When your business incorporates diversity into its hiring practices, it becomes a win-win situation for both employer and employees. Numerous studies have shown that hiring diversity leads to greater profitability and productivity, so employers benefit just as much as the actual employees who are hired. Continue reading below to learn some of the ways that diversity can grow your bottom line and make your own business more successful.
Improved business performance
As mentioned above, a great many studies have been conducted to find out the correlation between diverse hiring practices and business success, and these studies have consistently demonstrated a strong connection. While most studies have shown at least a 20% improvement in business performance when a diverse workforce is in place, some studies have discovered as much as a 35% improvement.
Ability to attract top talent
Many companies are bogged down by the hiring practice that any new employee must fit within the existing company culture, and must mesh well with other employees. A better approach would be to seek employees who have the requisite skills for an opening, but who also have something to offer in the way of enhancing or adding to the existing culture. This is a great way to find the best available talent, and the company benefits by having a much broader, more diverse outlook on how goals and objectives can be achieved.
Better metrics
Diversity can operate powerfully to keep employees engaged and to improve the overall employee experience. Since a regular practice of inclusivity and diversity has a strong tendency to create powerful work groups and teams, it’s very common to note significant increases in productivity from the workforce. When management recognizes how metrics are improving, it encourages even greater diversity, and a kind of domino effect comes into play.
Enhanced company culture
With a broader talent pool being drawn from, a more diverse workforce can quickly be built up, and this has a major impact on company culture. Whereas a company may have been fairly narrow in its cultural approach previously, the inclusion of different types of workers has the potential to bring in fresh attitudes, fresh ideas, and new ways of attacking old problems. With this broader cross-section of a population, a great deal more creativity gets injected into the workplace, and it’s very common for long-standing problems to be resolved by this kind of fresh thinking. The workforce thus becomes much more like a representation of society in general, with all kinds of backgrounds being brought into the mix.
Greater innovation
When you have a diverse workforce and an inclusive leadership team, it often results in much greater innovation being introduced to the company. In order for innovation to thrive, there must be a wealth of different ideas and perspectives, and that’s exactly what a diverse workforce can bring to the table. When diverse teams get together and collaborate on a project, the results can sometimes be very impressive. All this works strongly to the benefit of the company and to its success, and employees benefit as well because they are able to enjoy a more fulfilling and rewarding work experience.