About this time last year, Logitech’s CEO, Bracken Darrell, outlined a seven-point commitment to address the injustice often experienced by underrepresented and marginalized groups around the world.
Prior to the commitments, our vision and values already called for us to speak up and speak out. We were already committed to equal pay, diversity of people and ideas, supporting our communities and much more. These 7 commitments reinforced our ideals with specific actions to move us with more urgency towards addressing inequalities felt by many underrepresented people.
As the Juneteenth holiday approaches this upcoming weekend, we wanted to reflect on those commitments that were made a year ago.
It goes without saying that our teams, suppliers and partners should represent the communities in which we operate, but they do not yet. We have committed to this and while we are far from where we wish to be, we are holding true to our commitments and taking steps forward.
We intend to be transparent on where we are and be held accountable for progress. We will be sharing our company representation data for the first time in this year’s annual sustainability report, representing a defining step to identifying and eliminating barriers that have prevented the full participation, success and support of those from underrepresented backgrounds and communities. This year will be the baseline for our targets and our efforts going forward.
To help us internally, we’re now adding to our established diversity reviews of each leader’s organization and talent and provision of compensation analyses by providing resources and training such as our Inclusive Language guide, building up our “License to Hire” program for hiring managers and introducing unconscious bias training, where we help prepare hiring managers to maintain an open and transparent lens throughout the talent acquisition process. We also now have a CEO Comment Box where all employees can anonymously speak up about anything including sensitive topics on racism and bias to ideas on how to design our products, systems and operations for greater inclusion.
Supplier Diversity
One of the areas we are starting to see progress is within our supplier diversity program. A year ago, we looked at our US suppliers and only 34 (or 5%) were women-owned businesses; fewer(15 or 2% of US-suppliers) were underrepresented minority-owned businesses; and zero were Black-owned. Now as a policy, we include at least two minority-owned suppliers in all RFPs. In our last fiscal year, we recorded an almost 30% increase in the number of diverse suppliers we partnered with which resulted in a 5% increase in diverse spend from the prior fiscal year. So far this year, we have added 25 additional diverse suppliers into our supply base.
Not only are we engaging with new minority-owned suppliers but also encouraging our business partners to support our supplier diversity initiatives. To demonstrate our commitment, we ask that they share their current Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategy and how much of Logitech’s business they will be willing to subcontract to minority-owned suppliers. This is reinforced in all of our contracts which has motivated some of our partners to establish their own supplier diversity programs.
Last year, realizing the devastation brought on by the pandemic and resulting hardship faced by many minority-owned suppliers, we supported the National Minority Supplier Development Council’s “In This Together” campaign. We also committed to WEConnect International’s “Rise2thechallenge” by pledging to spend and do more with women-owned businesses. Additionally, we are a proud sponsor of the WEConnect’s International Day program and the STEM workshop.
Community Investments
It doesn’t end with diversity though. Investing in our communities is a part of our larger commitment, both empowering our employees to contribute to the causes they have a passion for and long-term financial commitments. As a step forward, we increased our donations to organizations globally that support the environment and equality and have set up a Donor Advised Fund to support these efforts ongoing.
Last year, our Streamlabs brand launched the #Creators4BIPOC Equality Commitment donating a minimum of $1M over the next 10 years to organizations explicitly working to help address racial inequality. The Logitech for Creators team is taking this commitment to the next level in July by stepping up our actions to provide recognition, representation and resources to amplify underrepresented voices and address racial inequality. Last year we also joined with Girls Who Code in its essential mission to close the gender gap in technology worldwide. This summer we continue our partnership participating and leading a series of workshops during the Girls Who Code (virtual) Summer Immersion Program.
Speak Up
We will continue to speak up and speak out across all our platforms while we help others to do the same. This year we invested in the Defy Logic marketing campaign where we amplified the voices of diverse creators and activists such as Lil’Nas X and Dr. Roshawnna Novellus founder of EnrichHer, who are defying expectations and breaking barriers to inspire and change the world. Across our brands, we are also spotlighting the many diverse creators, streamers and gamers we work with throughout the year supporting their activism and philanthropic work.
Logitech G initiated the #CreatorSpotlight series as a way to elevate the voices of marginalized communities and bring attention to a wide spectrum of diverse gamers. This series highlights members of various groups and showcases them during Black History Month, Women’s History Month, GAAD, PRIDE, etc. These campaigns all include a charitable component to raise funds for organizations via the streams.
Logitech must be an honest and authentic advocate for change and use our resources to make it a part of the routine commercial parts of our business. We will continue to work towards these commitments and be transparent in our journey. As Bracken said last year “We will never stop. We will make mistakes. And we will learn. This job isn’t done until the playing field is level for all.”
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