporate leadership, Andrea is an active volunteer, serving on the boards of several community-based organizations, and serves as TELUS’ executive sponsor for Connections, a grassroots initiative supporting women’s networking and career growth across the organization. Andrea has also been recognized as the 2024 recipient of the Blakes Judy L. Wilson Diversity Award by the Canadian General Counsel Awards.
Andrew MacDougall: I’m Andrew McDougall, a partner in Osler’s corporate group and a co-author of the Osler annual Diversity Disclosure Practices report. I am delighted to welcome Andrea Wood. Andrea is executive vice president, chief legal and governance officer at TELUS Corporation, and is a member of its executive leadership team. She also serves as corporate secretary to TELUS’ Board of Directors. Through her leadership, she enables the advancement of TELUS’ social purpose, enabling TELUS’ global leadership in sustainability. She is an active volunteer, serving on the boards of several community-based organizations, and serves as TELUS’ Global Executive Sponsor for Connections, a grassroots initiative that supports networking and career growth for women across the organization. She has also been recognized as the 2024 recipient of the Blakes Judy L. Wilson Diversity Award by the Canadian General Counsel Awards. I’ve asked Andrea to join me here today to share her perspectives on diversity, especially at the executive level. Andrea, thank you for joining me. I want to just jump right into it because we’ve seen a strong focus on diversity for many years now. This is our tenth anniversary report. So, do you think some of the big focus that we’ve seen over the course of these last ten years will start to lose steam as part of the EDI pushback that’s now occurring in the United States?
Andrea Wood: Oh boy, Andrew, I hope not. I think that Canada is a different environment than the U.S. I hope and believe that we have greater social consensus on the topic of diversity and the importance of diversity. I also am hopeful that corporations will continue to see and understand the business case for diversity. We at TELUS really believe that diversity is important not just because it’s just, but also because it enables us to better understand our customers and the communities that we support. And so I hope that that business case will continue to inspire corporations to maintain a focus on diversity in Canada, even if we see things changing a little bit in the U.S.
Andrew MacDougall: Well, and TELUS has been a big leader, the disclosure this year, like in past years, has always been one of the best examples when we go and do our report review in terms of setting out what TELUS is doing, some of the initiatives that it’s pursuing and going beyond the bare minimum. So, we actually did see in our report this year, companies were still explaining what they were doing, they were still articulating multiple initiatives. Some of the disclosure changed a little bit. I think the only thing is that the numbers are not showing quite the dramatic change that they have in the past years. And just curious what you think about the fact that we’re starting to see a slowdown in terms of the appreciation, in terms of the number of women on boards?
Andrea Wood: Yeah, well, I hope again that that slowdown is just temporary. At TELUS we are continuing to do very well. As you know, we have a target for our board. What we see at TELUS is not consistent with the numbers that you’ve described, Andrew. At the board level, we have a target for each gender of 40% of our board, and we’ve had no trouble exceeding that target year over year. Currently 46% of our independent board members are women.
Andrew MacDougall: That’s fantastic, because just to throw it out there, even among the S&P TSX 60 companies, percentage of board seats held by women is 39.6, not even quite at the 40% level. So, you’re definitely doing better than even some of Canada’s largest companies.
Andrea Wood: Well thank you. We’re very proud of that, and we believe that it has contributed to a strengthening of our board. We also have targets, of course, for various other equity-seeking groups. We have a target of three for visible minorities, Indigenous, LGBTQ2+ and disabled people, and we have met that target, as well. So we are really committed to the idea of having a board that reflects the greater Canadian population, and that enables us to see and understand what various communities in Canada are experiencing and, most importantly, what they expect from us.
Andrew MacDougall: That is amazing. I love the idea that the board is going to be reflective of the Canadian population more generally. With all these changes, Andrea, what is the biggest change in the dynamic at the board level that you’ve noticed as a result of TELUS’ focus on diversity?
Andrea Wood: I think number one is we have people challenging our comfortable perspectives more frequently. And one thing that we’ve done that I think has contributed to the healthy dialogue at the board level is we’ve introduced a program of mentorship for all new directors, and we really believe that that mentorship approach, and that coaching approach, has resulted in our new directors contributing faster and more comfortably and more quickly, feeling as though they are welcome to speak their mind and supported by their fellow directors.
Andrew MacDougall: Can you describe that a little bit more, in terms of what the mentoring approach actually involves?
