Welcoming diversity and differences

Supporting the advancement of women

While women’s representation within the company is more or less unchanged from previous years (around 29%), women account for nearly 39% of the Montréal region workforce. What’s more, again this year, their share of management positions increased by 1% to just over 27%.

We are continuing to reach out to various groups, especially those that support immigrant women seeking to join the workforce. We are also striving to deconstruct certain myths about jobs traditionally held by men is also underway with primary school students.

Promoting inclusion

As of now, inclusion—one of Hydro-Québec’s core values— goes hand in hand with the growing importance we place on interpersonal (people) skills in terms of hiring and promotions. For the first time, we’ve established an inclusion index that will let us measure employee perceptions on impartiality, job prospects and belonging. We will also work to reduce the gap between resources from underrepresented groups and those from the majority as much as possible.

Ensuring everyone a seat at the table

Our move toward a more inclusive culture is based on solid foundations on which each entity and every employee can build:

• A shared image of Hydro-Québec: to identify, understand and act on the gaps in representation, the main processes in the career trajectory—hiring, career paths, departures, etc.—were analyzed in detail. As a result, we now have a better understanding of the gaps as well as the areas where we need to be vigilant. Follow-up measures and remedial actions will be implemented soon, as will a campaign encouraging employees from underrepresented groups to self-identify as such.

• Hiring targets: setting personalized hiring targets lets everyone contribute according to their group’s business reality and the geographic region in which they operate.

• We equip our people to facilitate contribution from the greatest possible number of allies and support our staff, managers and teams through different means. For example, in 2022, we conducted an awareness campaign on inclusion.

Highlights about our workforce

• Women: Women account for 39% of staff in the Montréal region and 28.7% of the total workforce

• Cultural communities: People from cultural communities account for 18.9% of employees in the Montréal region. For the first time, the overall representation of this group has surpassed 10%!

• Indigenous communities: Seven students from four Indigenous nations interned with us this past summer through a pilot project—a success story that makes us want to offer even more such internships to members of Indigenous communities in 2023. We hope to see these talented young people again at the end of their studies.

• People with disabilities: As well as the 22 students with disabilities who interned with us in summer 2022, we welcomed 13 new colleagues with disabilities this year. The addition of a professional special education resource will ensure better support and guidance for these employees, their managers and their teams, all in view of optimizing their contributions in a spirit of inclusive management and collaboration.

• Working with our partners: We’ve established a working group involving all the unions to create a model for collaboration and informationsharing on inclusion.