Dome Women’s Luncheon


Uncovering the Issues Berg originally joined Dome in 2010, drawn in part due to the diverse group of women she saw working there in op- erational management roles. She started as a project manager and, a few years later, had reached the project executive level when she began to notice that many of those women had either left the company or appeared to be stalled on the career ladder. “It got me asking questions,” she said.


“We started forming some internal kind of networking groups, mostly run by employees at the grassroots level.” To shed light on the issues they were facing, Berg brought together a group of 23 women from various departments and offices, working under different directors, for a four-day Women’s Leadership Group summit. “We talked about what was going well for us here and what wasn’t going well,” she recalled. Dome President and CEO Rob Lynch


and Director of Innovation and Learning Steve Long were invited to join—and


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CALIFORNIA CONSTRUCTOR MAY-JUNE 2022


quickly understood there were issues that needed to be addressed. “Tere was kind of micro-aggression


stuff, like women in operations being asked to clean the office or take notes, stuff like that, or women getting caught on “islands” under unaware managers,” Berg explained. Te promotion process was found to need a course correction. And unconscious bias played an oversized role, she noted, impacting her personally both as a woman and an open lesbian working in an industry where “there are not a lot of ‘out’ LGBTQ people.” With the full support of company leadership, Dome began to take steps to improve its internal culture and pro- cesses. Tis included the formation of a Conscious Inclusion Committee, which recommended hiring a third-party con- sultant to evaluate issues and offer solu- tions. Trough multiple focus groups, em- ployee surveys, human resources analysis and other internal data, the consultant investigated how Dome was recruiting and hiring, handling promotions and


approaching other areas relating to its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Tey produced an impactful end-prod-


uct: a comprehensive, 100-page report that offered 100 recommendations for how Dome could improve its culture and eliminate bias in its processes.


Roadmap for Change Te recommendations ranged from ba- sic suggestions like making the website photos more diverse, to process-based approaches such as expanding the com- pany’s employee recruitment efforts to include more diverse colleges and uni- versities, among many other suggestions. Berg said the report provided a critical


roadmap for change that has driven her efforts since officially moving into her newly created role overseeing DEI in early 2020. So far, Dome has implemented about half of the 100 recommendations in the report, with an expectation that they will eventually tackle at least 90% of them, according to Berg. Dedicating resources to engage a


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