Embracing Diversity (7 Great Reasons!)

Source: http://www.ciphr.com/blog/7-reasons-you-should-embrace-a-diverse-workforce/

Employee diversity shouldn’t just be a ‘tick in the box’ for your business. Here’s 7 reasons you should embrace a diverse workforce.

1) Improved understanding of your customer base

With employees from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences comes a greater understanding of customers points of views. The more diverse your workforce the more likely it is that they’ll be able to empathise with your individual clients needs.

2) Increased productivity

Greater diversity offers different ways of thinking. A broad mix of prior experience and expertise in certain processes encourages employees to discuss and learn from each other. If employees are comfortable speaking with their colleagues and expressing their opinion then collaboration and teamwork thrive.
It’s also been shown that more diverse brands have higher levels of morale, which in turn leads to greater productivity and employee satisfaction.

3) Greater innovation and creativity

As with productivity, different backgrounds, experiences and skills leads to greater innovation and creativity. With a broad range of backgrounds comes an increased level of creative talents and ideas.

4) Increased skillset

The more diverse your employees the greater the set of skills and competencies your brand will have at it’s disposal. It’s never a bad thing to increase your brands ability to cope with an ever changing market or increase innovation and creativity. A greater diversity within the workforce increases your company’s ability to succeed no matter what the future may hold.

5) Improved employee onboarding and retention

New employees can be onboarded and integrated more easily when there are employees that they can relate to. Employees who feel comfortable, valued and able to integrate within a business are less likely to seek employment elsewhere. This in turn reduces costly recruitment processes and helps to build expertise and experience within the employee base.

6)A larger talent pool

Brands that embrace diversity benefit from a larger talent pool than those looking at select groups of potential applicants. This in turn leads to faster and often more cost effective recruitment processes.

7) Positive employer branding

Diverse brands are seen favourably by many and this can only be a positive thing for any business. If your brand is known for the qualities mentioned above then it will be seen as a creative, innovative, productive and progressive organisation that many will want to work with.