Women of Meridian - Emma Lloyd

Emma Lloyd didn’t take it laying down when she missed out on election to the executive of the Electricity Engineers' Association of New Zealand by a handful of votes.

Sure, given she was in her 20s and governance roles tend to be reserved for those with greyer hair and the perceived wisdom that comes with it, her candidacy was a long shot in the first place.

But she’d come close. Close enough that she figured a little networking at the annual conference certainly couldn’t do any harm.

She compiled a list of influential members and set about introducing herself - those conversations planting the seed that the association could do with some fresh perspectives.

“I hoped that by doing that I’d get an opportunity,” says Emma. “When they had their first board meeting, they had the power to second someone if they felt like they were missing something.”

As it turned out, the consensus around the executive table was that an injection of youth might be a good idea. Emma was seconded for a two-year term, taking her first steps in governance aged just 24.

When her term expired, she again stood for election, this time being voted on to the nine-member board with the third-highest vote tally.

“That was really, really cool,” says Emma. “People often get into governance because they’ve held a senior management role and have experience. One effect is that governance is typically reserved for people in their 40s and 50s – and the nature of the energy sector is that it is risk averse and conservative.

“That can bleed over into the culture a bit. I felt like there needed to be someone young on the board. We are really into diversity in governance at the moment as a society. People are like ‘we need more women, we need more ethnic diversity’.”

There was, however, no real push to include younger people in governance roles, observed Emma.

“I’ve grown up in a completely different world to someone who is in their 60s. For instance, I have had a cell phone since I started intermediate school. That actually makes a real difference to the way I think and the things I know inherently.”

Emma’s desire to be part of shaping an organisation’s strategic direction was evident right from the day she dipped her toe into the workplace on an internship for her honours degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Canterbury.

Having adopted an intensely practical approach to landing a placement by applying to a list of companies supplied by the university in alphabetical order, she found herself at Connetics, an engineering consultancy owned by Christchurch lines company Orion.

“Because I was one of the first graduates they’d had they didn’t really have a plan in place for me. I liked that – they kind of let me do what I wanted to do. I got heaps of great training and realised ‘this is a really cool place’.

As Connetics designed and installed electrical supply systems, Emma got to see the practical implementation of her work as a substation design engineer.

“Normally if you worked for a consultancy, you would never get to see your designs in the real world. We had the keys to Orion substations and could go and see our designs.”

She recalls visiting a site she’d designed and the installers – not knowing it was her design – talking about the problems with it.

“I was like ‘oh okay – what would you have liked’? They were like ‘this is silly, all of you designers always put X,Y and Z but in the real world we’re never going to do that because it doesn’t make sense. You’re spending a lot of extra time on it with no benefit’.

“On the drawing it made sense, but not in real life. Experiencing that just makes you better.”

Emma realised Connetics was a great placement option for students, but because it had no visible presence or reputation on campus, it wasn’t a sought-after option. She pushed the company to start promoting itself to students.

‘Great idea!” she was told. ‘How about you do it?’

“I created and ran the hiring programme. We started hiring all these grads and interns and I ended up being the team leader.

“Because I’m a nerd, I tracked the stats of how many people would look at our listings, how many would apply and the quality of applications we’d get. Basically, we turned Connetics from a company no one at uni had heard of into a preferential employer. We went from getting 20 internship applications to 130 in just three years.”

Emma’s decision to focus on a career in the energy industry was no accident.

Growing up in a single parent family in Christchurch where money was often tight, job security was near the top of Emma’s list of considerations when choosing a career.

“Someone told me that if I wanted to do something that actually helps people, like renewable energy generation, I should do electrical engineering.

“Then they asked me: ‘what happens in a recession’? I said ‘people lose their jobs’. They said ‘yeah people lose their jobs, but you go home and still turn on your lights, people still warm their houses, so the most recession-proof industry is the power industry’.

“There was a long time growing up where we were stressed about money – and I didn’t want that as an adult. I didn’t want the washing machine breaking down to be something that ruined the first three months of my year.”

Having joined Meridian as a sales engineer on the retail side of the business, Emma found her niche as a project engineer in a team that designs and delivers strategic power solutions for business customers.

“Meridian has been such a wonderful place to work. Right from when I started people have been so welcoming and encouraging. And the company was fully supportive of my move from sales engineer to project engineer as they could see a more technical role would suit my skillset better.”

While the sales engineer’s role is to understand a customer’s needs and design a solution, Emma’s job is to make sure the proposed system will work.

“For instance, we talk to the local networks to make sure there’s enough power. You can’t just put EV chargers in and connect them up - it’s not like plugging in a toaster. They use a significant amount of power so typically need their own transformer.

“Our asset deployment and operations team is on the ground installing the assets to ensure Meridian’s public charging network is the most loved network in the county, and it’s great to be part of that.

“This sounds like such a sales pitch but it’s true - at Meridian we really care that people have more affordable power and more renewable power.”

Meridian is an equal opportunity employer with Advanced GenderTick accreditation. To learn more about working at Meridian, check out our careers homepage.