Boost Creativity, Growth, And Decision-Making: Why Your Business Should Embrace Workplace Diversity

Diverse businesses that employ people across all ages, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, and education levels are 35% more likely to make bigger profits than non-diverse businesses, research from McKinsey reveals. Additionally, highly-diverse companies are 70% more likely to capture more markets, which is further key to growing revenue. Nevertheless, many businesses have yet to embrace diversity (41% of managers say they’re “too busy” to roll-out diversity initiatives). But, by taking the time to ensure diversity in your workplace, you can benefit from enhanced creativity, growth opportunities, and decision-making, as well as attract and hold onto millennial employees (who are currently the largest demographic in the US labor force).

Boost creativity and innovation

Diverse businesses are 1.7 times more innovative than non-diverse businesses. When team members from a variety of backgrounds work together, they bring a myriad of perspectives influenced by diverse life experiences to the table. Diversity naturally boosts creativity, and creativity is essential for innovation. In turn, your business can more effectively carve out a distinct niche in the marketplace and stand out from the competition. The creativity and innovation generated by diverse teams ultimately generates unique products or services that win and keep customer attention. As such, hiring a diverse team also has a positive indirect impact on your customers, as well as your internal business operations. When you have a creative team of employees from various contrasting backgrounds, you’re in turn able to more effectively promote your offerings to your intended diverse target audience. You’ll also come to identify opportunities for business growth as you’ll soon uncover greater differences between different customer groups and how to successfully market your business towards them.

Create growth opportunities

87% of millennials say “professional or career growth and development opportunities” as important to them. By welcoming and upholding diverse perspectives, ideas, and methods, you’ll create an inclusive workplace culture, which further attracts driven, talented, and diverse professionals. Diversity facilitates professional enrichment as employees are exposed to different outlooks and skills, in addition to being free to create international networks. By developing a richer understanding of the world, employees inject fresh ideas and perspectives into their work. Here, it’s also important to note the difference between equity vs equality in the workplace. Equality ensures employees are provided with the same opportunities and resources, while equity also recognizes the importance of catering to differing needs to ensure equality of outcome. So, for example, rather than just hiring diverse teams, you also need to have diversity at the executive level to better ensure your employees feel adequately represented. Not only is an inclusive executive team equitable, but employees can be confident they have the opportunity for career growth to executive levels within your business. In turn, this fosters loyalty and career satisfaction.

Improve the decision-making process

Diverse teams are better at making decisions than non-diverse teams 87% of the time. This is one of the biggest benefits of creating a diverse office.

Moreover, better decision-making can also help set your business apart from competitors. Ultimately, diversity works to rid your employees of the stale and standard approach to decision making or problem solving. Instead, the dynamic range of voices, ideas, and perspectives within diverse teams naturally results in a more creative approach that generates a range of effective solutions. You no longer have to rely on just one single uninspired solution based on a monolithic cultural perspective.

Attract and sustain a millennial workforce

By the year 2025, millennials are set to account for as much as 75% of the workforce worldwide. In turn, this means we should expect this demographic (defined as individuals born between 1980-1994) to hold most of the available leadership positions within the next ten years or so. And, if your business is aiming to attract and maintain a millennial workforce, embracing diversity is integral to achieving this goal. In fact, nearly half (47%) of millennials consider diversity to be one of the defining influential factors when choosing between potential employers. Moreover, millennials tend to view diversity differently compared to older generations who may just consider it in terms of various demographics, representation, and equality. Millennials, on the other hand, consider diversity primarily to be the coming together of unique individuals with different backgrounds and life experiences. The best type of workplace, for millennials, is an uplifting and encouraging one that welcomes a myriad of opinions and approaches towards any given topic. And 74% of millennials also believe that when a company has an inclusive culture, it’s in turn able to reach even greater levels of innovation.

Diversity is key to business success. By boosting creativity and innovation, creating growth opportunities, and improving the decision-making process, along with attracting a talented millennial workforce, embracing diversity and inclusivity has unmissable benefits for your organization.