Colleen Tiner

Colleen Tiner (she/her), senior VP of product strategy for Beeline, has long been an advocate for gender diversity in the workplace. Five years ago, however, she says it became “acutely clear” that she had only been scraping the surface. “The combination of having children who identify with the LGBTQ+ community and listening to the exclusion challenges my friends, colleagues and clients have faced — and are still facing — because of cultural, racial, gender, sexual orientation and abilities, my focus has broadened,” Tiner says. She recognized an opportunity to become a proactive change agent within a people-focused business.

Tiner has since devoted her efforts to creating an inclusive, equitable workforce, sponsoring the BeOne diversity counsel and the Accessibility Governance Committee. Her proudest achievement, though, is the role she has played in helping customers apply their DE&I strategies to their extended workforces. Tiner and colleagues saw that workforce programs were struggling to achieve their talent diversity goals, noting an inability to collect and store contractor demographic information was primarily to blame. Beeline addressed this concern last year, launching a SAFE (secured, anonymized, focused and embraced) methodology and talent experience.

Listening to the challenges my friends, colleagues and clients have faced because of cultural, racial, gender, sexual orientation and abilities — my focus has broadened.

“The methodology and solution enable Beeline to safely, and with the consent of the individual, collect demographic information for nonemployees without putting the supplier, client or MSP at risk. With our approach, clients, suppliers and MSPs can prioritize DE&I strategies but do not take on the responsibility of storing highly sensitive PII,” Tiner explains. “More importantly, the person who the data represents is in control — they can choose how they want to be represented, consent to how their information is used, and know how, why and where their data is used. This is a true win-win-win.”

Tiner is working to create a future in which corporations value and proactively seek to include differences in not only race, gender and ethnicity but also in thought, capabilities and experiences. It is the conversations with her eldest son, however, that give Tiner the most optimism. “He and his peers give me great confidence that DE&I eventually will not be an interesting or controversial topic — it will be the norm,” she says.