Equity and Inclusion Officer at CAE

Pascale Alpha was appointed Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer at CAE in May 2022. CAE is a high-tech company, leader in pilot training, with 13,000 employees and operations in 40 countries.

Prior to her appointment, Pascale held the position of Director, Public Affairs and Global Communications at CAE and was co-leading the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) journey since its beginnings. CAE’sDE&I leadership was recognized on numerous occasions - the company was included in Bloomberg’s Gender Equality Index for the fourth consecutive year in 2022, was awarded the Silver-level certification by Women in Governance for its efforts in promoting gender parity in the workplace and was included in the Globe and Mail’s Women Lead Here benchmark. Prior to focusing on DE&I, Pascale was a communications and public relations professional with over 20 years of experience in internal and external strategic communications and media relations.

Throughout her tenure at CAE, Pascale supported the company’s growth by developing communication strategies that advanced its business goals, enhanced the company’s image and reputation, and drove employee engagement. Prior to joining CAE, Pascale was a journalist for 11 years atthe CBC. She was the producer in charge of the Montreal bureau of the CBC’s flagship news program, The National. Pascale is a member of the Board of Governors of John Abbott College and was president of the Image, Visibility, and Outreach working group of Aero Montreal, Montreal’s aerospace cluster from 2015 to 2019.

Her work has won several awards of excellence from the Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS), the Société québécoise des professionnelsen relations publiques (SQPRP), and the stories she produced for the CBC won two Gemini Awards.

Following is the conversation that we had with Pascale.

As Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer, what are some of your key roles and responsibilities that you have on a daily basis at CAE?

I am very excited to be leading the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I)Office at CAE. The objective of my role is to foster and promote a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion across the global organization, to create a more inclusive, equitable and diverse company, where everyone feels like they belong, where they can contribute to the best of their abilities, and be themselves, with no exception. CAE is a global company, we have about 13,000 employees in 40 countries. Everything we do is geared towards making the world a safer place. We are mostly known for our flight simulators and training centres which are used to train the world’s pilots.

“One of the biggest drivers to foster a more inclusive, diverse and equitable culture is our Employee Resource Groups, we are proud supporters of all of them, including Prism, our LGBTQ2+ Employee Resource Group - one of our most active ERGs - and for the first time ever, CAE sponsored in Summer 2022the Pride parades in Dallas (USA), Montreal (Canada) and Stolberg (Germany).”

I am an immigrant, I lived in the Arab world all of my youth, I understand what it is like not to be part of the majority –I believe what we are doing for DE&I is making us uncover a lot of hidden talent within the company, and outside as well. Myrolebrings me to work closely with the HR team to ensure that our benefits, compensation, promotion, people-related processes such as our annual talent & leadership reviews and recruitment areinclusive and free of bias, as well as with the organizational development team to create development programs for underrepresented groups. But my work also goes beyond HR. The work of a Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer is to connect with people across the organization to instill DE&I in everything we do: working with the global sourcing team on supplier diversity, working with Employee Resource Groups to harness their power and helping them grow in ways they hadn’t thought of, working with the ethics and compliance teams to ensure we have everything in place against harassment, and to mitigate workplace bias. Going forward, we will be working with the business units and HR business partners and leaders in the regions to create DE&I teams regionally and programs specific to each country – because one size does not fit all.

The role Chief DE&I Officer role also entails creating awareness internally by participating or organizing townhalls, blogs, newsletter articles, focus groups, or surveys. It also involves benchmarking best practices and a lot of networking with external organizations to create a recruitment pipeline through scholarships, COOP internships, and sponsorships. As my role becomes more established, I am looking forward to connecting with product marketing to see how we can include a DE&I aspect in the training we provide our customers.

By working on all these fronts, we will help foster and promote a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion across the organization, and beyond, in our communities.

What are some of the challenges existing for the leaders looking to establish Diversity and Inclusion at their organizations?

