Supply chain logistics are critical to nearly every industry. Whether you’re a tech executive or manage a professional sports team, figuring out how to get your product to customers is key.
But, as it turns out, supply chains aren’t just about products. They’re also about people, particularly the diversity of workers who deliver what we consume.
That was the key takeaway from a trio of executives at Twitter, LinkedIn, and Major League Baseball (MLB) who spoke at Fortune’s Reimagine Work Summit on Wednesday. In addition to focusing on the bottom line, they said businesses should push for social justice.
“I will say that we’ve benefited from the fact that we started really refreshing our approach to diversity and inclusion a few years ago. So we were already on a path laying foundations and working on how we build trust and accountability,” said Jennifer Christie, the head of human resources at Twitter.
That meant laying out hard targets. By 2025, the company wants at least half of its global workforce to be women; at least 25% of U.S. employees to be underrepresented minorities; and 10% of its U.S. workforce to be Black.
Christie said the company is trying to attain those goals by recruiting across a larger swath of the country. The mission is to reach more underserved communities and prevent the bottlenecks that can make American firms look very different from the nation as a whole.
“We were focused on hiring talent in one location, really, in California. And that limited our ability to tap into a much broader, more diverse, frankly, pool of tech talent that are really across the globe,” said Christie, whose company is based in San Francisco, which has a decidedly unlevel playing field across the socioeconomic spectrum.
Census data shows that Black Americans in San Francisco, for instance, are at the lowest rungs of median household income, and just 5.6% of the city’s population is Black. Latinos, who make up nearly 40% of the statewide population, account for just 15.2% of the San Francisco demographic.
The sentiment was echoed by LinkedIn senior vice president and chief people officer Teuila Hanson, as well as MLB chief people and culture officer Michele Meyer-Shipp. Hanson stressed the importance of addressing employees’ mental health during the pandemic, which is its own form of equity and inclusion. After all, mental health crises have proliferated during this time, with a disproportionate effect on underserved communities.
Meyer-Shipp has an especially intriguing story. She doesn’t see herself so much as a troubleshooter as she does an amplifier of efforts that were already underway in Major League Baseball to add diversity to both its managerial and player ranks.
“The good news is baseball has really strong policies and practices in place around the workforce and the workplace that we’re trying to drive, which is one of inclusion and belonging and psychological safety,” she said.
That’s a work in progress that includes training for senior leadership at MLB, which can then trickle down to the organization at large.
It is, as with any major business, a process. Said Meyer-Shipp: “As my colleagues have stated, this is indeed a marathon, not a sprint.”
