SIA Article: The DE&I Challenge

One pain point involving staffing suppliers is that more suppliers need to take ownership of DE&I for their workforce, Omni Inclusive’s Stenger says. Stenger tackles this challenge by taking ownership of DE&I strategy for all Omni Inclusive staff and contractors. Furthermore, Omni also mentors other businesses on how to implement a DE&I process for their companies.

While no quantifiable results are out yet for most companies Omni has worked with — the company launched in December 2021 — some initial steps have been taken in 2022.

Stenger says organizing supplier data and delivering to the buyer in anonymized and data-protected methods is an issue. Furthermore, ­firms should go beyond supplier spend and diversity employee resource groups and buyers should understand their role when it comes to DE&I, they say. “Data is the important starting point to understand your gaps, not to determine how diverse you already are, because you aren’t,” Stenger adds.

“It’s important to understand exactly what EEOC reporting (EEO-1) requires, which is race/ethnicity and sex (not gender) of all employees by job category for private employers with over 100 employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees.

“This is not like implementing a direct sourcing model or an MSP. We’re talking about hundreds of years of systemic discrimination. The change in biased business practices is a slow process,” Stenger adds.

To read more from the full SIA Article click here.