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Addressing diversity is also critical in our own consuming public. We are a mass marketer. Our products are designed to have broad appeal. There is no one in America who is not a potential consumer of our products; within a few years, we'll be able to say there's no one in the world who is not a potential consumer of our products. We have to be persuasive to people with vastly different backgrounds and viewpoints.
Finally, we care about diversity in our suppliers. And we care for the same reasons that we care about our employees. In today's interconnected workplace, suppliers are almost an extension of the workforce. We work closely with them to develop their skills. We measure their performance and give feedback. We hope to achieve a long-term relationship, just as we would with our employees. It would make no sense for us to demand innovation from our own organization but not from our suppliers.
We originally thought that workforce diversity this was a recruiting issue. It seems obvious that your workforce will look like the people you hire. Since our management is primarily people promoted from within our own ranks, they too will ultimately look like the people we recruit. Therefore, we thought, if we just recruit diversity we'll be fine.
That's what we thought.
We learned is that workforce diversity is primarily a development issue. Diversity in recruiting is necessary, but that's the easy part. Retaining and developing diversity in management is much more difficult.
And we once thought that the key to developing people equally was to treat them all the same. We talked about being a color-blind, gender-blind organization. The assumption was that fairness required sameness. We learned that assumption was wrong - and it has led us to fundamentally alter our development process.
We believe in carefully designed pre-employment testing to ensure that we're getting people with the skills required to succeed, and we operate with the expectation that each new employee will succeed. That expectation causes us to make a total commitment to develop each individual from the day he or she walks in our door.
Additionally, there is a Hispanic employee network which provides a support system, a positive forum for development, information sharing, and idea exchange on common issues of interest to members.
Another key to creating a diverse workforce is the importance of concrete goals. When you're addressing diversity, some people shy away from goals. Some people call them quotas. We don't. We believe that setting goals and measuring progress against them is a critical part of any serious initiative.
My final observation is that good diversity practices tend to be good business
practices. Effective marketing to Hispanics and other ethnic groups is not a diversity initiative - it's a business building initiative. Our supplier diversity efforts are strengthening our overall supplier base. Good diversity management is good management.
And while we are proud of being named the best company for Latinas to work for in the United States, we know that we have more work to do - in the Hispanic community and in every community.
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