Winnipeg, Canada
Using Procurement Power to Expand Hiring Opportunities
Project Type:
Community Engagement, Economic Development
At a Glance
Winnipeg’s Sustainable Procurement Action Plan is redefining what makes a valuable supplier for the city—instead of evaluating only price, quality and service, the City is now also prioritizing community and social impact.
Pilot procurement projects are gathering the data needed to steer more of the city’s CA$400 million to businesses that employ a workforce that represents all Winnipeggers.
City departments track performance across numerous measures, including citizen satisfaction and benchmarking against other cities, and that information is considered in budget decisions.
Winnipeg maintains an award-winning dashboard that allows City leaders to track how well they are doing at hiring a workforce that reflects the community they serve.
The City of Winnipeg spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on goods, services and construction projects.
Recently, City leaders made a connection between the money it spends and opportunities to build a more inclusive workforce. That’s now part of a strategy Winnipeg calls “sustainable procurement.” The idea is to redefine what makes a valuable contractor for the City—instead of only thinking of price, quality and service, the City is now also prioritizing community and social impact. That means giving better opportunities to win City contracts to businesses with owners from underrepresented groups or who provide apprenticeship and training for people with barriers to employment.
Winnipeg has been doing something similar for years in the realms of the environment and ethics, requiring bidders on City contracts to reduce waste, for example, or avoid products made with sweatshop labor. And as an employer, the City has committed to hiring workers who reflect the community they serve — and share the results publicly through an Open Data dataset and a diversity dashboard that tracks how they’re doing toward that goal.
Winnipeg reports 347 performance measures across 30 service areas and connects them to budgets.
“The City spends $400 million a year in procurement, and we want to make sure that money makes a difference in the community.”
To do the same with contractors, City leaders knew they needed to get data to guide decision making. That’s why Winnipeg (Canada’s seventh-largest city with 750,000 people) is testing the approach through a series of pilot projects.
The 21 pilot projects are generally construction tenders, such as installing new bike paths or replacing water mains. For the first time, City leaders asked contractors and subcontractors to prioritize hiring people who identify with at least one of Winnipeg’s underrepresented groups. Contractors are also reporting data on their progress back to the City.
None of this is mandatory just yet. Nevertheless, the results so far are encouraging. Most contractors have exceeded their own targets. The majority of contractors have reported 2.5 percent to 75 percent of hours worked by workers who identify with an underrepresented group.
That’s valuable data for when the City moves toward making the hiring goals mandatory. The goal was to develop a baseline target that was acceptable and achievable by the contractors.
The pilots also give Winnipeg a chance to prepare vendors for these changes. City leaders have been signaling to contractors for a couple of years that these hiring goals are coming. While larger companies with robust HR data systems have had little trouble reporting results, some smaller contractors are reporting difficulties. But the City is providing webinars, training videos and other outreach to help them understand and navigate the Sustainable Procurement Action Plan.
The City has many construction contracts each year and a large share of the annual spend is attributed to these contracts. “The City spends CA$400 million a year in procurement, and we want to make sure that money makes a difference in the community,” says Procurement Coordinator Corinne Evason.
“Certification provides the City a platform to recognize our strengths, see where there’s gaps, and connect resources to where the deepest needs are in our community.”