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.
  
   

We Are BEAUTIFULLY Different at American Water

At American Water, we regularly reflect on our values and our culture. We’re all different and having that diversity across our organization is what makes us a great company. We’re stronger because we have different ideas, viewpoints, experiences and backgrounds. Most importantly, we embrace and expect one another to respect and value those differences.

At American Water we say “Include Yourself” because employee engagement is essential in creating a workplace where everyone feels safe, included and treated with respect and dignity. “Include Yourself” is about empowering employees to contribute and participate in the culture we aim to create and maintain – one that is beautifully different.