Achieving diversity is accepting change
Mike Nigro, Managing Director - UK & Ireland
Welcome to the second edition of Drive, our magazine dedicated to helping women take their Enterprise careers exactly where they want to.
It’s important that people at Enterprise understand the opportunity that diversity brings; ensuring we have the most talented team to deliver our goals.
Diversity is not a simple tick-box, it’s a business strategy that contributes to the success of the whole company.
Trust me when I say we’re 100 per cent committed to doing what it takes to achieve it.
But in order to provide an environment where employees can prosper there is much that needs to change. And driving this change means we need to know the issues. Of course, many of them we know - they are common to many businesses.
But there’s much more we need to understand. That’s why we need all of our employees to get involved. We need you to be comfortable talking to your managers and colleagues about career and life choices. Where necessary we need you to challenge how we do things and help push the company in new and better directions. Only if we all participate can we make this change happen. It’s not something that can be done from a boardroom. It requires each of us to play a role, scrutinise the business, share your findings and concerns. Then together we can change them – and if it makes us a better business, we’ll do it!
But every employee also has to recognise the need to change their own expectations or priorities in order to either personally succeed, or harness the benefit of a diverse workforce. So in this edition we talk to several of our Group Rental Managers about their experiences at the Women In Business Forum and how it made them understand the need to change their approach to nurturing talented women within their group.
In a piece on Active Mentoring, Candice Turner tells how she used mentoring to change her behaviour and make herself visible ahead of her promotion to Area Manager. And Claire Beynon explains how she restructured and adapted her life in order to balance the demands of a young family with a senior role in rental, alongside caring for her partner through illness.
The change that concerns many women at Enterprise is the reality that promotion often means relocation. I know many women worry about the impact this will have on family life.
So we’ve spoken to three women in very different roles across the company to find out how they managed to relocate in order to pursue their career whilst balancing the needs of their family.
These are real-life examples of how our employees have adapted and forced change to support their careers. I hope you can take inspiration from them.
Change is not easy for any of us. But the success of our diversity programme has taught us that when we adapt how we do things to suit the needs of our employees, and their ambitions, then we are a better company.
