Skills on How to Maintain Diversity Initiatives in the Workplace

Today’s workforce is calling for a stop to bias and prejudice and an increase in diversity initiatives. It is time for businesses to take effective action. 

What is diversity?

Broadly speaking, diversity refers to the demographic perspective. It means that a workforce includes a heterogeneous mix of people representing a variety of ethnicities, genders, ages and abilities. 

Benefits of diversity initiatives in the workplace

Diversity in the workplace is all about creating an inclusive environment, accepting of every individual’s differences, enabling all employees to achieve their full potential and as a result, allowing businesses to reach their fullest potential. If you value each person’s differences then you are allowing each person to contribute their unique experiences, which can have an extremely positive impact on work, other employees, motivation, productivity and customer experience. 

What are the main benefits of diversity in the workplace? 

Different perspectives and innovation

As employees will have different backgrounds and characteristics, it also means that their skills, experiences and abilities are likely to be different as well, which can mean you have a very well-rounded team. This is also great from a learning perspective as the team will have access to these different perspectives and so will enable the team to widen their experience and learning. This also means that your employees are more likely to collaborate and come up with more innovative and creative ideas. 

Problem-solving and decision-making

Again, because of the different perspectives of your teams, individuals can come together, utilising their different viewpoints to bring diverse solutions to the table. This means decisions can be made quicker, making for an extremely competitive business in today’s marketplace. Research from Harvard supports this as it found that diverse teams are able to solve problems quicker than cognitively similar individuals. In addition to this, when employees from different backgrounds come together, they tend to come up with a wider range of solutions 

Increased employee engagement

Research has shown that employee engagement is heightened through diversity and inclusion: when employees feel more included, they are automatically more engaged. 

Increased employee retention

If an organisation is operating a diverse workforce, it means that it is open to different perspectives and characteristics. When employees feel accepted and valued, they are less likely to stray if another opportunity were to arise and less likely to hunt for new opportunities because they are unhappy. As a consequence, your employees will be more motivated, will respect the business and are far more likely to stay. As a result, your employee turnover rate will be far less than that of a non-inclusive nature. In addition, recruitment is extremely expensive and time-consuming and so if you can hold on to valuable employees you will potentially be in a far stronger position than your competitors. 

Ready to introduce more diversity initiatives?

If you wish to learn more about the importance of diversity initiatives in the workplace then please feel free to get in touch with us today. With experience in teaching the importance of diversity in the workplace, we can help you to benefit from inclusive workplaces.