weCARE: Share Our Purpose, Be Yourself & Feel Valued
Building a safe and inclusive culture requires everyone’s participation. Through 46 roundtable discussions with hundreds of employees we wanted to validate and better understand our employees’ experience.
These talks revealed a widely-shared sentiment that employees want to feel they are cared for by the company because they truly care for our customers. This feedback led to the development of our employee value proposition, focusing on five components. weCARE is what we call our internal promise to value our people and represents the tremendous role employees play in our company.
Under the weCARE umbrella are programs including safety, compensation, career pathing, worklife balance, stability, respect and inclusion, and training, to name a few. We categorized these opportunities into five areas that capture what employees experience at work:
- Deeper Connections: Focuses on driving inclusion, diversity, and equity, working in our communities, and offering opportunities to build our employees’ networks internally with different teams across the company.
- Personal Growth: This is about professional and personal development opportunities, career growth, and training.
- Shared Purpose: This happens through the work our employees do to support our environmental, social, and governance goals, ethics, integrity, and providing customers with superior services.
- Flexibility: This is about achieving work-life balance, working on innovative projects and stretch assignments, and providing floating days and inclusion swap holidays so our people can take the time they prefer.
- Well-being: Connects to our commitment to safety and equates to good emotional and physical health that comes by way of competitive wages, recognition opportunities, and financial well-being.
Mr. Earvin "Magic" Johnson speaks to American Water
Earvin “Magic” Johnson strongly believes ID&E is a business imperative. In 2021, Mr. Johnson joined other American Water leaders to speak about the challenges he faced while transitioning out of the NBA and becoming a successful entrepreneur and advocate for diversity. The talk represented another way American Water seeks out subject matter experts to help us build a caring culture.