A few years ago, at CAE we started our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion journey by focusing first on gender. Why? Because we work in male-dominated industries such as civil aviation as well as defense and security. At the time, less than1 out of 5 employees was a woman at CAE.  Our objective was to foster an inclusive, gender-diverse, bias-free environment and strengthen the representation and development of women within the company and in leadership positions.

We launched mentoring programs as well as many industry-leading development programs, such as CAE DARE where we take 30 women through a 12-month program that focuses on their own development: self-confidence, risk taking, negotiating, networking, work-life balance and influencing. We also launched the Ambition challenge, a 100-day program aimed at helping participants transform their mindset, adopt new behaviors and take action to develop their talent and realize their ambitions. We are proud of our success already as we have increased substantially our percentage of senior level female leaders and the representation of women in our high potential pool.

Our DE&I work was recognized through many awards, we were part of the Globe and Mail’s Women Lead Here, and CAE was included in the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index for the past 4 years in a row and won Silver Certifications from Women in Governance.

Our challenge today is to extend the lessons learned in our DE&I program beyond gender to cover all other underrepresented groups including visible minorities, Indigenous People, LGBTQ2+, people with disabilities – and to ensure that we are truly global in our work. We already have self-identification data in the Canada and the US which represent 70% of our workforce, and we are finalizing the plan to launch a self-identification campaign to all our employees worldwide in order to better understand our worldwide employee base – we need to have a baseline, so that we can work on improving upon it. We worked with our legal department to better understand the requirements globally - in many countries there are rules governing the collection and storage of sensitive private information which need to be respected.

Another key challenge is ensuring we have an inclusive culture in place, we cannot foster diversity without ensuring that employees are working within an inclusive environment, free of bias and micro-aggressions. We plan to launch an inclusive leadership campaign, micro-aggression workshops, testimonial videos, a belonging day, among other things.

2022 will see a new wave of support with organizations moving beyond setting the foundation to actively supporting gender identity and expression. These will include: Use of Gender-inclusive language and communication. Your views on this trend?

Of course, supporting gender identity and expression is at the centre of our DE&I program. One of the first projects of our DE&I program a few years ago was to accompany Gabriella, a transgender employee, though her coming out after 17 years working as a man. We developed special training sessions for all employees and created a successful documentary series to share her story with our employees.

One of the biggest drivers to foster a more inclusive, diverse and equitable culture is our Employee Resource Groups, we are proud supporters of all of them, including Prism, our LGBTQ2+ Employee Resource Group - one of our most active ERGs - and for the first time ever, CAE sponsored in Summer 2022the Pride parades in Dallas (USA), Montreal (Canada) and Stolberg (Germany). We have also included the use of pronouns in the templates of our email signatures and business cards and explained why they are used. This is just the beginning, the use of gender-inclusive language (in English and in French) is one of the programs we will be advancing this year.

What would be your piece of advice for your fellow peers and leaders?

A huge part of our success is the fact that our CEO and executive leadership believe in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. From the beginning we ensured we had everyone’s buy-in by conducting our first-ever DE&I workshop with the top 100 leaders of the company. Our CEO has been a driving force in making DE&I a strategic priority of our company, and today, our whole executive management committee is part of our Executive Diversity Council overseeing our progress, and each one of our employee resource groups is sponsored by an executive leader of CAE!

My second advice is do not underestimate the strength of the network – make the communications team a key partner for your DE&I plan. Communications is a very powerful ally. Also, focus on creating an ambassador network globally through local DE&I committees and local chapters of your Employee Resource Groups. Diversity has many facets, and the diverse workforce in Asia will look different from the diverse workforce in North America, that’s why it is important that each country and region creates its own DE&I committee which will define and oversee its own objectives – in line with our global DE&I objectives. In general people feel strongly about DE&I and they want to play a role in creating an inclusive workplace, by leveraging the strength of those ambassadors, you will multiply your impact exponentially.