Creating Opportunity Through Gender Fair Procurement

Creating Opportunity Through Gender Fair Procurement

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guests: David Latten, Head of Procurement, Logitech

This episode of At Work in America is sponsored by Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement, and insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes. The only constant in business is change, and 2023 will be no exception. That’s why hundreds of in-house compliance professionals at Paychex compiled a list of regulatory issues that could impact businesses the most this year to help you prepare. In our guide, find out about federal and state regulations and programs that may affect your business and your employees in the coming year, so you can take appropriate action now. Visit paychex.com/awia to check it out, today.

This week we met with David Latten from Logitech to talk about how to make progress towards equality through gender fair procurement.

– How organizations around the world can make a difference in gender equality

– Conversations to have with potential or current suppliers

– Relevance of a supplier diversity team

– Importance of inclusion across all elements of an organization

Thank you for joining the show today!  Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

Transcript follows:

Announcer 0:00
Welcome to At Work in America sponsored by Paychex. At Work in America digs in behind the headlines and trends to the stories of real people making a difference in the world of work. And now here are your hosts, Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane Steed.

Steve 0:27
Hi, everyone, welcome back to the At Work in America show, we have a great show today. Trish, I am so excited for today’s topic, one that we haven’t really directly hit, maybe ever, but I’m super excited for it. We’ll be talking about procurement today. And more specifically, gender fair procurement. I love the topic, and I can’t wait to get the show going.

Trish 0:45
Yeah, I agree. This is a fun one. You’re right, in 13 years we’ve never covered this topic in this way. And it’s so timely, I think we hear a lot from our listeners about how you’re really trying to understand how all of operations fits in with, you know, the people side, the people aspect of human resources. And so this will sort of put everything all together and show why this is important to everyone regardless of role.

Steve 1:08
Yeah, and also kind of aligns with a one of the themes we’ve had on the show for a while now, which is opportunity inclusivity. Giving people opportunity, economic opportunity, in the broad sense, right. We talk about it a lot through the employment lens, but this is, you know, we’ll be discussing it through the procurement lens today. So before we welcome our guest who’s waiting patiently for us Trish, I have to thank our friends at Paychex. This episode is sponsored by Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement and insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes, the only constant in business is change and 2023 will be no exception. That’s why hundreds of in house compliance professionals at Paychex have compiled a list of regulatory issues that could impact businesses the most this year to help you prepare in their guide. Find out about federal and state regulations and programs that may affect your business and your employees in the coming year. So you can take appropriate actions now, and you can visit paychex.com/awia to check it out today and thanks to our friends at Paychex.

Steve 2:10
Alright, let’s welcome our guest, Trish. Our guest today is David Latten. He’s the head of procurement at Logitech. His career spans over a decade across management roles in finance and more recently procurement in addition to more traditional procurement priorities and cost optimization, supplier performance and risk management. David’s primary priority as a procurement leader today is to ensure Logitech and the wider corporate sector can deliver real progress towards equality V and their suppliers spend, which is a core value for Logitech and a personal passion for David. David, welcome to the show today. How are you?

David Latten 2:46
I’m doing very well Steve. Thank you. Yeah. Hi, Steve. Pleasure to be here. Hi, Trish. Thanks for having me. I’m really looking forward to our pod.

Trish 2:53
Now thank you for coming on with us. I have to tell you, I mean, we didn’t talk about this in the pre-show but I am a huge Logitech fan. And even though this is audio that’s going out to the world but the camera I use on my computer is Logitech camera. I’m looking right at it right now. So thank you for all you do to make that possible. This technology is amazing.

David Latten 3:14
Well, Trish Thank you. And you know one of the funny things of working at Logitech, it’s the amount of zoom calls I hate when people can actually people can normally grab one of our products from from their arm’s length, which is it’s just showing me the camera sadly, but you can, right.

