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Diversity & Equal Opportunities

Diversity strategy

Diversity is about embracing and utilizing our differences and similarities. We believe that these differences will help differentiate the company in the marketplace. When integrated in Skanska, it will sharpen its competitive edge and improve results.

Diversity is also about including individuals regardless of differences in background. What we as individuals contribute is what counts, not if we belong to a majority or minority group.

In an effort to change both attitudes and behavior within the company, Skanska has chosen to concentrate on three major areas of diversity: Gender, Ethnic and Educational background.

Educational background may seem like an odd area of diversity, but looking beyond the traditional engineering background is important to be able to bring well-needed creativity to this industry. At the same time, it will broaden the base of recruitment, which is necessary when looking at the supply side of the workforce.

Three potential opportunities
There are three major reasons or potential opportunities that drive Skanska’s ambition within this area:

• We need to tap into the skills and potential within the entire prospective workforce.
• When looking at the demographics, there is a systematic workforce shortage and targeting people outside the traditional construction audience will increase the employee base. Not only will this solve the shortage in numbers, it will also enrich the company with people with other experiences, backgrounds and skills.
• Skanska’s customers are becoming more diverse in aspects of gender, ethnic or educational backgrounds. To better serve customers, we should be just as diverse as they are. 

As a minority you need to win credibility and to justify yourself – that hampers performance. Increasing the percentage of minorities will therefore increase performance, since the minority representative can focus on performance rather than justify themselves as the odd-one-out.

Finally, diversity is also a highly important matter with regard to Skanska’s ability to attract and recruit talent. The industry’s lack of diversity is today seen as the number one barrier for attracting engineering graduates (WEF). When young high potentials were recently asked about factors that reduce Skanska’s attractiveness down; diversity together with low brand awareness were the top responses.

Critical success factors
Skanska believes that critical tactical success factors are:

• Leadership from the top, management is role model
• Diversity is a business and line concern at local level - not only a HR topic
• The change in diversity is a big effort, and in change you need to have a two-way communications with high employee involvement
• We need to celebrate success
• What gets measured gets done
• Not create new guidelines and policies, rather integrate the diversity aspects into current policies and working/business principles