SAIC's 2024 Corporate Responsibility Highlights: Social Impact
Our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have created tremendous business value, and we continue to push forward with our goals
09-03-2024
Jeff Raver
DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION
Key Takeaways:
- SAIC continues to cultivate its workforce through talent acquisition and retention efforts in order to generate the innovation in science, technology and IT needed by government customers.
- Our continued commitment to DE&I spans from developing a diverse leadership team, to sustaining parity and inclusion, to providing contracting and partnership opportunities to diverse small businesses.
- We provide details of our DE&I progress in our comprehensive 2024 Corporate Responsibility Report on the company's environmental, social and governance efforts.
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SAIC has a long history of delivering outstanding solutions to our customers, creating a workplace that is a career destination for our employees, helping to ensure the future of our planet and doing it all with a sense of purpose and unwavering integrity.
We know that we cannot deliver on these expectations without an exceptional workforce. As we seek to advance the power of technology and innovation to serve and protect our world, a critical part of our business strategy is attracting, continually developing and retaining top talent — engineering, science and IT innovation cannot happen without it. To deliver that strategy and its value to shareholders, customers and employees, we aim to be a company that provides meaningful work and purpose, as we:
- Develop solutions for our customers’ most challenging problems.
- Continue to deliver value to our business through meaningful diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
- Nurture our people throughout the talent lifecycle, including upskilling and job rotation to improve retention and fill critical skill gaps.
- Create a culture of empowerment, where our people can be their authentic selves and do their best work for our customers.
- Provide benefits and programs that enhance employees’ experiences and their well-being.
Creating a culture of exceptional value
SAIC recognizes that diverse teams deliver better solutions to our customers' toughest problems. We also know that when employees see a reflection of themselves in their leadership, and our customers see a reflection of themselves in our workforce, we are more likely to attract and retain the top talent that we need to deliver on our commitments. To this end, we focused on employee engagement, employee development and talent acquisition in fiscal year 2024.
Beginning in FY21, we set goals to achieve parity in the representation of women and people of color between our leadership roles and non-leadership roles by the end of FY26. We want to ensure that our leadership reflects our workforce and our workforce reflects the customers and communities we serve. In FY23, we achieved our parity goal for women in leadership, and in FY24 we sustained it at 28%. In FY24, we continued our progress on parity for people of color in leadership with a 2% improvement to 25% of our leaders being people of color. Also notable from FY24, based on our population of full-time, non-executive employees, is our gender pay gap, which continues to be approximately 1% for the compensation of women relative to men.
We are committed to always filling every role within SAIC with the most qualified candidates. We develop a diverse leadership team from our existing workforce by fostering diverse candidate slates for leadership roles; ensuring our job descriptions, recruiting tools and processes help eliminate the potential for bias; and providing training, educational resources and leadership development programs for all our employees.
To ensure equitable access to opportunities for everyone in the company, we continue to enhance our workplace practices to eliminate bias, remove barriers and improve inclusion. We train our leadership, hiring managers and recruiters on the benefits of improved parity and enhanced inclusion; we use diverse talent communities and sourcing tools; and we leverage our advertising and marketing efforts to make sure we reach a diverse pool of candidates. Through these efforts, women make up 32% of our job candidates and people of color 57%.
Our Employee Resource Groups, or ERGs, serve as the cornerstone of our employee engagement initiatives. To date, just under 13% of our workforce belong to one of our seven diverse affinity groups, which provide opportunities, engagement and resources specifically focused on the unique needs of their members. All employees are welcome to join any of these employee-led ERGs, and allyship is fostered and encouraged.
SAIC believes that small and diverse businesses are essential for maintaining a robust and dynamic contractor ecosystem, as well as play an integral role in the types of supply chain efforts required to meet the unique needs of our government customers. With that belief, we work to expand our partnerships with diverse small businesses and suppliers by hosting outreach sessions, mentoring them and providing contract opportunities to those that drive innovation and improve processes. SAIC has a robust small business outreach program and tracks its spend with disadvantaged, women-owned, veteran-owned and service-disabled veteran-owned businesses and suppliers, as well as companies under HUBZone, Alaskan Native Corporations and Indian Tribes classifications.
In FY24, we spent over $420 million with small and diverse-owned businesses. Independent third parties and customers consistently recognize SAIC for its industry-leading engagement efforts, including a NASA 2023 Small Business Industry Award as the Center-Level Large Business Prime Contractor of the Year as well as both the 2022 Small Business Advocate of the Year and 2022 Champion Award from the National Veteran Small Business Coalition for dedication to service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses and veteran-owned small businesses. SAIC has also won the HUBZone Contractors National Council Small Business Liaison of the Year award.
As SAIC's vice president of environmental, social and governance integration, I am proud of our accomplishments in creating an environment where our people can be their best. These are just some highlights from our comprehensive and detailed 2024 Corporate Responsibility Report. I invite you to download and read our report to learn more about our ongoing efforts and the progress we are making!