Steve 3:32
Yeah, absolutely, David. Yeah, we sort of had church mentioned that you mentioned as well. We all know, Logitech meeting before we get into some of the story around gender fair procurement and the initiatives going on at Logitech and with other companies that you’ve aligned with and some of these initiatives. Maybe just give us a minute on the largest tech more so not to explain, oh, Logitech, we make all this equipment, but just maybe the scope and size of Logitech because I have a feeling it’s a much larger enterprise than even we think even on even though Nope, we know the brand name.

David Latten 4:04
Yeah, no, absolutely. Steve. So Logitech were founded in 1981. A consumer electronics company, most of you will know as we were talking about Trish that the keyboards and mice is where we originally started. We still do a lot of that. But we’ve also really developed into growth markets where we do a lot in the gaming industry, hardware in the gaming industry, and also video collaboration as we’re doing today, not only for home office, but also meeting room setups. A lot of meeting rooms aren’t set up for what we’re doing today really in a really good way. So yeah, that has had a big impact on our scale. As you say, I think we grew dramatically during the pandemic, as you might imagine that we empowered a lot of what’s being done today. So in terms of the numbers pre-pandemic, we were a two point something billion dollar company. As of today we’re around the five point something billion dollar company, 4000 office employees across the globe. So there’s been some some pretty quick growth. But I think one constant, and it really plays into what we’re talking about today. One constant is that we’re a really values driven business. That values driven business actually reflects itself in what we do on a day to day basis comes from Bracken, our CEO and other leaders to our core value for instances of quality and environment. What we really mean by that is that we’re going to have an impact on this world, like we’re a $5 billion company, like I just said, we’re really determined that where we have an impact, some relevance, and where our branding and our skills, and scale can resonate, we really want to make a positive impact. And that goes across all of our business really, like I there’s a certain impact I can have in procurement. There’s other impacts that other people in other industries can have. But that’s really common for all of us that we want to be a company that makes a positive impact towards the quality and environment.

Trish 5:57
Thank you for sharing that. I think, you know, it’s interesting, because when you think of a brand like yours, where we are familiar with it, right, it has been around since the early 80s. And it’s it’s not something you think about all the time about, well, what are their core values? Right? They’re a technology company, or they’re, you know, providing some some sort of products for us. Could you talk a little bit more? I mean, you mentioned the quality and an environment but but the conversation today, we’re really going to get into kind of that gender equality? Could you maybe start touching a little bit on that? And what what drove that to be such a core value was there, you know, a issue that came up or just something where you thought that’s really the direction we want our business to go? Like, what really was the impetus for that?

David Latten 6:38
Sure. Well, I think quality is our core value, as I said, Trish, and I think a really important exercise for anyone to go through. And I mean, an individual or a corporation is, what are our core values? In our case, it’s a quality and environment. And then the single most important question after that really is what is our what is our something? What is our way that we can make an impact? Or what what is our challenge that we can really impact? And that answer will be different for different companies. Of course, Logitech are a consumer electronics company. When you think about who we really are, our DNA is design, it’s engineering, it’s consumer electronics, those skills are really the DNA of our company, that’s tech, that stem that immediately makes you think about that that’s an industry that’s had gender challenges. So gender, Logitech name can have a lot of relevance around gender and gender equality. Even I mentioned in the intro piece that we one of our biggest verticals is now gaming. And again, gaming is a is an industry where there’s a huge gender issue. So I think if you ask ourselves, what is the area we can really address towards, towards equality? Gender Equality comes up really strongly.

