Incentive - March 2008 - (Page 18)

COVER STORY word. But by 1992, UPS formally launched the UPS Supplier Diversity Program, in 2002 Homeyer was appointed to the UPS Corporate Supplier Diversity team and in 2006 she was named as one of Women’s Enterprise magazine’s “100 Women Impacting Supplier Diversity.” “Since 2001, I have been involved in supplier diversity. It all started with the opportunity to work with the certification committee for the Women’s Business Council–Southwest. After working with those talented, remarkable women from the Southwest Business Council, I knew this would be the new career choice I wished to pursue at UPS. In 2002, I joined the Corporate Supplier Diversity team in Atlanta, Georgia,” she says. Homeyer, director for the UPS identify potential suppliers and provide them with critical information and access to UPS’s purchasing process. She also is responsible for the establishment of new and the development of existing UPS relationships with small businesses, ranks, is a painful and demoralizing experience. For the company, exclusionary treatment of certain employees based on race, gender or any other personal traits unrelated to performance leads to high turnover, loss of talent and “I think that everyone is catching on to the idea that diversity and inclusion have to be a core, central philosophy ” –Carol Evans, CEO and founder of Working Mother Media women-owned businesses and minority business organizations. Ask Eddie Smith, owner of E. Smith Box Inc., based in Atlanta, how being a supplier for UPS has helped grow his packing materials business. In 1996, he happened to meet someone from UPS who had had a bad experience with an African-American-owned company and was reluctant to move the business, says Smith. “He didn’t understand diversity, but I kept working on the relationship. I said, ‘Yes, I am a black man; I know what the heck I am doing.’ We’ve grown from $97,000 at the beginning to doing over $16 million last year.” “If you look at the future, ethnic groups are where the new groups are. Hispanics have a lot of buying power, as well as African Americans. And we support companies who support us. We also work with General Mills. So all of us only buy cereal from General Mills. We do the same with UPS. It’s a great company and the upper echelon knows how important diversity is.” (For more on UPS, see Q&A on page 19.) Diversity in the workplace may have come a long way since the first office potluck, but it still has a way to go. Even today, large and small inequities throughout an organization may favor the promotion of one particular group over another, overlooking talent and ability. For the individual, working for a company that excludes him or her from feeling like an equal part of a team, with an equal chance of moving up in the a disconnection from an increasingly diverse marketplace, not to mention potential legal trouble. “I think everyone is catching on to the idea that diversity and inclusion have to be a core, central philosophy and practice for every great company,” says Carol Evans, CEO and founder of Working Mother Media, based in New York. Evans started her career back in the 1970s when discrimination, she says, was rampant. It wasn’t until decades later that top-level positions were open to women, enabling them to become CEOs. Her personal experience as a woman struggling to ascend the corporate ranks led her to become very involved in the Multicultural Women’s Initiative. Launched in 2002, the Multicultural Women’s Initiative is a spin-off of Working Mother magazine’s list of 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers, created to address a set of issues pertaining to women of color in the workplace. The goal of the initiative is to celebrate companies with cutting-edge policies that support women of color. Anita Rice, manager, multicultural and women’s initiative, IBM Supplier Diversity Program, manages internal and external programs designed to increase representation of small, minority- and women-owned businesses in UPS’s supplier network. In addition to these responsibilities, Homeyer is also involved with corporate procurement commodities purchasing opportunities. Homeyer works with UPS managers nationwide to implement initiatives that IBM, Diverse from Day One At IBM, managing diversity is nothing new. Now with 350,000 employees in 170 countries, IBM has been global its entire history. Asked how the topic of diversity has changed over the years, Anita Rice, manager, multicultural and continued on page 20 18 | Incentive | March 2008 | incentivemag.com http://incentivemag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Incentive - March 2008

Incentive - March 2008 Contents Editor’s Note: Delivering on Diversity In The News Cover Story: Leveraging Diversity in the Workplace Incentive Interview: Paul Levesque on Why Awards Fail Case Study: AEIS’ Max!-imum Incentive Program Mine Employees’ Creativity with Innovation Incentives Incentive Must-Reads The Third Annual Gift Card Roundtable My Turn: Motivation or Bribery? Everybody Get Together In Her Shoes: Why Bosses Should Be Flexible Incentive Primer: Passport Problem-Solving potentials Here and Now Is CES Electronics Heaven? China and Crystal: More Than a Pretty Face Travel News Florida: What’s New on the Beach? Smooth Sailing for Incentive Cruising Come To Hawaii And Take It Fast Last Word: But Enough About You

Incentive - March 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.