Making meaningful connections.

Achieving global reach means embracing diversity.
  

Adam Warby, Avanade CEO, celebrating International Women’s Day.

 

 
Thinking globally, acting locally


To achieve Adam’s aspiration we think globally and implement locally in the areas and regions we do business. We recognize the importance of having a global strategy that ties us all together across the fabric of Avanade; however, the importance of local context for driving diversity and inclusion strategies will ultimately create success.

Our strategic focus has been to create a strong, shared understanding of what diversity and inclusion mean at Avanade, ensuring ALL of our employees’ diversity, talents and skills are leveraged to ensure competitive advantage for us in the marketplace. In the future, we will constantly challenge ourselves to implement diversity and inclusion tactics to attract, develop and keep a diverse employee workforce across the company.

Ongoing Programs
Avanade has a growing and significant list of diversity-related actions and activities:

• Our largest effort to date focused around International Women’s Day (IWD). We hosted 29 regional round-table events in over 20 countries, where we challenged our employees to come up with 101 ideas on how better to attract, develop and retain women at Avanade.
• Instituted our Global Women’s Planning and Steering Committee to bring together Avanade women to focus on global pipeline issues.
• Established our first Global Employee Resource Group, the LGBTQA employee resource group.
• Implemented a learning and development program to expose our senior leaders to a broad set of experiential educational opportunities.
• At the First Women Awards UK, in June 2012, Pam Maynard, general manager, United Kingdom and Ireland won the Real Business’ “First Women of Science & Technology” category. These awards are designed to recognize pioneering women whose achievements open opportunities for others and showcase the wealth of career opportunities available for women in the science and technology sectors.
• Girl Geek Coffee Ambassadors (Australia) – Avanade is proud to be involved with Girl Geek Coffees - a meet and greet open discussion group for females studying Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Multimedia and related disciplines. Our goal in partnering with Girl Geek coffees is to increase the participation for women in the IT workplace. We aim to do this by providing opportunities for the Girl Geek Coffee group to network with our industry professionals in an environment which will provide them with honest and varied perspectives on differing careers within IT consulting.