Responding to the Qualitative Section of the HCAi AB962 Report

The AB962 reporting process includes a qualitative section to help HCAi and your stakeholders better understand the efforts that your health system or hospital facility is undertaking to promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in your procurement practices.

The guide below provides some tips on how to organize your response to provide a clear understanding of what your system is doing or is proposing to do.  Remember that most organizations are on a journey, and this is likely true of your health system.  You may have done some things to promote outreach and inclusion but have plans to do more.  This is typical, and very common. This section of the AB962 report is an excellent place to describe your accomplishments and paint a picture of the plans that you have for future improvement.

The tips below are for each portion of the AB962 report qualitative section and understanding what is being asked.

Hospital's Supplier Diversity Policy Statement

Your Hospital's Supplier Diversity Policy Statement is the foundation that ties your efforts together.  Like all policy statements, it should focus on specific rules or objectives and explain why the rules or objectives are being followed.  There is more information here on how to craft your Hospital's Supplier Diversity Policy Statement

How does your hospital encourage and seek out minority, women, LGBT, and disabled veteran business enterprises to become potential suppliers?

The narrative provided here should give a clear understanding of policies, procedures and actions that your health system is taking that currently results in or is intended to result in minority, women LGBT and disabled businesses becoming potential suppliers.  One way to break this down is to segment it as follows

• Outreach – how do you make opportunities to do business with you be known to prospective diverse suppliers? (Example - Do you post notices and invitations to bid?)
• Engagement – how do suppliers who are interested get your attention? (Example - Do you have a supplier registration system?)
• Monitoring – How do you measure the effectiveness of your outreach and engagement? (Example - Do you evaluate the percentage of diverse suppliers that your procurement teams are interacting with when compared to the entire population.)

How does your hospital encourage its employees involved in procurement to seek out minority, women, LGBT, and disabled veteran business enterprises to become potential suppliers?

The narrative provided here should give a clear understanding of specific efforts that you are undertaking to influence the behavior of the people who make sourcing and purchasing decisions, with the intent to engage more minority, women LGBT and disabled businesses.  One way to break this down is to segment it as follows:

To illustrate some best practices, we are quoting from the Article "Change Employee Behavior in the Workplace with These 5 High-impact Corporate Training Strategies" by Asha Pandey, chief learning strategist at EI Design. www.eidesign.net/blog

1. Experiential Learning

In experiential learning, employees are immersed in simulations, role-plays and case studies, creating an atmosphere that is conducive to behavior change. 

For your AB962 program, is there any version of your environment where your procurement teams can practice inclusive sourcing techniques and surface their questions, issues and challenges while still getting their work done.   If you have these tools in place, their would be an excellent place to describe them.

2. Feedback

Feedback is vital to any effort to modify employee behavior. Without feedback, employees don’t know when their behavior is incorrect. Managers, supervisors, change managers, training teams and coaches all play a vital role in the feedback loop.

You are likely the coach in this scenario and you invest considerable time and effort in providing feedback in a qualitative way. Do you also have quantitative metrics to help support the progress you sense your teams are making?

3. Follow-up

After receiving feedback, employees should have the opportunity to follow up, ask questions and try again. Employees who can iterate are more likely to achieve desired behavior changes.

You may want to describe programs you have in place to encourage and process feedback on the progress your Supplier Diversity program is making.

4. Nudges

While active coaching and feedback is useful, small nudges throughout the flow of work can also be effective. Strategically placed microlearning opportunities can serve as reminders for employees, helping to modify their behavior. Short videos and infographics shared through email or a corporate social learning platform will also refresh the behaviors learned in formal training. 

Does your Supplier Engagement platform provide you with tools to assist the nudging process.  If it does, you should describe how you use it as an integral part of your program.  This Knowledge Base article is an example of a nudge.  Another example - the demographic breakdown panels that are strategically placed at various points of the SupplierGATEWAY system to remind teams of the demographic composition of their sourcing lists.

5. Modeling

Modeling by executive sponsors and champions serves as an effective method of changing employee behavior in the workplace. When combined with microlearning, follow-up messages from leaders will remind employees of expected behaviors and can help modify norms, reward appropriate actions and reduce undesired behaviors. 

Does your senior leadership actively review and provide feedback on DE&I efforts?  How often and when?  The clear emphasis by senior leadership will send the message that this is important and reinforces the behavior.  Your statements should reflect how that feedback is provided.

How does your hospital conduct outreach and communication to minority, women, LGBT, and disabled veteran business enterprises?

The response to this question should provide a clear description of the various mechanisms and initiatives that help your health system to engage and communicate with minority, women LGBT and disabled businesses.  You should pay attention to the narrative that best illustrates the sustained effort you are making to make outreach and communication an ongoing sustained process.  One-off events are good and should be included here.  Systematic persistent communication is even better and if you have programs or mechanism in place, you should take the time to describe them here.

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All these actions lead to new behavior that rewires the human brain, creating new neural pathways that lead to better habits. Once the behavior becomes a habit, it is engrained in employees’ day-to-day actions.

The AB962 report is simply a scorecard, but the process of preparing the scorecard should be additive to your overall program.