Johnson Controls puts diversity and inclusion firmly in spotlight
When Maria Jose Lloret Crespo graduated from college in her home country of Spain, she became the only woman working as an engineer in a manufacturing plant.
“My mum said, ‘Why would you go to a manufacturing plant where you’re the only woman?’”
“But sometimes you don’t know what you can do until you try.”
To the wonderment of her colleagues, friends and family, however, she put on “safety helmets, safety glasses and safety boots” every day and excelled at her job. What Crespo was doing, was path-breaking at the time and remains path-breaking today.
Women and people of colour are still fighting for parity in the tech universe and the rapidly growing sector of Artificial Intelligence (IT).
According to a recent American study, the gender gap in the tech industry remains vast with researchers concluding that if current trends continue to hold, women will not achieve equality with men in publishing computer science research in this century.
Crespo recalls being mistaken for a receptionist while leading a tech firm in the US.
“I’ve been in many situations where I was hosting someone, and they asked me for coffee, assuming that I was admin. And I’ve seen the same request being made to my Indian colleagues,” she says.
And my accent is also strong so that people may look at me differently, but negative experiences like that make you humble, so I’m perfectly fine giving them coffee.
Now Vice President (VP) of IT Operations and Chief Technologist at Cork-based multinational tech company, Johnson Controls, Crespo wants to help build an inclusive and diverse environment in Munster’s leading, tech firm.
Derek O’Connell, VP of IT and Digital Transformation at Johnson Controls, agrees that diversity and inclusivity is an intrinsic part of the company’s credo.
O’Connell, whose wife also works in the IT sector and faces the challenges of working in a male-dominated environment every day, says the company is ready to break gender- and race-barriers within the Irish workforce.
“For me, as a leader within Johnson Controls, it’s about coming together and making sure that we get a more diverse leadership in the company,” he says.
Johnson Controls’ building, a tall, vitreous structure, which is supposedly Ireland’s smartest, faces Cork City Council’s age-old edifice on Albert’s Quay.
The Albert’s Quay building is the company’s headquarters, albeit the Munster firm haveing around 2,000 locations across six continents with over 105,000 employees.
Inside the company’s headquarters, most things, including lifts, follow the structure of microchips inside the employees’ badges, so one needs to scan a badge to use a lift as opposed to pressing a button.
The offices are designed in an edgy, futuristic fashion with a sprawl of doodles covering their glass walls.
The company designs a variety of building equipment ranging from security, fire-to-air conditioning products, working with tech giants like Google and Microsoft.
Job vacancies available at the firm vary from positions in IT, digital architecture and engineering and the Cloud as well as sales.
Crespo and O’Connell, who have both found their dream jobs at the Cork-based firm, are determined to encourage and attract young college graduates of Munster who otherwise might leave the country to seek employment abroad.
“We want to tell college graduates that they don’t necessarily have to travel away if they don’t want to,” O’Connell says.
As Crespo puts it, by working for Johnson Controls, young tech professionals can remain in Cork, while influencing a global impact.
O’Connell, 45, who is from Cork and has finished his education in University College Cork (UCC), says he made a conscious decision of raising his three children in the rebel county, after living in Dublin, London and Sydney for years.
And thanks to the opportunities provided by his new company, he hasn’t looked back since.
“It was hugely important for me to have a work-life balance that we couldn’t have in other places,” he says.
Making the decision to move back to Cork, and me and my wife driving our careers from Cork, knowing we have the family support, was huge.
Crespo and O’Connell both agree that hiring international, non-European, yet “Irish-trained” talent is significantly vital to their company.
O’Connell says the topic is one that he is quite “passionate” about.
“International kids come here and get their education from our colleges and as you were saying, we sometimes send them home, but at Johnson Controls, we have very strong support for diverse talent,” he says. “We have a multitude of nationalities here at Johnson Controls, and we want to sponsor and take on board graduates, of UCC and CIT, from different countries.”
Asked about the company’s approach to maternity leave, Crespo, who has experienced pregnancy discrimination first-hand after giving birth to her second child while working at an American company, insists that the Munster firm is dedicated to protecting professional mothers’ jobs.
“I had to fight the bias of my manager at the time. We had a phone conversation a few weeks before I was coming back [from maternity leave],” she recalls.
“He said, ‘Since you have a baby now, I don’t think you can take it anymore’.”
Crespo says maybe it is “unconscious bias”, but women are still fighting managers who are willing to rid their payrolls of new mothers or female employees on maternity leave.
“I got really upset and angry at him, but I later had an honest conversation with him and asked him if he would say the same thing to a man,” she says.
Crespo has witnessed a different approach to pregnancy at her Cork company, however, urging qualified women to join Johnson Controls without worrying about losing their jobs after childbirth.
O’Connell says he can’t “get my head around” the notion of a professional mother returning from maternity leave to a job that “is not there anymore”.
It is wrong to the extreme, but I know it does happen.
“But from our perspective, we try to provide flexibility for our workforce and providing more options for both our male and female employees,” he says.
Both O’Connell and Crespo hope that by the time their daughters, whom they believe are “blind to race and gender differences” are old enough to work, barriers and discriminations against women in the workforce are completely lifted.
Until then, they are trying their best to lay the groundwork at Johnson Controls.
