- It’s more important than ever for businesses to ask, how does diversity improve performance?
- Organizations that aren’t diverse can get trapped by narrow perspectives and miss important opportunities.
- Including people from a variety of backgrounds opens companies up to different ways of thinking.
- Research data shows that diverse organizations enjoy both financial and workflow benefits that make them more effective and powerful.
- Boomsourcing encourages diversity and strives to include different viewpoints as we build the best solutions for our clients.
In the modern business world, it’s increasingly common to have an emphasis on diversity in the workplace. This emphasis reflects the values of a changing culture. In past decades, in the United States and in other parts of the world, a diverse workforce was a concept that many employers would look at with suspicion. This suspicion had much to do with attitudes informed by old ideologies and simple ignorance. For the most part, those ideas are unpopular now. There are still some places and some people who don’t accept the idea that diversity is a positive benefit, though. Even those who do accept it might still need to ask themselves if they understand why it is a positive benefit. So how does diversity improve performance in the workplace, and in business generally? Let’s take a look.
Why Diversity Matters
At first glance, it might be appealing to a business owner or manager to have a workforce composed of people who think entirely the same way as themselves. They would suppose that things would generally run smoother this way.
It would be easy to make that assumption, but workplaces that feature such sameness can also calcify and become trapped in a rut. Without the input of diverse perspectives, it’s difficult for anyone to understand issues beyond their own perspective. This is because most people don’t realize the extent to which our perception of reality depends on our own biases. It’s very easy for us to let those biases guide our actions without considering how those actions affect other people.
By contrast, when we include other people from diverse backgrounds and experiences, we open ourselves and our organizations up to greater possibilities. Other people can provide us with insights that we might never have thought of on our own. At the most basic level, this is because every individual has different experiences and reacts to those experiences in their own way.
When we talk about diversity though, we’re talking more about including members of whole groups of people that over the course of history have often experienced marginalization. They’ve often been excluded because they were different from those in power in one way or another.
Even when we recognize that the smallest minority is the individual and that every individual does have value, this doesn’t change the fact that some groups of individuals have suffered mistreatment and exclusion over the course of history that have disadvantaged them. Those disadvantages, however, do not mean that these people are less capable of producing great value for our society.
Does Diversity Improve Performance in Business?
Important studies carried out by research organizations and corporations alike continue to reveal that diversity in the workforce and inclusion of different viewpoints in the workplace both contribute to higher productivity. The reasons for this are simple, and it has so much to do with this simple question of what we can see and what we cannot see as individuals.
There’s a reason every human being has two eyes and two ears but only one mouth. We function best when we are able to take in information from different angles. It allows us to see a more complete picture.
These important studies find that firms with women in high leadership roles enjoy millions of dollars in increased value. Companies that encourage diversity and inclusivity enjoy enormous benefits. Employees make greater efforts, stay with the organization longer in their careers, and collaborate more and better with their coworkers.
Inclusion with a Boom!
How does diversity improve performance for us? We consider it one of Boomsourcing’s strongest points as a company, as an employer, and as a service provider. We have operations located in three countries, and at each of these locations, we encourage people from a wide range of personal backgrounds to work with us.
In particular, our offices in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico draw in workers from across the globe. The sheer variety of perspectives they provide allow us to create the most ideal solutions for our clients. We can look at both the big picture and the little details from every angle.
Contact us today to put this diversity to work for you!
