Ethnically Diverse Workforces spur Innovation-EntHire
By: Ashana Sachan
Tags: Equality, Diversity In Tech, Hiring, Diversity And Inclusion, Startups In India

How does a company ensure there is a sense of community when people are working remotely?

Diversity and inclusion need to go hand-in-hand as organizations cannot establish diversity without being inclusive. Similarly, they cannot claim to be inclusive if they do not embrace diversity.

More companies now realize this. In a 2019 Glassdoor survey, it was found that 77% of US employees believe that their organization employs a diverse workforce. However, 55% think that their companies should do more in the area of diversity and inclusion, while 64% observe that their employers are already investing in the said aspect. source

Also, in a survey where employees were asked about the most preferable workplace in terms of diversity to choose, the results are shown below:

Growth-oriented companies are the ones that are most likely to carry out and embrace diversity to fuel innovation, giving them a competitive advantage. Bringing diversity to a workplace should be on priority in mind, whosoever is responsible for building a team be it a Team Lead or a founder.

The only reason being, a diverse workforce not only widens the bandwidth of talent from different domains but also brings creativity and innovation in the approach.

‘Great minds think alike’, is a great proverb, but no one ever said that these great minds necessarily have to be from the same place or so-called culture. In a workplace when the whole team welcomes a new joiner with the same vibe, irrespective of its origin, culture or language, only then the inclusion of diversity is visible.

Here are a few key benefits of having a diverse workplace:

Leads Productivity

Members from different cultural backgrounds bring their unique skills to the table. It helps in critically examining a problem or task at many diverse levels.

A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has found that increasing diversity has a direct effect on the bottom line. Companies that have more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenue due to innovation. This finding is huge for tech companies, start-ups, and industry where innovation is the key to growth.

It also helps in understanding the customer base from diverse backgrounds, which results in higher efficiency and effectiveness that boosts employee’s productivity as well.

“When talking about the goal of gender equality, chairman Jack Ma describes women as the “secret sauce” behind Alibaba’s dominance in the online shopping industry. More than one-third of Alibaba Group’s founders were women, and a similar percentage are in senior executive roles.”

Increase Profitability

Inclusion of diversity is also an immense possibility for a company’s growth. It creates more space for creativity and innovation. Newer ideas give rise to the improvement in the product and hence, make it more valuable. More the product/service is valued, more is the profit.

Ethnic and cultural diversity’s correlation with outperformance on profitability was also statistically significant at board level. We found that companies with the most ethnically/ culturally diverse boards worldwide are 43% more likely to experience higher profits.

Source: Delivering through Diversity.

Promotes Cohesiveness

This might be quite surprising, given how diverse cultured workforce can be cohesive. But, it is contrary to the facts. Ethnic diversity not only helps to boost the company’s competitive advantage over other competitors with a more ethnically homogenous workforce but enhances employee satisfaction as they come to work with energy levels and appreciate other team members and different ways of perceiving their assigned tasks.

Diverse companies may capitalize on the multiple perspectives that employees from different backgrounds contribute to problem solving and idea generation. More harmonious working interactions benefit group cohesion and team performance, and employees can grasp better ways of doing things when there is a diverse population to learn from.

Cox, T. H., Lobel, S. A., & McLeod, P. L. (1991). Effects of ethnic group cultural differences on cooperative and competitive behaviour on a group task. Academy of management journal, 34(4), 827–847.

The mix of cultures, viewpoints, and personalities will create better group cohesion.

Encourages Learnings

In a diverse workplace, different minds are brilliant and subject matter expertise in their domains. Having brilliant minds is not a terrible thing altogether, but if all of these brilliant minds fall in a predictable pattern, they eventually devastate the value of your business. These brilliant minds help each other with the shortcomings hence building the nature of learning amongst each other.

Take, for example, a team composed of individuals from three different generations (Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials). Both Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can learn a great deal about new technology and how to incorporate it into the workflow and problem-solving process from the tech-savvy Millennial generation. Likewise, the more laid back Gen Xers and Millennials can learn about the “go-getter” work ethic from the more assertive Baby Boomers.

These learning experiences will help the team and business to run smoothly and efficiently regardless of the difficulties it faces.

Remove Unconscious Biases

Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their conscious awareness. In a company, employees tend to make their assumptions with their preconceived notions. Most of the time, unconsciously, people are judged based on their names on resumes and even their skin colour. This judgement can cause a drawback in hiring the best talent. So, when there is team diversity in any company, it may help in removing the unconscious biases.

“Johnson & Johnson appeared on the number one in Diversity Inc’s top companies for diversity in 2018. Starting with recruitment, Johnson aims to stop gender bias with the use of technology. The company works with Harvard University to train its Interviewers to reduce unconscious bias.”

Creating a diverse and unbiased team is always a primary focus, and when considering candidates, their team uses gender-neutral pronouns, and they make a point to provide anonymous interview feedback to keep opinions as unbiased as possible. They also implemented gender pay equity guardrails to ensure equality across the company.

For any company big or small, it is of utmost importance to bring in the ethnic diverse workforce into practice. It will not only help in fostering the environment for growth for employees but also keeps the company culture growing.

Accenture believes that “no one should be discriminated against because of their differences, such as age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, religion or sexual orientation.” At EY, they believe that “only the highest-performing teams, which maximise the power of different opinions, perspectives, and cultural references, will succeed in the global marketplace.” The organisation was the first of the Big Four to assign full-time, partner-level leadership to diversity recruiting.

At EntHire, we understand that advocating for change in the world starts with change at our own company as well. To see how we’re taking action to improve diversity, equity and inclusion at EntHire, we have a team from diverse background, culture and institutions. Not judging anyone from their previous company or pedigree, we practise an open culture which is helping us broadening our learning spectrum and enhancing team collaboration.

We at EntHire, help start-ups and tech companies build their teams with diverse culture, gender, and ethnicity saving their engineering time and costs by interviewing only vetted and highly targeted candidates.

If you are also looking to build a team we have a pool of 4000+ pre-vetted tech talents, you can reach out to us at business@enthire.co or visit www.enthire.co for more info.

References-

https://hbr.org/2020/11/getting-serious-about-diversity-enough-already-with-the-business-case

https://getsling.com/blog/group-cohesion-strategies/

https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2018/how-diverse-leadership-teams-boost-innovation

https://yello.co/blog/diversity-in-the-workplace-statistics/#chapter-5

https://comparecamp.com/employment-trends/#TOC3

https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofmanagementopenstax/chapter/diversity-and-its-impact-on-companies/