major differences.
Customers/target audience
DEI focuses on recruiting and fostering a culture of inclusion for current and future employees regardless of ethnicity, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, or educational level. DEI may also focus on niche groups within the organization that may have historically been overlooked, such as parents that are adopting or fathers that want to take paternal leave. These groups have a tremendous voice in shaping the benefits that an organization offers its employees.
Supplier diversity focuses on developing and nurturing the contracting relationship with suppliers, vendors, and consultants that have been historically marginalized and excluded from business opportunities because of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and veteran status.
Tactics used
Supplier diversity and DEI deploy different methods to appeal to their target audiences. Because internal feedback is so important to the culture-building process, DEI directs its efforts primarily in the internal environment. It may deploy a combination of methods including recruitment fairs, ERGs, and climate surveys to direct its program efforts.
Supplier diversity uses a combination of external and internal efforts to achieve its results. Because it’s targeting small and diverse businesses from the community, it participates in outreach events and conducts workshops and training, all directed at the external community. It may even use councils of external small and diverse businesses and other community stakeholders. Internally, it works with employees, senior leaders, and allies to help them understand supplier diversity and encourage them to buy from small and diverse vendors.
Measuring results
DEI and supplier diversity use varying metrics to demonstrate their value and measure success. The types of instruments they use definitely overlap, but ultimately, it’s a bit like comparing apples to oranges. They’re both fruit, but they taste totally different.
DEI may focus on the number of hires, efforts taken to accommodate specific groups, the number of new initiatives that recognize and celebrate different nationalities, the creation of programs that create a pipeline to senior leadership positions, and so on.
With supplier diversity, spend and utilization with small and diverse vendors are the most common metrics. And, for a long time, they were the standard metrics. With the heavy investment in supplier development, supplier diversity today may look at the number of small and diverse businesses responding to solicitations, the award and project completion rates for small and diverse business, the conversion rate for workshop attendees becoming actual vendors, the number of repeat awardees, whether contract awards are increasing or decreasing, and so on.
Figure 4-1 provides examples of metrics used by each and shows how they compare to each other.
FIGURE 4-1: Differences in measuring results.
Becoming Collaborative Partners
Supplier diversity and DEI definitely have aspects that make them great collaborative partners. Based on their timelines and history, in many ways DEI and supplier diversity have grown together. Each started by government executive order, with little guidance other than the intended outcome. Unfortunately, the path to get there was never completely laid out. Through trial and error, both programs have had to figure out their respective roles and how best to deliver value to the organizations.
Based on the differences I describe in the earlier section “Diving into Their Different Audiences, Tactics, and Results,” each has forged a distinct path and role — DEI in HR and supplier diversity in procurement — and both have managed to grow and become strategic staples by working together as natural collaborative partners.
Help gain active stakeholder involvement
Help increase visibility and engagement across the organization
Help keep the diversity conversation top of mind
Perusing the Pitfalls of Combining Supplier Diversity and DEI
In recent years, two trends have appeared to sometimes blur the line between supplier diversity and DEI. Understandably, how your diversity efforts are structured depends on budget, personnel, or exactly how your organization views diversity. Whatever the reason, it should align with what your organization wants to accomplish and how you want the public and your stakeholders to perceive your diversity efforts. But in this setting, for the two programs to exist without one cannibalizing the other is a challenge. The following sections cover some of the current trends and the problems they present.
Best practice is for these functions to work alongside each other, not one under the other. You’re creating supplier diversity and DEI rather than supplier diversity or DEI. As important as both of these are and will continue to be in the future, setting up a choice would be a hard, and maybe costly, decision to make.
Combining diversity efforts under one umbrella
This structure presents challenges for a few reasons:
Leadership
