Anamarie DeVito | January 19, 2022
“Diversity significantly improves financial performance." - Harvard Business Review “Racially and ethnically diverse companies are 36% more likely to outperform their competitors.” - McKinsey “Diverse companies produce 19 percent more revenue.” - Forbes The data is consistent. Companies that prioritize diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging have better business outcomes. Implementing a successful DEI&B plan for Managed Service Provider (MSP) program begins with a diverse supplier base. Here are five steps you can take to implement a more diverse supplier network into your MSP program.
1. Begin With a Diverse Supplier Base
Your base fuels the entire talent supply chain. Seek out and engage with diverse suppliers and technology partners through targeted outreach so you can add minority-, women-, LGBT- veteran - and disabled-owned businesses and small businesses to your roster. When you leverage an MSP program, you put a structure in place that increases the likelihood of engaging diverse suppliers, thus accessing a larger diverse contingent labor pool.
2. Train, Train, Train
It is critical that you train your hiring managers and your suppliers in the particulars of your program. When you share your program’s targets and goals with your suppliers, they become stakeholders, increasing the likelihood of early adoption and compliance and referring other diverse suppliers to your program. Offer training to potential suppliers on how to qualify for your program to expand your pool of diverse suppliers.
3. Set Spend Goals
Most supplier diversity programs share a goal centered on spend, including the percentage of overall spend a program allocates to diversity suppliers. Tier 1 spend tracks suppliers within the program’s portfolio, while tier 2 spend tracks the suppliers’ suppliers, in other words, the suppliers’ diversity efforts. While most MSP programs track tier 1 spend, we suggest you track tier 2 as well, as this provides yet another opportunity to ensure diversity representation at all levels of your program.
4. Create Checkpoints, the Monitor and Review
Scrutinize technology stack and capabilities, then use that technology to incorporate key program metrics — including spend objectives — into your program. You will then use those key metrics and datasets to evaluate supplier performance, predict your future needs, and make modifications accordingly. Monitor and review this process over time to measure its effectiveness in helping you reach your overall diversity goals.
5. Share your Real-Time Successes
If you have successfully met the DEI&B program goals for your supplier network, share that news, both within your existing diverse supplier community and externally. The purpose of sharing your successes externally is to foster trust in diverse communities and to encourage new suppliers to participate in your program. Increasingly, a supplier diversity program is an essential part of any competitive MSP program. At Sevenstep, we help our MSP clients implement more diverse supplier networks by partnering with you to implement strategies like those we suggest above, tracking detailed metrics using Sevayo® Insights, Sevenstep’s all-in-one proprietary data analytics solution.Sevenstep continually measures diversity, both internally and throughout all our global RPO and MSP talent solutions, whether we are required to or not. We do so because diversity is a priority across our organization. We want to help you implement a more diverse supplier network in your MSP program not only because it will bring you better business outcomes but also because we believe it is the right thing to do. About Sevenstep MSP:Sevenstep delivers managed service provider (MSP) programs that effectively meet organizations’ needs regardless of workforce size, labor categories or geographies served. Each program is customized specifically to the unique industry, requisition and cultural requirements of the organization. Offerings include the people, process, and technology necessary to meet client contingent workforce needs and strategies to support employment branding, diversity, analytics, and new technology assessment and integration. Sevenstep services a broad range of industries and profiles – from engineers and nurses to truck drivers and call center reps. Many of our clients are represented in the Fortune 500 and are recognized leaders in the transportation, insurance, government, manufacturing, technology, engineering logistics and healthcare industries. Sevayo® Insights pulls in data across talent acquisition systems into a single, holistic dashboard, enabling the use of business analytics and talent management data to solve and conquer today’s most pressing challenges.
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