Basic Training - Diversity in Supply Chain Management and Operations

Time was that diversity in our world meant that a person of the feminine persuasion had snagged a job customarily performed by males.  In sensitive and progressive organizations, the ramifications of the event were that we had to stop telling jokes about traveling salesmen and farmers’ daughters.
But our world has changed – a lot.  It is no longer populated by hard-drinking overweight traffic managers and warehouse supervisors.  It is a commonplace to find women running distribution operations – big ones.  It is not rare for a female executive to have complete responsibility for a corporate supply chain.
Colleges and universities are graduating enormous numbers of women from their supply chain and logistics curricula.  And – oh, happy day – our professional conferences are filled with representatives from the distaff side, as practitioners, consultants, and academics.
We won’t pretend that all the battles have been won, and that all of the Old Guard has clambered aboard the gender diversity train, but – no matter how far we have to go – we can look back to see how very far we have come.
But, there are newer and more complex diversity challenges in supply chain management.

Despite the current economic malaise, we have had to acquire workers and supervision from non-traditional sources.  And, we will resume that pattern as business returns to whatever we may define “normal” as.
Those non-traditional sources are, themselves, varied and diverse.  One is a pool of older workers.  As people retire later in life, or can’t afford to retire, or can’t stand being around the house once they’ve retired, they become natural supplements to workforces in both planning and operations for supply chain functions.  Distribution Center operations are the natural place for most to land, but they may be found in a number of functions.  They present special challenges to management, though, in strength, stamina, realistic expectations for sustained performance levels, technology literacy, and health issues.
Another is a population of physically and mentally challenged individuals.  In general they make productive, loyal, and appreciative workers.  But, we can’t all go as far and as fast as Walgreen’s in its South Carolina DC, with a huge percentage of the local workforce falling into the differently-abled category, and managed to the same productivity and quality standards as employees without mental and physical limitations.  Sometimes sheltered work environments can be a good answer; sometimes selected tasks/functions within a larger facility can be assigned to individuals or small groups.  In any version of a solution, planning, scheduling, training, and day-to-day, hour-to-hour supervision is complex and demanding.  They need to be planned in advance, and then need to be ready to react/respond to unexpected developments.
A major component of the new diversity, though, is concentrated in immigrant populations, with complicating factors of culture, language, religion, life experience, and history.

Gotcha!  The first learning is that we can’t classify and manage people on the basis of them being “Hispanic.”  But, Spanish-speaking immigrants are critical components of solving the labor availability equation.  And, they tend to be the first example that comes to mind when we talk about non-traditional workforces in any segment of the economy.
But, Hispanic isn’t always a useful descriptor.  Puerto Ricans and Mexicans might as well be from Mars and Neptune.  Colombians and Cubans are also from different cultural planets.  And, by the way, they don’t speak exactly the same Spanish, either.  So, management can’t make blanket assumptions or manage mixed groups as if they are all the same.  This is particularly critical in locales containing people from several countries of origin.  Add Brazilians to the mix, and you’ve exponentially complicated the challenge. 
Understanding the cultures involved is tricky business.  Someone from a heritage of revolution will behave differently from a person from a more stable political environment.  Someone from a culture in which the five-fingered discount is the only feasible means of feeding a family isn’t really a criminal, but may need re-education in the consequences of doing so in our environment.
English as a language requirement poses another opportunity for the undertow to take us out to sea.  Many of us have been sensitized by activist groups to the importance of maintaining linguistic and cultural identity (Hispanic and otherwise).  Well-meaning companies have developed training materials in, for example, Spanish, and subsidize (or offer) English-as-a-Second-Language classes.  Some offer and promote the option of performing jobs in the native language.
But, in many cases, that’s not what the folks want.  Most studies show that, for Hispanics, English use grows tremendously in the second generation, and that English is a primary language in the third.  So, workers often don’t want, for example, to use Spanish voice recognition; they want to work in, and learn, English.  Further, when line management and supervision are of the same heritage as the workforce, they tend to think that the workers should not be linguistically coddled, but should apply themselves and learn the prevailing language the way they, themselves, did.
As a side note, it is condescending – borderline racist – to assume that anyone with a Spanish surname is part of the immigrant, or even next-generation workforce.  In parts of the US (and not just in Texas and California), people who might be assumed to be Hispanic by their names are actually many, many generations removed from those origins.  They are as “American” in values, work ethic, aspirations, language, and behaviors as people named Kowalski, Murphy, Schneider, or even Postlewaite.