David Latten 7:51
And I’ll give you an example. That’s kind of one that isn’t, say something that’s necessarily relevant with Logitech, just by virtue of our nature of our business, we’re a relatively cash rich business for the size of business we are. So you could look at that and think, Okay, we’re a cash rich business, we could we could do some things around financial inclusion, we could try and do something around that and then help that issue. And, you know, that’s right, we have we have a good cash balance, we could, but at the same time, do you know what we know about cash, financial inclusion, not very much, and our name doesn’t really resonate in that space. Because we’re not a bank, or some sort of other financial services providers. I think that’s a clear example of we could do something there. But it’s not really where we have a resonance, whereas we really resonate around tech around gaming. So that really is a strong point for us that we can really make a big difference there. People recognize a well yeah, they’re a tech company doing something about gender, that’s really powerful. So I think on a corporation level, that’s why gender speaks really strongly and, and also, frankly, it’s one of the few understood universally understood challenges globally around equality as gender equality. It’s difficult sometimes to grapple with diversity topics and equality topics globally, they mean different things in different countries, whereas gender is quite a universal one. So So that’s quite clear about we can really make an impact there. The question then, for someone like me is what can I do in my role, really, from that?

Steve 9:16
Yeah, David, and that’s get into that role a little bit more specifically, right, because we set up the show, we’re going to talk about procurement and gender fair procurement. And I’d love for you to comment a little bit about just the the enormous influence that especially large organizations can have in their communities as well as in their industries, through their decisions or their policies or their philosophy around procurement because you said a $5 billion organization you are buying quote unquote, a lot of materials, a lot of raw materials like you know, Oregon processed stuff and imagined supplies the whole thing, right it’s I don’t know the number but I’m sure it’s quite large. The so you must sit back and say okay, we’ve got a lot of info woman’s here and we have the potential to impact lots of other people with our purchasing decisions. I’d love for you to maybe talk a little bit, just that philosophy a little bit.

David Latten 10:09
Absolutely. And just before I do that, if you don’t mind, I’ll probably set the scene a little bit around, around what exactly we talking about with gender equality. And, I also put my thinking back to the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN SDGs that were that were sort of created in 2015. With the goal that we’ll be achieving these goals by 2030, that that felt a nice, comfortable time for us to achieve these things back in 2015. And when we say SDG, five gender policy by 2030, what we really mean, to be completely clear on it is removal of all legal, economic and social barriers to women and girls empowerment by 2030 – is not very far away now. So I think you have to sort of ask yourself the question, okay, well, where are we now? We’re kind of halfway through that 15 year time frame at the moment set in 2023. And I think, again, on gender certainly in, in maybe in the US and in Europe, there’s a kind of feeling of, well, we’re pretty much we’re getting there. We’re pretty close to gender equality at this stage. I think there’s a sense of that somehow. And and the answer is absolutely not. I think there was a the World Economic Forum each year do a gender gap report this year, globally, they assess that societies 132 years away from gender equality. So we’re a long way away, even specifically in North America and Europe, where we’re still 60 years away from gender equality, and no single country has achieved it.

David Latten 11:40
So I think, to set the scene, the problem is enormous. There is a lot to do. And as you say, large corporations are uniquely positioned to do something about this, with their brand, their societal resonance, their frankly, their scale and reach large corporations employ millions of people across the globe have trillions of dollars of revenue, I think you could, you could really, quite accurately say we will not achieve equality without large organizations making a move on this. So that brings me directly to your question. It doesn’t really work. How can we influence these other companies to to make a move. And my profession procurement is entirely based on influence. That’s exactly what what we do really, it’s the bedrock of procurement. We’re a pivot point between kind of internal requirements, priorities, strategies, and external solutions. From from that pivot point, we typically use it to get best performance and pricing from our suppliers, manage risk, etc, like I said in the intro, but we could do a lot more. And we just wanted if we use that influence to progress towards equality with our suppliers, if we went to these large suppliers that have such a huge impact, and as part of our relationship said, the quality is really important to us, it’s really important that you’re an ally to a quality we want our suppliers to share our values. As such, we we asked you the simple question, are you gender fair, gender fair, is an assessment that that has some metrics that will answer the question, is this company living up to the UN Women Empowerment principles? There’s $11 trillion in the US alone in b2b spend? Can you imagine the influence and the impact that could have if we all asked ourselves that simple question, are you progressing towards gender equality? In procurement, you have that influence where when you’re a client that in some cases, you’re spending multiple millions of dollars with a company, they will listen to you? And I think we can absolutely use that influence to its to achieve that equality shift that we need?

