Whilst issues around climate change and carbon tend to dominate the “sustainable procurement” agenda, we have always positioned “procurement with purpose” in the broadest possible way to incorporate issues around social and economic wider value as well as the critical environmental areas.
Two recent articles from the excellent Supply Chain Dive website highlighted good and less good news about procurement and diversity. One looked at the recent announcement from consumer goods giant Unilever of a partnership with MSDUK. This “accelerator programme” will help ethnic-minority owned businesses in the UK to build links with larger firms. MSDUK has played a leadership role in supplier diversity in the UK since 2006, working to encourage companies to provide access to supply chain opportunities and engage with ethnic minority-owned businesses. (I think I first wrote about the organisation back in 2014).
The first cohort of 40 business owners will start participating in this new scheme during October 2021, helping these founders “to build connections, gain access to the expertise and senior counsel of MSDUK and its corporate partners via one-to-one mentoring sessions, group workshops, brainstorms, bespoke support packages specific to the specialist area of the corporate partner involved and more” according to MSDUK.
The programme is backed not just by Unilever though - WPP, Dow and Google are also supporters. “This accelerator demonstrates the commitment of these companies to supplier diversity and investing in the development of ethnic minority businesses that may become their supplier partners in the future”. It builds on many initiatives we’re seeing from firms who want to encourage supplier diversity in many ways, not just in terms of the ethnicity of business owners as in this case. And that desire from the buy-side is not just because of an altruistic sense of purpose – a diverse supplier base is more likely to give you innovation, resilience and competition, we’d argue.
On a less happy note, another Supply Chain Dive article from March commented on the Gartner Labor Market Survey. The results suggested that procurement is near the bottom of the league table when it comes to employing minorities in our own profession.
“In an evaluation of 21 corporate departments, procurement was found to be the second-least diverse, with just 8% of respondents identifying as a person of color, according to Gartner's Labor Market Survey”. Only Sales (at 8%) has a lower percentage.
In fact, this isn’t a new problem and is the procurement profession’s “dirty little secret”, we might argue. Female presence, even at the higher management levels, is undoubtedly improving, but in terms of race and colour, the situation is less acceptable. Again, going back to my time writing for Spend Matters, I covered a UK survey based on 2015 data from the England and Wales Labour Force Survey which came to similar conclusions. “Purchasing managers and directors” as a category was the 8th worst out of 202 occupations in terms of minority representation.
It was also interesting that my article got no comments and little attention in the procurement world – it is uncomfortable to face up to this issue, I suspect. In the Supply Chain Dive article, Shana Yearwood from Impact Consulting suggests that the role of leaders “is vital to improve diversity, equity and inclusion in their organizations." Leaders set the tone and need to show commitment and dedication, “which may take the form of more frequent and open communication company-wide, participating in training or coaching to improve their own cultural competence and acumen, or sponsoring or mentoring the next generation of leaders."
It’s good of course that organisations are looking for more diverse suppliers. But maybe more also need to look internally at the make-up of their own procurement teams.