Celebrating our journey: Milestones in Diversity and Inclusion

Posted: January 13, 2025

In October 2024, we held our customer conference AVEVA World in Paris and hosted our very first Inclusivity Breakfast Roundtables. These sessions focused on digital accessibility in the workplace, multigenerational workforces and how we are rebalancing our global talent.  

The conversations in the room were insightful, inspiring and impactful. Listening to our customers’ stories and challenges had me reflecting on the improvements we’ve put into place at AVEVA.  

I’m so proud of what we have achieved so far. Every journey begins with a single step, but it’s the lessons we gather along the way that truly shape it.

Building a strong foundation 

At AVEVA, our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion has been a continuous process of growth, reflection, and progress. Here’s how we have turned vision into action: 

Appointing our first Global Director of DEI, Lena Milosevic MBE, four years ago resulted in a full assessment of our diversity and inclusion landscape here at AVEVA. This led us to develop the AVEVA DEI Policy and our five-year strategic DEI Plan, outlining five core pillars and setting targeted goals. Having these documents has provided us with a clear vision and structured direction for how we can enhance diversity and inclusion at AVEVA. We’ve grown our DEI team to include colleagues in EMEA, APAC and the Americas who are working together to build an inclusive culture closer to the ground. Having a wider team means we can celebrate diversity across all functions and countries. 

Growing our DEI impact 

We know that education and awareness are key to fostering an inclusive environment. In 2021, we introduced DEI training for all employees. This has laid the foundations for DEI principles across all areas of AVEVA. We know there’s always more learning to be done, so we have included unconscious bias training for all leaders and continue to provide ongoing wider education to support understanding and empathy across our global workforce.   

We are continuously advancing DEI within the company through ongoing internal initiatives such as employee group activities, keynote speakers and functional programs, all aimed at fostering an inclusive and equitable workplace culture.  

Strengthening our commitment  

In 2021, we made our pledge to gender targets of 50% women in new hires, 40% women managers and 30% women in leadership by 2030. We’re pleased to say we’re tracking well against our annual interim targets on all three goals as we outlined in our 2023 sustainability report. 

Also in 2021, we hit a significant milestone in publishing our first combined UK Gender and Ethnicity Pay Gap Report. This supported our internal research and how we communicate our DEI progress. The report was recognised with a Global Equality and Diversity Transparency Award from GED, reflecting our commitment to addressing pay equity and transparency.  

We continue to report, and we’re proud to say that our gender gap is improving. The proportion of women across the organization has increased from 28% in 2021 to 32% in 2023, with improvements across three pay quartiles. 

In 2023, AVEVA became a signatory to the Change the Race Ratio and the Race at Work Charter, key pledges to increase racial diversity in leadership and help to create a more inclusive workplace, respectively.  

In the US, we collaborated with our BLACKVoices@AVEVA employee group to develop our AVEVA Scholars Program, a first for AVEVA.  This is a scholarship partnership with two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to support education opportunities and strengthen our early-career talent pipeline in the US. Our first cohort of eleven students have completed their six-week induction program, and we look forward to welcoming them back next year as part of our internship program. This is just one example of how our employee groups and the corporate DEI team work together to create impact. 

For the last three years, we have demonstrated our commitment to celebrating the brilliant Black talent in tech by being a corporate sponsor of the Black Tech Achievements Awards. It was fantastic to win the Employer of the Year category in 2023. 

This year, we also secured Disability Committed status in the UK, signalling our dedication to recruiting, retaining and supporting people with disabilities. Most recently, we received the news that we had ranked 43 out of 850 companies on the Financial Times Europe’s Diversity Leaders list for 2025, up from place 135 in the previous year. 

Looking ahead  

Data is the foundation of everything we do at AVEVA to support our customers. Inside AVEVA, we use the power of data to understand our people, helping us to move the needle.  

Through our personnel data platform, we collect voluntary key “diversity characteristics.” This new initiative provides us with a better understanding of who our employees are, what matters to them and what we can do to improve. 

We created a two-way conversation through our pulse employee engagement survey, Peakon. This survey provides us with an opportunity to seek insightful feedback three times a year, which we take on board and use as a vehicle to make impactful change. 

We want to continue to improve, and we know we can. We will continue to listen to colleagues to understand what actions we can put into place. DEI is truly a journey, not a destination.