Trish 13:40
I’m so glad that you’re giving an actual way. Because as you’re listening to this, and you’re thinking, like, what can we do? Right? That’s a great way to approach your own suppliers. What kind of reaction do you get from from the ones you’re dealing with? Is it is it something they’re all just really jumping on board with? Are they like, oh, we need to really figure out how this works for us. What are you hearing from your own suppliers when you’re doing this?

David Latten 14:02
I think the simple answer Trish is that they receive it very warmly. And and you know, totally get the message. I think it’s impossible to argue really, with what I just said. I mean, that piece is the easy piece. I’d be lying if I didn’t say there have some fears. I think their immediate reaction might be concerned that we’re not going to score very well on this assessment. We’re not doing very well with women in leadership or our policies and procedures, maybe aren’t that gender fair at the moment? We get a bit of that. And I think that’s I expected that. And I think I I always make sure that I take them through the argument that this is not a stick to beat you with. When when we really wanted to embark on this journey. We looked at it as the world needs to progress quickly and dramatically. Like I said, this is a way that we can try and provoke that progress. And progress is the key word for us. Really, I think we’re not using it for a stick to beat our suppliers. If someone goes from being pretty poor on gender equality One year, and then as a result of working with us and doing these assessments if they’re slightly better next year, that’s amazing. I’ll celebrate that. That’s fantastic. That’s exactly what we’re trying to achieve. So I think I do sometimes have to talk through that kind of idea that it’s a new initiative. So there’s always a little bit of push pushing that boulder up the hill, I think that fear is to be expected. But the overall message of the impact we can have, and essentially the, the, the largest untapped impact is always external of our organization that the question is, how can we impact that? And I’m looking to leverage procurement spend, you know, our influence is a client. That’s what we’re trying to do people get that message. I think it’s understandable that they need a little bit of talking through, what will this mean, for us? If we don’t do very well? Will it be the end of our relationship? And that may be the case at some point in the future, but certainly, at first, we’re taking the idea of, I can make a lot more difference working with some of these companies than we can just throwing them out of our of our business. Relationships. And, and progress is that key word like I say.

Trish 16:06
Yeah, you’re right. It’s really about knowing that this isn’t an overnight fix for anybody. Right? And like you said, these things will never, for most of us be be fixed. I’m doing air quotes in our lifetime. But you’re right, it is about making steps and strides each year maybe, right having a little bit smaller goals, but you’re you’re making movement in that positive direction. And I think that sometimes we we are very afraid if you’re in an organization, you think like, oh, I don’t want to ask the questions. Because if I know the answers, it will make us look bad. But yeah, really, somewhere.

David Latten 16:37
That’s exactly it. And I think another angle that we have on internally is that we took the assessment, of course, before we embarked on this journey, and we want to continue getting better. We are considered gender fair, according to the assessment, but our position is, well, no, we’re not gender fair, really. And when we’re not, we’re certainly not gender equal. 50% of our leadership team is not filled positions are filled by women. 50% of our tech roles are not yet filled by women. So whilst we do well on the assessment, and we continue looking to improve, I think you’re right to say that, you know, no one is is gender equal, yet, it’s a journey for all of us to take. And that, again, is a point I try and make in those conversations with suppliers that we’re on the journey as much as you are. And it’s all about, we can change this if we all go on that journey together.

Steve 17:28
David, you mentioned the external stakeholders here, right? How you start having these conversations with suppliers or potential suppliers trying to encourage them to sort of buy in, I’d imagine and along with you on the journey, kinds of at least maybe, maybe not at larger Tech where equality right is a core value. And it’s kind of entrenched, it sounds like and just how business decisions are taken and strategies taken. But were there or could there be for organizations looking to try to do some of these things, specifically on the procurement side? Anytime you have internal pushback, what I’m thinking more about right, the folks that I knew in when I did procurement projects years ago, were just singularly focused right on quality on time delivery, meaning specifications and cost, right. I guess you can’t be singularly focused on four things. But they primarily were focused on those four things, right. And so now we’re trying to introduce a conversation about gender fair procurement. Could you run into an operation theater, or someone running a factory or a plant that says, hey, I need this stuff? I don’t care where you get it from? Stop bothering me with this?