We’ve learned to tap into several immigrant groups in order to staff our facilities and haul trailers to where they’ve got to go.  Russians, come to mind, as do Vietnamese and others.  When there are concentrations of a given group, both plusses and minuses come in to play.  There may be slightly greater tendencies to stay with the mother tongue, which introduces the need for someone to communicate back and forth, at least in the beginning.  That practice could result in:  1) putting a lot of power in one person’s hands when it comes to relations with the employer; or, 2) positioning the interlocutor to take advantage of the captive workforce.
Things really get dicey, though, when cultural and religious practices that are incompatible with “normal” western business activity are part of the package that comes with the immigrant workforce.  Management has then got some serious thinking to do about how much pain is tolerable for sake of getting enough headcount in the door in order to get customer merchandise out the door.

The challenges multiply when the immigrant labor population carries a lot of endemic performance and productivity baggage.  For example, when the point(s) of origin are agricultural villages in a radically different culture and belief set, how much time and effort will be required to re-tune pace and sense of urgency in the workforce?  It’s not that these people don’t know what hard work is, and it’s not that they don’t want to rise above subsistence-level living.  But, it’s not a slam dunk when their lives, and those of generations before them have been governed by sunrise, sunset, and the passage of the seasons.  The concept of an hourly performance target is indeed a foreign concept.
How will other, more traditional, workers respond to how the newcomers are permitted to behave?  Will their performance suffer while the “others” get re-educated and acclimated to our pace of business activity?
The debate gets livelier when religious practices, which may have little or no room for negotiation, get in the way of daily peak volume processing, or break schedules, or high season order levels.  It’s challenging enough to have to stop work and go off to a room to pray a few times a day.  It’s quite another level of accommodation to require both facilities and time during the work day to wash feet.
Then, what can be done when the immigrants’ traditional garb presents safety hazards in the presence of machinery?  And, when the traditional costume is part and parcel of cultural and religious – even tribal and national - identity?
Assuming all this can be worked out, is management then prepared to handle disputes in the workplace that are rooted in which particular villages squabbling sub-sets of the workers have come from?

It’s time for some straight talk.  There have been African-Americans in our profession who, with extraordinary talent and effort, have climbed the mountain and risen to the top – but not enough.  We see people of color in operational and line supervision roles seamlessly integrated into the whole – but not enough.  Our workshops are showing a growing racial diversity in their makeup – but not enough.  So, good things are, and have been happening in this arena; when it works, it works well – but not enough.
How much is enough is a debate for another day.  But, it strikes us that an untapped alternative labor source might be found among the under-and-unemployed in our cities.  Some might argue that disconnects in attitudes and expectations, in skills and readiness, is more of a class issue than a race issue.  Maybe so, but it seems to disproportionately affect minority communities.
Lots of work could be involved in solving this part of the puzzle.  And, we are ready to posit that developing this potential is not a one-way street.  That is, corporations and community groups might need to work in concert to prepare future workers, to train candidates in operational processes, and to beef up capabilities in reading, mathematics, and technology application.

None of this discussion is intended to denigrate any non-traditional labor source, or to suggest that any particular group is somehow “wrong.”  But, it is critical for all levels of supervision and management to understand how delicate and sensitive, how complex and daunting, it can be to effectively deal with the nuances of “different” cultures, practices, and religions – and abilities.  Whatever we wind up doing to assimilate, accommodate, or acclimate non-traditional workforces, respect for origins, heritage, and potential must be both sincere and consistent.
It’s also likely that we may not, within our own organizations, have all the skills and understandings needed to pull off the creation of a more effective and more diverse workforce.  Good news – there are organizations who devote themselves to just this topic, and they can be an enormous help in developing effective 21st-century alternative workforce solutions.
The effort may well be worth it, and may even be mandatory if an adequate workforce is to be built at all.  But, it’s a little like outsourcing to China.  It’ can’t be a snap decision, and a lot of focused investigation is required to figure out what’s really involved, and what the real costs, benefits, and risks are.

Bruce Strahan is a Partners in The Progress Group, Inc., an international supply chain and logistics consulting firm headquartered in Atlanta. He lead the Supply Chain and Manufacturing practice groups for TPG. Bruce did his graduate work at Georgia Tech, and was previously a Manager in Coopers & Lybrand’s SysteCon division. He may be reached at 770-804-9920 or bstrahan@theprogressgroup.com