Advancing Workforce Diversity and Workplace Culture at the DOE National Laboratories
The Department of Energy (DOE) and the Office of Science (SC) believe that creating a diverse workforce and a respectful and inclusive workplace culture that values and celebrates a diversity of people, ideas, practices, cultures, and educational backgrounds is essential for establishing the creative and innovative work environments necessary for the success of the DOE National Laboratories and continued delivery on DOE’s vital missions. Further, behavior such as discrimination and harassment undermine SC’s ability to achieve its mission by reducing productivity, discouraging or inhibiting talent retention and career advancement, and weakening the integrity of the SC enterprise overall, and will not be tolerated. The DOE National Laboratories are each engaged in a number of efforts to promote workforce diversity and inclusive workplace cultures at their laboratory and to continuously assess the effectiveness of their policies, procedures, and practices for cultivating safe, inclusive, professional, and respectful work environments. They also collaborate in key areas to collectively advance these efforts across the DOE laboratory complex.
The Office of Science works closely with the ten DOE National Laboratories that it stewards to support and encourage their efforts to advance workforce diversity and an inclusive workplace culture within their organizations. In recent years, SC has instituted new processes to strengthen SC oversight, provided expert feedback and guidance to improve their supporting programs, processes, and activities, and increased laboratory accountability. SC continuously seeks opportunities to work collaboratively with all of the DOE National Laboratories to develop and promote successful strategies.
Collaborative SC Oversight of Laboratory Workforce Diversity and Workplace Culture Strategies
External Peer Review of SC Laboratory Workforce Diversity and Workplace Culture Strategies
Promising Practices for DOE National Laboratory Workforce Diversity and Inclusive Workplace Cultures
DOE Laboratory Efforts and Workforce Demographics
Collaborative SC Oversight of Laboratory Workforce Diversity and Workplace Culture Strategies
DOE National Laboratories’ management and operating (M&O) contracts include requirements that the DOE laboratory contractors establish laboratory diversity and inclusion plans and update their plans annually. In 2016, SC updated its practices to strengthen oversight and laboratory accountability and establish uniform guidelines for the annual plans for promoting workforce diversity and inclusive workplace cultures for the ten SC National Laboratories. This resulted in a shift from a largely compliance-based approach to requiring actionable strategies. SC’s guidance includes the use of a defined content structure for their written plans to improve the consistency and quality with which each lab communicates to SC its vision, strategy, and major actions for advancing workforce diversity and workplace culture at their laboratory and for assessing the effectiveness their efforts. SC established an annual, formal SC Headquarters-driven review and feedback process on the laboratories’ plans and activities. In 2017, SC also began requiring that all 10 SC laboratories post their workforce demographics on their public websites (many were already doing so) as a demonstration of their commitment to fostering diverse, innovative organizations to advance the DOE mission.
External Peer Review of SC Laboratory Workforce Diversity and Workplace Culture Strategies
In FY 2020, SC conducted an external peer review of the ten SC National Laboratories diversity and inclusion strategies. SC empaneled a group of reviewers representing subject matter expertise that ranged from leadership in managing large research organizations or departments; operations management, including human resources and civil rights compliance; social science research in diversity, harassment, and workplace civility; and professional leadership in promoting diversity in science and engineering fields. The reviewers were charged with evaluating whether the SC National Laboratories diversity and inclusion efforts will enable the laboratories to: 1) competitively attract, develop, and retain a diverse workforce of talented staff, and 2) cultivate equitable and inclusive laboratory cultures that are critical to building the creative and innovative work environments needed to deliver on the DOE mission. Reviewers were also asked to evaluate whether SC’s processes for oversight of the SC laboratories were likely to be effective at guiding the laboratories to advance workforce diversity and inclusive workplace cultures at their institutions.
The SC National Laboratories were provided with the feedback from the reviewers, which included a summary of SC laboratory-wide strengths and opportunities for improvement, as well as laboratory-specific strengths and weaknesses. The peer review also informed improvements to SC’s approach to the annual laboratory diversity and inclusion plans and feedback process, identified areas where SC can work with the DOE laboratories to further advance their efforts, and encouraged SC to conduct future external peer reviews of the SC laboratories’ diversity and inclusion efforts through onsite reviews every three to five years.
In 2023, SC initiated a triennial peer review process for the 10 SC DOE National Labs. SC is externally peer reviewing 3-4 labs each year over the following three years to establish a triennial review cycle.
Promising Practices for DOE National Laboratory Workforce Diversity and Inclusive Workplace Cultures
The Office of Science developed the Summary of DOE Office of Science Recognized Promising Practices for DOE National Laboratory diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility as a compendium of promising practices for SC DOE National Laboratories to consider when developing and implementing their overall diversity and inclusion strategies. The document was originally drafted in 2019 to recognize practices that have been adopted by one or more SC National Laboratories that have demonstrated some effectiveness in other institutional environments (e.g., academia or industry) and hold potential to advance workforce diversity and inclusive workplace objectives in the DOE National Laboratory setting. The document was externally reviewed in 2019 and updated in 2020. It is intended to be informative to DOE National Laboratory leadership and staff, as well as others engaged in advancing efforts at similar institutions. It is not intended to be comprehensive or a checklist, recognizing that each organization needs to identify the appropriate strategies to address its own unique challenges and goals.
