Deutsche Telekom IT: Adapting diversity strategies to local culture

When an international company develops initiatives to encourage a diverse workforce, it must be ready to adapt these to local education and employment trends, as Melanie Lange, Chief Social Responsibility Officer, Deutsche Telekom IT GmbH, explains in an interview with TM Forum’s Inform.

Deutsche Telekom IT employs more than 8,500 people to design and deliver advanced IT platforms and capabilities to the Deutsche Telekom Group and has operations in Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Slovakia and Spain.

The division is investing in diversity because it wants to reap the benefits it brings, explains Lange. She points to research by McKinsey, for example, which demonstrates that the multiple perspectives of a diverse, inclusive workforce contribute to organizational success, leading to greater profitability, increased innovation, and higher employee engagement.

One of Lange’s goals is to encourage women to join the company’s technical teams. However, the often-invisible barriers to women entering the IT sector take different forms.

Getting an early start

The entry-level of the career pipeline is crucial. However, as McKinsey points out, women still tend to face more barriers than men when looking to secure an initial role. And if women are absent from the first rung of the IT career ladder, then it becomes hard for companies to promote them into senior managerial roles further down the line.

“Girls typically exhibit an interest in IT careers in secondary school, but their enthusiasm then dwindles due to missing support from parents and teachers for pursuing STEM careers and demotivating behaviors and comment by peers,” notes Lange.

“Since we lose them before they leave schools, we are holding workshops with schoolgirls such as Girls Day, Digital@School or GirlsinTech in Germany, Hungary, Slovakia and Spain, making them aware of impactful and interesting job profiles in IT. DT’s IT company also encourages women to apply for its IT degree apprenticeship programs alongside men supported by scholarship programs."

In contrast, “in India, it's not necessary because 41% of STEM students are female. Women are orienting themselves towards IT where they can have a high salary and see it as a good career,” explains Lange. This allowed Deutsche Telekom IT to run a hackathon as a recruitment platform, which received hundreds of applications. Of the 200 selected to take part in the hackathon, 10 were hired. “It’s a dream pipeline,” says Lange, “you really have the best of the best.” For this reason, “we cannot have a one-fits-all approach. Instead, we have a fit-to-purpose approach,” Lange explains.

Holding on to a good thing

Once you have attracted strong recruits, it pays to hold on to them. Deutsche Telekom has found, for example, that if women don’t have a small critical mass of female colleagues in technical roles, attrition rates can rise.

As a result, “we started to rebuild teams that don't have one woman alone,” says Lange. In addition, “retention improves when women of a similar age are on the same team,” she observes. “So, it helps already if you have a junior and a senior, but it's even better if you put two juniors or degree apprentice women together.”

The company is also making efforts to retain women as they rise through the IT workforce, including mentorship programs or offering “shadowing days,” where women can spend one day with a local leader to learn about the expected challenges and to demystify the leadership role. Deutsche Telekom IT is using best practices from one country and applies these in other countries, adjusted to local requirements. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, but a learning and sharing approach, says Lange.

“The workforce in the countries is quite diverse. For example, in our German organization, the average age of a female employee is in the high 40s, whereas in India the women are in their late 20s. Thus, you need different measures to reach the target group and to enable them to succeed in their career” says Lange.

In India this means greater focus on maternity and childcare packages, to combine private and professional life.

To enable parents to work while knowing that their kids are taken care of, Deutsche Telekom IT provides mothers and fathers in India with private childcare in their home or in Germany with childcare during special events.

“Sometimes already tiny tweaks can have a tremendous impact ,” says Lange.

One of Deutsche Telekom IT’s most radical moves was in Slovakia. During a widespread reorganization, they looked afresh at the skills it needed and opened up roles en masse to new applicants. The upshot was a lot of women entering managerial positions.

Eye-opening

As befits an IT company, they have also turned to technology to help, using VR glasses to provide bias training. When senior male leaders in Germany wore the VR glasses, they experienced a typical day in the life of a female IT leader through the eyes and ears of a woman.

“They were really shocked by how they felt,” Lange says. For example, some experienced being literally looked down on by a taller person, as well as being ignored in meetings, often being the minority in the room and having men answer for them, even if out of good intentions, but making them look weak.

The bias training really enforced the commitment to clear goals regarding the improvement of the female share at Deutsche Telekom IT,” Lange concludes.