We all know that diversity is a good thing. Every major city on the planet is a giant melting pot of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, not to mention the plethora of subcultures that don’t necessarily fall along the lines of ethnicity or gender. Technology makes the world a little smaller. All of us are exposed to those in almost every aspect of our lives.
This diversity is, of course, also present in the business world. Companies have increasingly diverse staff members. But is diversity really good for creating high performance cultures? Absolutely.
Here are five reasons why having a diverse workforce increases productivity and profit:
1. It Strengthens Employees
At the most basic level, a diverse staff makes each individual employee a stronger asset to the team. Diversity breeds cultural awareness, tolerance, and compassion – all of which are admirable qualities in and out of the workplace.
On the job, these attitudes help navigate stressful situations, keep a level head, and make employees all the more likely to go the extra mile to meet the needs of customers or clients. Exposure to different backgrounds and lifestyles can help employees step outside themselves – which in turn means better identifying with customers and clients, as well as fellow employees.
2. Globalization
As the world marketplace gets smaller (and more companies are doing business internationally, hiring virtual employees, or expanding into new markets), representatives of these businesses will undoubtedly be met with language and cultural barriers. Having a diverse population of employees helps overcome these difficulties in two distinct ways.
First, much as diversity strengthens employee resolve and builds compassion, having experience learning a new culture or navigating a language barrier with a coworker is excellent training for conquering these obstacles in the field.
Similarly, a diverse group of employees may even contain an individual who speaks a particular language, or who has visited a particular region. This could be an invaluable advantage when competing against other globally active companies.
3. Build Customer Connections
Because diversity is more than ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc., and can encompass a whole host of other preferential and/or inherited traits, employee diversity is a great way to connect with the broad spectrum of your customers.
If a customer communicates with someone they can relate to, it will help put them at ease. This in turn fosters trust. Because diversity has become such an important part of many companies, many customers will recognize and appreciate efforts to build and maintain a diverse team of employees.
4. Attract Talent
Just as customers will identify with your diverse employees, so will prospective employees. By maintaining a diverse workforce that breaks down cultural barriers and fosters innovation, the best prospects will seek you out to be part of the team.
Employees will naturally share their experiences with one another, learning about different backgrounds and lifestyles and building their personal understanding. This offers an engaging and educational setting for doing business. When you can offer that type of environment word travels fast.
5. Combined Insight
This is quite possibly the single most important reason for having as diverse a staff as possible: the more minds you have working on a problem, the more different solutions you can come up with. With diversity comes different ways of viewing the world, different upbringings, skills, communication styles, etc.
When faced with a challenge in your business, a team of employees with the exact same background may all propose a similar solution. But a group with a wider range of experiences and opinions may be able to come up with dozens of answers to a single question. Simply put, diversity in the workplace is a way to harness the lessons learned across age groups, country lines, or gender roles. It grants access to multiple perspectives on any given issue, and requires that each and every one of these perspectives be tempered by the others.
As we become more connected as a global society, diversity is not a choice. It is both the reality of the world around us, and an absolute necessity for companies that want to remain competitive in the modern world.
Anil Saxena is the President of Cube 2.14, an organizational development consulting firm that works with clients to increase both customer and employee engagement while decreasing turnover, improving customer retention, and increasing profitability within organizations.
Saxena is a certified High Impact coach and trainer and a Joint Application Design facilitator. He is also certified by both Rush Systems and IBM as a focus group facilitator. He is an inaugural member of Northwestern University’s Learning and Organizational Change program, and he earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
