ID&E at EDC

Our ID&E strategy aims to continue to improve the overall experience for all employees. Our strategy focuses on three pillars: 

• Who we are—our values and behaviours, including hiring and promotion practices 
• The workplace we create—building awareness and understanding through education, training and dialogue
• How our business reflects us—through alignment with business priorities and our external partnerships

Overall, our goal is to create an inclusive culture that is diverse and welcoming, where all employees:

• have a strong feeling of belonging—regardless of their unique experiences
• feel safe, valued and supported throughout the employee lifecycle
• have equal opportunities for advancement
• feel that transparency and fairness are embedded into all processes and practices 

Creating diverse and inclusive teams enables EDC to better serve our customers and to have a positive impact on Canada.

Learn more about our inclusive culture

Our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) help us to create safe spaces for employees to engage with one another, share lived experiences, and help provide important context behind identified gaps. Our ERGs also offer specific recommendations and strategies to narrow potential gaps within our processes, systems and structures to improve upon the employee experience.

Our ERG communities include:

• Black
• DiversABILITY
• Francophonie
• Growing Professionals
• Indigenous
• Latin+
• 2SLGBTQI+ 
• Mosaic for Newcomers
• Women@EDC

Our ERGs each have a senior executive sponsor who is directly involved in the group’s strategy development and activities. More than 800 EDC community members and supporters are involved in the ERGs, representing approximately 40% of all employees. The ERGs collaborate with each other and with ERGs from other Crown corporations. 

To accelerate our momentum towards a healthy, inclusive and safe workplace, we launched mandatory inclusion, diversity and equity (ID&E) training including the Five Key Behaviours. This training helps establish the basic norms for how we interact and work with each other and enables us to unlock our full potential as an inclusive, diverse and equitable organization. 

Some examples of other mandatory training topics include:

• Unconscious bias 
• Microaggressions 
• 2SLGBTQI+  lived experience 
• Persons with disabilities’ lived experience 
• Respect in the workplace

Our ERGs help us deliver this training by sharing their own lived experiences, which provides powerful context around the concepts being discussed.  

We also work to embed ID&E perspective into our everyday operations by incorporating these topics into employee communications, events and activities. 

Our goal is to have diverse representation across our employee population as well as within leadership levels, mirroring external labour market availability and reflecting the customers we serve. 

To map our progress, we developed an online representation dashboard which is shared with employees to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to transparency and accountability. Representation is tracked in key segments of our workforce—gender, visible minorities, Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities, 2SLGBTQI+  and Black employees. 

We’re on track to meet or exceed diversity representation commitments including the BlackNorth Initiative CEO Pledge, which seeks to remove anti-Black systemic barriers negatively affecting the lives of Black Canadians.

Learn more about our diversity representation in our Integrated Annual Report.
 

We have introduced and/or updated the following ID&E policies:

• Updated Talent Acquisition Guideline—to ensure the transparent posting of all roles except for a narrowly defined list of exceptions.  
• New Special Hiring Policy for Under-represented Groups—to increase the number of applicants and hires from identified groups.

Employee stories—learn more.