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Career Advice: Saira Mazhar

In this week’s installment of our Career Advice video series, Senior Business Writer Linda Bell spoke with Saira Mazhar, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Manager at Southern Company (No. 24 on the Fair360 2023 Top 50 Companies for Diversity list). Mazhar shared insights on how she transitioned to corporate America and what employers and employees can do to foster an inclusive workplace.

2023 Top 50 Companies For Diversity

Southern Company

Rank 24

Southern Company ranked 24 for 2023, as it developed a framework to track its progress in supplier diversity, civic engagement and social justice. Chris Womack succeeded Tom Fanning as President and CEO of the company, which took effect on March 31, 2023. 

Chris Womack - President and CEO-elect, Southern Company
Chris Womack
President and CEO

“Our commitment to diversity and equity will continue. We will continue to focus on growing diverse talent within our organization and providing opportunities at every level. It is not a short-term episodic adventure. It is a long-term journey with a commitment to staying the course.

Sloane Drake, EVP, Chief Human Resources Officer, Southern Company
Sloane Drake
Executive VP, Chief Human Resources Officer

“We remain focused on advancing diversity, equity and inclusion across our businesses. We believe our workforce should reflect the communities we serve. That means having a diverse workforce and an inclusive workplace where all groups are well represented and treated fairly within all levels of our organization.

From The Company

At Southern Company, we believe how we do our work is just as important as what we do. We have positioned diversity and inclusion as critical to our success, enabling us to put the needs and well-being of everyone we serve at the center of all we do.

To make our vision of equity a reality, we enacted a framework to guide our business through this process. The framework helps ensure a continued and coordinated focus and also details our work to achieve these goals through five commitment areas:

  • Talent
  • Work Environment
  • Supplier Inclusion (formerly supplier diversity)
  • Civic Engagement (formerly political engagement)
  • Community Investment and Social Justice

A team of employees continually oversees our ongoing efforts, including senior leaders, representatives from each business unit and subject matter experts. All employees are expected to embrace our equity ideas and hold each other accountable for our success. We have purposefully chosen this structure, rather than a separate diversity, equity and inclusion team, to ensure the work we are aiming to accomplish has leaders and buy-in throughout the Southern Company system.

For each of the five commitment areas, we developed key performance indicators to track our progress, highlight key results and ultimately hold ourselves accountable. We also implemented controls and governance processes to help ensure the data we report is complete and accurate. We plan to continue to report additional benchmarks in 2023 and beyond as we implement further data process enhancements.

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