In recent years, organisations have recognised the importance of diversity in workplace, from hiring qualified talents, irrespective of gender, race, or nationality, to driving business sales and profits.
It brings multiple perspectives, allowing you to make the best decisions and generate innovative solutions. Additionally, millennials prefer working in a company that invests in diversity programs. It enables them to work with talents from diverse backgrounds and skills and understand different ideas and perspectives.
This article guides you about the importance, benefits, and impact of diversity in workplace.
What is Workplace Diversity?
Workplace diversity refers to your efforts in hiring talents with varying characteristics and multiple backgrounds. With the rising importance of diversity in workplace, it is no longer a buzzword but a necessity for every organisation.
Workplace diversity can be inherent, e.g., race and sex, or acquired, e.g., religion and educational qualification. Both are essential for businesses aiming to succeed in the long run and ease their recruitment process. Research says 75% of employees will leave their current job for a more inclusive company.
Additionally, when you hire people from different backgrounds, they improve your decision-making. They also provide different perspectives, generate new ideas, and enhance creativity in the work culture. Furthermore, diverse teams can open doors to new clients from different demographics and geographical regions. Thus, your chances of capturing new markets and driving sales increases.
What is the Importance of Diversity in Workplace?
Equality diversity and inclusion in the workplace allow companies to work with a more robust talent pool. It helps you understand client needs better, generate creative solutions, and drive business profits.
We have listed some of the benefits of diverse workforce.
Access to More Talents
Unconscious biases may limit your chances of meeting top talents through job boards and websites. However, embracing diversity in the workplace allows you to meet people from different backgrounds and skills naturally. Additionally, diversity improves your workplace culture and lowers the employee turnover rate. This is one of the major importance of inclusion in the workplace.
Better Understanding of Your Consumers
The impact of diversity in the workplace is visible when dealing with demanding customers. Diverse teams can provide valuable insights into various customer bases, understand their pain points, and fulfil their demands.
Additionally, you can design products and services according to different consumer needs and use the right marketing strategies to target them efficiently.
Increased Employee Satisfaction and Retention
Investing in an inclusive workplace makes all your employees feel valued, respected, and included. This sense of belonging directly links to their job satisfaction, engagement, and retention. In research by Deloitte, 83% of millennials are recorded to be more engaged at work in inclusive companies than others.
Increased Work Productivity
One of the top benefits of a diverse workforce is increased overall business productivity. When you hire people from diverse backgrounds, you get access to a wider range of skills and experiences among employees, along with various ideas and perspectives. They can potentially improve your work productivity and deliver excellent solutions for clients.
Improved Cultural Awareness
An inclusive workforce gives you access to a diverse range of cultures, skills, and experiences of talents in your organisation. They can help you deal with nuances within a global marketplace and allow you to enter new markets.
For example, a Mandarin-speaking employee can save your back and improve workplace relations if you enter the Chinese market.
Build a Positive Brand Reputation
Companies investing in a diverse workforce are often considered as better employers. Top talents prefer working with recruiters who are tolerant of all backgrounds and treat every employee equally. Additionally, when you demonstrate your commitment to inclusivity, equality, and social responsibility, you can resonate with customers, talents, and shareholders alike.
What are the Challenges of Diversity in Workplace?
By now, we know the importance of diversity in workplace, but it comes with multiple challenges. If you don’t focus on solving these issues in your organisation, they can significantly affect your reputation and standards.
Communication Issues
Communication becomes difficult when you hire talents from multiple cultures, social, ethnic, and other backgrounds. For example, an employee may not be a native English speaker and might struggle to express their feelings in advanced English.
Therefore, you must always state clear communication guidelines for all your potential employees. For instance, encourage your employees to ask questions if anything is unclear and avoid using slang they may struggle to understand.
Workplace Discrimination
Irrespective of all your efforts, some employees may have cognitive biases leading to workplace discrimination. For instance, if your company works in a male-dominated industry, some of your employees may doubt female workers’ skills and qualifications for their roles.
To reduce such discrimination, you must clearly communicate company values and discrimination policies to all staff.
Diverse Opinions Cause a Clash
When you encourage a diversified workplace, people of different upbringings, mindsets, and experiences bring their ideas and perspectives. This may lead to clashes when opinions don’t match on particular topics, leading to employee tension.
Failing to reach a common ground can affect your decision-making process and negatively impact your company’s reputation. However, you can invest in conflict resolution training to clearly define appropriate workplace behaviour and communication policies.
Strategies to Implement the Importance of Diversity in Workplace
Knowing the importance of diversity in workplace and implementing diversification in reality are two different things. We have listed a few strategies to encourage diversity in your organisation.
- Tweak your job description to demonstrate your efforts towards workplace diversification.
- Recruit from diverse talent pools or niche job boards
- Use blind hiring practices to recruit diverse talents
- Train your interviewers on workplace diversity to avoid biases
- Prepare a diversity policy to reduce discrimination in the workplace
- Improve communication to ensure every employee is on the same page
- Ensure diversity in all positions from top to bottom
How Does 6 Pence Help in Creating a Diverse Workplace?
If you know the importance of diversity in workplace, you will undoubtedly invest in such measures. They ease your recruitment process, help you improve your business reputation among customers and shareholders, and increase sales.
However, there are certain challenges of diversity in workplace that you must consider and try measures to eliminate them from your organisation.
If you are failing to create a diverse workplace, contact 6 Pence. We provide top-tier staff outsourcing and HR solutions to our business associates in Oman, Iraq, Bahrain, and Dubai.
Our team helps you find qualified talents irrespective of their race, colour, gender, and other discriminating factors. Additionally, we help businesses with international hiring, from processing work visas to verifying documentation.
Also Read : Increase Productivity With Top Employee Training Techniques in HRM
Frequently Asked Qusetions
What is diversity in the workplace?
Diversity in the workplace refers to having a workforce inclusive of multiple backgrounds and national origins. It includes gender, socioeconomic and cultural diversity, and beyond that.
Why is diversity inclusion important?
Diversity inclusion in an organisation allows you to hire top talents, make employees feel more connected and productive, improve business performance and reputation, and satisfy customers with better products and services.
How does diversity affect the workplace?
Diversity in the workplace with new ideas and perspectives leads to creative solutions and business productivity and improves decision-making.