David Latten 18:36
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question, Steve. And those conversations do happen. And, where my team and I have those conversations most is actually in what I’d kind of term more traditional supplier diversity, which again, which we’re also looking to drive drive some targets on as well. But that is the idea that we’ll try and work with as many underrepresented suppliers as possible minority owned suppliers, women owned suppliers. And that exact point always comes up. But what if David’s companies are best company and he’s not diverse, etc, etc. We always get that pushback. I think the interesting thing about this initiative is almost that it’s almost an answer to that question, in a way. And in Logitech ecosystem, we’re looking to drive our diverse spend, but we’re always going to work with certain really high impact tech companies, large companies tend to work with other large companies. And and I’ve almost looked at this as a way of answering that question of, well, what can we do with those large companies? How can we influence those large companies? So it almost challenges that question, in a way we certainly get that for supplier diversity. But around this initiative, it’s yeah, you know, of course, we’re going to work work with other large tech companies, other large marketing companies. I’m not going to anyone in for a second and saying don’t work with him. I’m saying we work with them. They have a large potential impact. They can change the world. Let’s make sure they are really that’s essentially the question we’re asking. But we do get challenged. On that around supplier diversity? My answer to that one an aside really is that we’ve firmly of the philosophy that there are great diverse suppliers everywhere, we will try our best to find those diverse suppliers. If we don’t find them and the best supplier is a non diverse supplier, we’ll always go with that option. It doesn’t really suit anyone long term to make a decision to go with a supplier that isn’t the best fit. If they’re not, then we’ll certainly look at doing other things around development with that supplier. But that’s kind of the answer to the supplier diversity challenge. But it’s a question that does come up for sure.

Steve 20:33
Great. Thank you. Yeah, appreciate that.

Trish 20:36
I love that you’re, you’re out there seeking diverse lead and, you know, suppliers. Also, I would imagine if I’m a female led organization, if I’m a minority led organization, are you seeing people like approaching you and Logitech now, maybe that you wouldn’t have even heard of before? So obviously, you’re going one direction? Are they starting to come the other direction when they hear that this really is something that is core to your values as a company? And and are you finding opportunities for them in that way?

David Latten 21:08
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think we do that. And a lot of other organizations that really have kind of active supplier diversity functions do that. There’s someone in my team in over in Miami that actually drives this initiative. And and he always considers himself really he’s almost an agent for those suppliers. I mean, I spoke about procurement being that pivot point. I think that’s never more true than it isn’t supplier diversity that that his role is entirely looking to drive our diverse spend. And that works two ways it works at trying to find out what are the eternal opportunities, but then it absolutely works on him being very open, he goes out there. And another function or the supplier to supplier diversity groups do this, too. He’s spending a lot of his time trying to make those connections. So absolutely. They come to him. I think he’s been in the industry for 20 years. Plus, he what he really brings is, if I’m in the business, and I go to go to the supplier diversity team with Hey, we’re looking for a VC in, in Region X, Y, Zed, he will probably have a diversify already in his network that can fill that. And I think that’s, that’s where the magic happens. And you really need that kind of network support as well.

Trish 22:21
Great. Thank you.

Steve 22:22
David, I’d like for you to talk a little bit more specifically, if you could around the Coalition for gender fair procurement. Right. I was reading up about it this morning, a little bit Logitech a part of this. And I’m thinking in that in terms of the coalition itself, but also maybe as a dovetail into folks who are listening to this, who really haven’t specifically thought or talked with their procurement departments about gender fair procurement, what be some avenues for them to begin those conversations and start rethinking how they approach something as important as this.

