Building a diverse company isn’t just the right thing to do; according to research from Bersin by Deloitte, it’s also pretty good for business. In a recent article for Forbes, contributor Josh Bersin wrote about why smart companies are making diversity and inclusion a top priority. Here’s why your employer should be on board.
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1. Diversity fosters creativity and innovation.
These days, a lot of our bosses know that creativity and innovation are key for helping a business to grow. Finding the strength, courage, and intelligence to try doing things in a different way could open up whole new avenues for business. Diverse people bring diverse ideas to the table. Take pride in being a part of one of these teams, and enjoy working together to think more outside-of-the-box than ever before.
2. Diverse teams are better at problem solving.
Diverse teams have a broader perspective than teams that aren’t diverse. It’s only logical that if 10 men of a similar age with similar backgrounds sit down together to solve a problem, they are likely to find a narrower range of solutions than a group that is diverse in terms of gender, age, and cultural background, for example. If our teams are expected to problem solve in diverse ways, the team itself ought to be diverse.
3. Diversity is good for recruitment and retention.
“Embracing diversity is critical to being an employer of choice,” writes Lynette Pathy at LinkedIn, in a column about Unilever’s diversity strategy. “It not only gives you better access to talent, but is also proven to increase talent retention, as people want to work in an inclusive workplace that promotes equality.”
4. Diversity enables a broader perspective that businesses can’t find any other way.
Women and non-white workers are also (shocker) consumers. They participate in our economy and marketplace. And, as a result, they have a valuable perspective to share about how any given industry could better serve them, specifically. Hiring and promoting women and minorities gives companies in-house insight into what consumers want. A company that’s serving everyone should be built by everyone, too.
5. Quite simply, diverse companies outperform their competition.
Diverse teams have been proven to do better on team-based assessments. Also, McKinsey & Company’s research found that gender diverse companies outperform their peers by 15 percent, and that figure rises to 35 percent when the companies are ethnically diverse as well.
Companies are often most motivated by hard facts and the bottom line. Therefore, it’s no surprise that a lot of businesses are working to diversify these days. As an employee, it’s essential to understand and embrace these changes in order to be a part of a productive and competitive future.
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Is your employer working toward building better diversity in 2016? We want to hear from you! Leave a comment or join the discussion on Twitter.
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