Leadership and Diversity: Encouraging Teams to Embrace Inclusion

By : Scott Bahr

All companies need to understand the value of workplace diversity and how it can positively impact their business. Unfortunately, in some industries, embracing inclusion remains a secondary priority, or worse. At Bit Service, we have met with industry leaders to learn more about their approach to workplace diversity and inclusion, and best practices for helping teams to embrace the concept.

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION BENEFIT EMPLOYEES

Communicating the socioeconomic and productivity-based benefits of creating a diverse workplace should demonstrate to existing employees how they will be positively impacted by working with individuals from different, diverse backgrounds. The benefits of a diverse workplace include things like increased creativity, faster problem-solving, and better decision making. In addition, companies with diverse workforces are typically more profitable than competitors who are less diverse, according to research by McKinsey & Company. And this is just the beginning of the benefits. Companies that embrace diversity are prone to having higher employee engagement and reduced employer turnover – meaning managers can spend less time training new hires and more time building the team’s diverse strengths. Improved retention also suggests that diverse workforces are happy workforces, further contributing to employee satisfaction and productivity.

TACKLE PROBLEMS WITH DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES

Workplace diversity offers many business benefits, in part because today’s business challenges require a variety of different perspectives and higher levels of innovation in today’s competitive marketplaces. Companies can be far more effective at tackling problems when they embrace ideas from a range of genders, cultures, races, and age groups. Each of these perspectives interjects different ways of thinking. Managers who can combine them effectively will succeed in getting the team to think outside of the box. When each team incorporates a variety of viewpoints, it quickly becomes clear how diversity and inclusion can benefit the company as a whole, as well as supporting individual employees in need of fresh ideas and creative solutions. Being able to approach problems differently will vastly change the way companies solve problems and innovate.

ENCOURAGE DISCUSSION AND PARTICIPATION

It might seem like a good idea to mandate diversity and inclusion policies and hope that employees take them in stride, but that is unlikely to work. Instead, it is better to have discussions about diversity before guiding policies and rules are put into place. For example, employees can offer suggestions to middle management about current hiring practices, how to speak with employees about diversity, and finding ways for all employees to be a part of discussions surrounding diversity and inclusion. Further, providing opportunities for employees to participate in the community supporting diverse and marginalized people helps to provide alternate perspective and understanding.

These forms of exposure to inclusion can help employees feel comfortable with eventual policies surrounding workplace diversity. 

Diversity and inclusion can be difficult to tackle and bringing employees on board with the idea that the company is purposefully seeking talent with different experiences and backgrounds than their own is not guaranteed to go smoothly. With a gradual approach that includes employees in discussions on the topic, any company can make its workforce more diverse for the benefit of everyone involved.