David Latten 22:57
Sure. So I think, you know, gender equality is a long way off, and it’s a big priority for society. I think, you know, we all get that we need to look at all different options to really progress on that. And and procurement spend. In b2b transactions can be so powerful that spend is very concentrated. At Logitech, we have a few billion dollars of supplier spend, there are many other companies far bigger than us, you can really start to have an impact. If you get a reasonable number of allies doing that you can have a really big impact. And and in simple terms, we what are we doing, what we’ve started doing is we’re going to our high impact suppliers, these are high headcount suppliers, if you have a big employee base, how fair you are to your people can have a big impact on the world. Again, if you’ve got a big revenue, how you spend your dollars can have a big impact on the world. We’re going to those suppliers, which it also just dovetails nicely, that they’re also the ones that are very difficult to switch for a diverse option. So it’s kind of a, it’s a way of when we spoke on it internally, we wanted to make sure that we were living our values with all of our suppliers. And this speaks exactly to that, really that with some of our largest suppliers, we’re never going to switch them for a diverse option. But we can be pushing them about well, how fair how gender equal to you, rather than looking for a diverse option. So we go to those suppliers, we ask them to take the gender fair assessment, the gender fair assessment, as I said, really asked, answered the question, are you living up to the UN Women Empowerment principles? It does that by looking at your representation of women in leadership. It does that by asking questions around your policies and procedures. Are they gender fair? Are they family friendly?

David Latten 24:38
Also things like advertising and philanthropy. Are you supporting some of these organizations? Is your advertising breaking some of these biases, supplier diversity is also part of it. It does all that and it gives you a bit of a benchmark about Hey, are we living up to the UN reps or could we be doing a bit more? It also gives you a roadmap to progress So I think when I was saying about talking with our suppliers, we want them to be in a better place next year and the year after in the year after doing the assessment actually gives them that roadmap. So that’s great. That’s what we’re doing. And there’s some really good impact that can be had there. But I think the coalition comes in and why we’re looking for allies is the Our ultimate goal is to engender an industry wide change in procurement practices, whereby all organizations assess all of their high impact suppliers, for gender fairness, there’s a lot of things that happen as standard in procurement, as we were talking earlier, Steve around contractual stuff, risk privacy, data security. And that’s all really important. I don’t want to I don’t want to undermine that. But what doesn’t happen is the standard feels, to me even more important is a simple question, are you living up to the UN Women Empowerment principles, you’re a big company with potentially 10s and 10s of 1000s of employees, we like to know that you’re at least aspiring to live up to the UN Women Empowerment principles. So so to do that, to get that breadth and depth of impact, and frankly, to make it an industry standard, that’s where we need allies. It’s very simple to join us. There’s a coalition website, gender fair procurement.com. And all we’re simply asking really is assess your own company for gender fairness, and look to improve each year. But then externalize your impact, and go to your high impact suppliers and ask them to do the same. And that’s where the magic happens. Because, you know, Logitech are a well known brand, we have some influence, I was looking at it as kind of a breath of influence, like we have a certain number of suppliers that we can influence as, but the coalition if we get other allies to join us, that breath can be increased, of course, that there’s more and more suppliers can be assessed. And crucially, the depth of the impact can be improved to and when I say the depth of impact. Trish, I didn’t, didn’t answer this when you asked the question earlier on, but we have had you do get some kickback. You know, I was expecting that, again, there are some companies that just refuse to do it. That’s probably because my leverage with them is limited. It might also be because they’re thinking, geez, we’re going to do pretty badly at this, it might be a combination of that. I expected that. That’s where the magic of the ally ship comes in that they can say no to me. But if Steve has had a procurement that another multinational Trish is at another, and there’s another four or five companies, if we’re all saying, Hey, we all need to take this assessment. I’m pretty sure what their answer will be. They can say no, to me, they will not say no to everyone. So I think that’s ultimately the collective action power of the coalition. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make it a standard, that large organizations challenge each other to make sure that we’re trying to aspire to be gender equal.

