Benefits of Diversity in the Workplace

Technology has enabled us to interact with customers, vendors and employees around the world 24 hours a day. Even if your company’s marketplace is local, the chances are that your community is also becoming more diverse.

Therefore, it’s more important than ever to build a diverse staff for your business which will reflect the world around you and make your team better able to develop fresh ideas that will meet the needs of the whole marketplace.

Benefits of diversity in today’s workplaces include:

Increasing creativity:
Teams that include workers from different backgrounds and experiences can come up with more creative ideas and methods of solving problems.
Making recruitment easier:
Competition is fierce for the most talented workers. In a recent survey, two-thirds of the people polled said that diversity was important to them when evaluating companies and job offers. Additionally, if you recruit a wide variety of candidates – not just those who went to the local college or who match the ethnicity of the rest of your staff – your company is more likely to hire the best and the brightest in the labour market, and with a diverse workforce, your candidates will be more likely to accept your job offers. It’s a beneficial cycle.
Avoiding high turnover:
When an employee leaves, finding and hiring a replacement can be an extremely expensive process. In many cases, a lack of diversity can create an unintentionally hostile environment for those who feel they don’t fit in.
Capturing more of the market:
When your workplace is home to a diverse group of individuals from different backgrounds and experiences, your company can more effectively market to all groups of consumers, from a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds, men and women, older and younger adults, differently abled and those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Building a diverse workplace can help you increase your company’s market share.

Are you creating a diverse workplace?

Adapted from an article by Kim Abreu, entrepreneur.com