Andrea Wood: Sure. So each new director is given an old director mentor, for lack of a better word. And that mentor may not be an old person, but each new director is matched up with a director that has had some tenure on our board, and that mentor provides coaching to the new director. Like everybody else, we have a very robust director orientation program, but that mentorship supplements the director orientation program, and it enables the mentor to offer coaching that perhaps enables the new director to understand some of the undercurrents that might be going on at the board level, and to better understand the, maybe, other directors’ reactions to certain suggestions, whatever it is, just to help them to quickly acclimatize to the social and cultural and business context for what happens in board meetings.
Andrew MacDougall: I really like this idea because you put people into a new situation and you’re enabling them to feel welcome and able to contribute faster than they would otherwise, and really leveraging the skills that they bring to the table in a way that may not have happened absent this program. That’s a great initiative. You know, if we turn now to sort of the organization more broadly, Andrea, because you’re quite involved with the initiatives that TELUS pursues, what would you describe as the best initiative or the best initiatives that TELUS has pursued to improve its diversity, its equity, and create lasting change within the organization?
Andrea Wood: That’s a tough question, because there is really no one thing. It’s really a suite of approaches that we’ve taken that complement each other and that have contributed to TELUS’ employees telling us that they feel as though their thoughts and ideas are respected. On our recent pulse check survey, we scored 93% on “The team respects my thoughts”; we scored 96% on “The corporation respects my values”; 91% on “The corporation values different ways of thinking.” So, it really has to do with many, many different initiatives from, for example, our team member-led resource groups that enable team members to join communities like Connections, where they can network and express their perspective and feel as though there’s a team supporting them. It’s scholarships. It’s the board’s commitment to diversity is expressed through its targets, and that’s been very important. Our Indigenous reconciliation program, which is very robust and well developed, our supplier DEI program. I guess what it all comes down to is tone at the top, right down from our board, brought to life by numerous programs across the organization that, themselves, each have a different diversity objective, with the result that we do hear that our team members feel as though they’re welcome and included, and their different perspectives are appreciated.
Andrew MacDougall: So, a multifaceted approach. There’s no one single answer, which intuitively makes sense when you’re talking about the diversity internally within an organization and bringing in people from all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences. I was curious, the pulse survey that TELUS does, how frequently is the survey conducted with its employees? Is it annual, every few years? And is it focused on diversity, but is it focused on other areas as well?
Andrea Wood: Yeah, it’s done at least annually. Teams can choose to do it more frequently than annually if they wish. If they have particular concerns or questions that they’re monitoring, they can do it more frequently than annually. And yes, it’s intended to do more than just measure people’s sense of being included. It does measure employee sentiment. “Do I feel engaged?” “Do I feel as though my career is developing the way I want it to develop?” “Am I being given the opportunities that I deserve?” “Am I paid fairly?” It’s a wide-ranging survey that we do at least annually.
Andrew MacDougall: That is amazing. Anything else, Andrea, that you wanted to share just before we wrap up here?
Andrea Wood: I guess one other thought is that one thing that I think is interesting about TELUS, is that we’ve talked a little bit about the targets that we’ve set at the board of directors level. We’ve taken a very different approach at the employee level, and there we leave it to the discretion of each individual manager to determine how best to promote diversity, equity and inclusion on that manager’s team. And so, we don’t have top-down targets. Notwithstanding that, what we’re seeing is that we have a very naturally diverse employee base, including 40%, which I think is quite extraordinary, 40% of our senior leadership are women. So, we see good gender representation from top down. And then more broadly, we see we do have very diverse teams. Mine, for example, is highly, highly diverse, and that has happened without me having set specific targets for the achievement of specific groups. It’s happened naturally because we’ve done things like we’ve considered how we describe job descriptions. We’ve rewritten our job descriptions so that they’re more likely to attract a broad array of candidates. We conduct interviewing with panels so that there are multiple perspectives represented on any given candidate and for any given role. And through initiatives like that, without having a top-down target, we’ve nonetheless been able to attract a very diverse team.
Andrew MacDougall: And you measure and track, sort of, the progress year over year in terms of the diversity throughout the organization?
Andrea Wood: Yes we do.
Andrew MacDougall: Right. So that you can see the progress occurring, even if you haven’t got a particular target that you’re aiming at, you can see that there is change happening. It shows that the programs are working, which is important.
Andrea Wood: Yep. That’s a great point Andrew. Thank you.
Andrew MacDougall: Listen, it has been fantastic to have this conversation with you today. And I appreciate very much the thoughts that you’ve shared with us and with the listeners today. We are looking forward to the release of our report in a little while, and this will be an important part of our report this year. And thank you again.