Trish 27:42
Yeah, I love that, that you’re actually working together. Because I think too, it really does. That’s what’s needed to drive an industry forward. Right? It’s one thing to think about your own sort of little corner of the world. But when you really are truly trying to do something more meaningful, it’s often very difficult to do by yourself, because you don’t have that persuasion, or that poll, and teaming up is certainly going to help lead that.

David Latten 28:08
Sorry, Trish, I was just gonna come back on that. That was, that was certainly one of the early challenges, we first started doing this ourselves last summer, assessing our high impact suppliers, and I started advocating for around that time, too. And, and yeah, finding those first allies is really tricky, isn’t it that I think human nature almost dictates and whether it’s a risk aversion, I’m not sure, or whatever it is, but the amount of times I’ll be asked a question, oh, and who else has joined this coalition, and in the early days, you know, no one had overs just start with Logitech restarting ourselves. And that first ally is so important. Now, I’m pleased to say we have a number of other founding members in the coalition. Now, the combined, I mean, to show the power that this can bring the combined revenue in the coalition already is, is sort of above 30 billion at this stage. So it really does start to show the power that you can have, if we can channel all of that spend towards gender equality. But yeah, I didn’t realize advocacy was as tough as it is. But that’s been a learning for me. And, and it’s an important learning because as a procurement person, normally, I’m getting advocated to or I’m being sold to, and I try and deal with it in the most patient and kind of constructive way. But I think a personal learning for me is that I’m going to deal with salespeople a lot more differently now, that having spent the most part of the year advocating, which, you know, in a way, you’re selling something really, it is tough to advocate, certainly until you get those first allies.

Trish 29:41
I think with that assessment, though, it I liked that earlier, you sort of said it gives people not just where they are right now, it gives you something to measure going forward. And so, again, back to the sort of the idea of progress. It’s if if you’re doing something by yourself, if Logitech just said, You know what, we’re just going to do this by ourselves. And we’re not looking for allies. We’re not looking to form a co volition, it will be fascinating to me to see five years down the road or when you get to, you know, 2030 to sort of this first milestone, I don’t want to call it a goal, right? Because it’s it’s an ongoing process. But like, it’d be really fascinating to see how other people sort of jumping into the coalition with you really does move the needle much farther than if you really had just approached it on your own. And I think maybe that’s a mistake we make in businesses, we sort of feel like we have to do all of it and shoulder it out ourselves. Yeah. And you’re demonstrating that that’s not the case. It’s very difficult what you’re trying to do. Right? I know for sure. Highly possible. So yeah.

David Latten 30:41
And I think you mentioned in the assessment, I think, I think one really nice thing about about making it an assessment, it’s very specific on what what it asks. And it’s around all those areas I was saying earlier on. And I think the really nice thing about that is that some of this is quite simple to do, the overall aim of achieving gender equality is kind of a scary big target. And the most difficult thing that the the assessment metrics on and where most companies fail is that women in leadership representation that is that is the most difficult of the stats to be achieving a really good gender equal score on. But here’s the thing, you can easily get scared off from taking really good, small, simple steps by these big targets. And I think some of the important foundational things are actually really small, simple steps to take, like, some of the things that assesses around is do you have erg? Is your company that are supporting progression of women. If the three of us were leaders in an organization, I would hope that’s just one quick zoom call to say, Hey, should we have an erg? For this? Yeah, let’s do it. Another one is around making sure that you have really good maternity leave paternity leave and other policies and procedures. Again, that might take a bit more talking out. But if we were the three leaders, I hope we could do that pretty quick. That will not help you achieve gender equality and leadership and other levels straightaway. But what it’ll certainly the foundation for it, and I can be pretty sure you won’t achieve gender equality at leadership if you’re not doing those things. So I think, you know, do the simple things now. And you’ll start moving towards those bigger targets.

Steve 32:22
Last one. For me, we’ve talked a little bit about the influence that large organizations can have specifically around their procurement spend, and how they decide to direct their budgets. It’s even stronger when you have other partners, right? Who aligned with you or maybe join the coalition as well. And now the combined strength of that organization for those organizations gets much more powerful. Do you have any advice for organizations that are smaller, that maybe you know, don’t have that global reach, like a Logitech does or that well known brand name, or maybe don’t control a billion dollars and spend and maybe something less than that? Right, which is a lot a lot of organizations, right, but but if they have these types of goals and concerns as well, was there one or two things you could sort of offer to those type of organizations?

David Latten 33:07
Yeah, I think the, I think the short answer is that we can all do something, they will have a relevance somewhere, I think they certainly with your own employee base. It may not be as large as Logitech, but you still want to make sure that you’re doing the right thing by them. If you look at it on a sector basis, or an industry basis, you know, there’s still a lot of people that are employed in those sectors. So I think scale scale means you can achieve more quickly, perhaps in terms of numbers of people influenced. But you know, small businesses tend to be a lot more agile. In fact, in fact, one of our one of our other values really is that we try and behave like a small business, because they can move things a lot quicker. So I think I wouldn’t underestimate the impact that small companies can have, get that kind of get that wave of movement going. And that influence can certainly add up advocacy, advocacy groups, your members of make sure that you’re channeled through there. So I think, you know, gender equality and other social issues need all organizations to move towards them. I certainly wouldn’t. I wouldn’t fail that you can’t do anything just because you’re a small business.

Steve 34:15
Yeah. Great, David, great stuff. This has been a super fun and interesting conversation. I love the idea of sort of talking about accessibility, inclusion, access to opportunities throughout all elements of an organization, not just, you know, typically some of the things we’ve we’ve talked about or our industry tends to focus on, which is sourcing and candidates and interviewing. There’s so much more out there. There’s so much more opportunity out there for organizations to have a positive impact. And I think we touched on a lot of those topics today. And I certainly would invite people to check out gender fair procurement.com They can learn a lot more about some of the things we’ve been talking about as well. Trisha, you’re you’re you’re you’re nodding to I think you agree.

Trish 34:59
Yeah. would just say, you know, sort of in closing, I think that in Human Resources kind of growing up in that side of the business, we always looked for ways to, and reasons to work more closely with procurement. And it was sometimes challenging, right? You felt like you were sort of at odds in a lot of what you were doing. I love that you have given us some real life examples of how, even if it’s in the organization that the the listener is in, and procurement is not taking the lead on this, my goodness, now’s your chance, take this idea to them, right? What a great way to partner not just with them with marketing with your accounting and finance teams, right? This is something that the entire organization’s leadership can get behind. And like you said, no one really disagrees that this is needed, right? It’s just gonna be how much can we do? How quickly can we do it? So thank you so much for sharing those great ideas for people to go out and get started if their company really isn’t sort of dabbling in this just yet.

David Latten 35:58
Thank you, Trish. Thank you, Steve. A real pleasure

Steve 36:00
David Landon from Logitech. Thank you so much for joining us today. And I also think it’s been great for folks who are listening to this, to know a lot more about some of the programs and the, the initiatives and the values, quite frankly, of the organization that they probably know. And they’re probably using that equipment right now in their home offices, their fingers, which is awesome, as well. So we’ll put a link to gender fair procurement, of course, in the website, David’s information as well, we’ll link to and yeah, thanks so much, David, once again for joining us today. Trish great stuff. Loved it. I love this topic. I want to do more on procurement. We started the HR Happy Hour back in 2009. I used to joke there was no such thing as the supply chain happy hour. Maybe there is now I don’t know, but there wasn’t back then. So I’m glad we got to touch on this today.

Trish 36:50
It next time, we’ll just have David back and we’ll just make it a pure happy hour. We’ll do that.

Steve 36:56
Great stuff. Thanks, David. Thanks Trish, thanks to our friends at Paychex of course, you can find all the show archives at HRHappyHour.net. Thanks so much for listening everyone. We will see you next time and bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai