The benefits of a diverse team
By: Caio Braga
Tags: UX, Teamwork, Diversity, Tech, Design

em·pa·thy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

As a designer, I have always had this false belief that my field was diverse — after all, while I heard about teams that were predominantly male, I have had the pleasure of having many women as leaders and mentors in my career.

Oh boy, I was wrong. Since I moved from Brazil to the US and found myself being part of a minority, I have learned that I have a lot to learn about diversity.

Diversity is more than having someone in your team that has a different gender, ethnicity or background from you.

Diversity is about inclusion and belonging. It is about the constant act of questioning our bias and world views, and bringing other people to the conversation.

It's an ongoing action. And we all have to start somewhere. Let's start with the benefits of having a diverse team — not to say why it makes mandatory to the design practice.

Diversity helps you find better talent and define your company culture

With such a heated market, it is daunting to hire the right person. So, you ask friends and colleagues for recommendations. You go on online groups from your University to find someone.

However, by doing that, you are likely hiring someone just like you. Because schools, universities, neighborhoods and almost all social circles have the same diversity problem, you are just transferring the problem from one environment to the other.

Even when a candidate is not someone's referral, we try to find on their résumés something to relate to some way. We let our unconscious bias make decisions for us and define how we respond to something. Our first challenge, then, is to move away from this bias.

Another interesting parallel is with the culture of UX unicorns. As described on this article from UX Matters, bringing people with different backgrounds and career paths not only can help with diversity, but also bring balance and different skill sets and perspectives to the team. Together, they can assist solving design problems in different ways.

As Reshma Shetty states on this article on FastCo: "The real challenge, I thought, is to look for talent that’s being systematically undervalued by the competition."

Hiring is the first step to having a more diverse team, but also the first benefit of it: There are super talented designers outside of your bubble if you can break it.

Your company can naturally attract these talents with a culture of inclusion and without wage gaps. The hiring process starts with the employer actions that define its culture.

“The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.” — Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility

Diversity increases the team performance and innovation

It’s easy to feel safe surrounding yourself with people just like you. But you are paying a big price for this short-term benefit. You are missing out on creating a safe space for innovation and different ideas.

Like Netflix' presentation about culture states: culture is who you hire, promote and let go. If you only hire like-minded people, you are just sending a message that this is the only way to work at your company. And that impacts your team's work, their performance, and innovation.

Homogenous teams feel easier — but easy is bad for performance — HBR article

The team members should feel safe, not their ideas. Talking about bias and cultural differences can’t be a taboo. Being aware of the team member’s different backgrounds it’s the first step for empathy. “Of course, we’re talking about intellectual conflict, debate, and controversy, not personality conflict (…)A good manager wants to encourage the former but squashes the latter.” — Stanford Business.

Diversity is about highlighting the differences, not hiding them — HBR article

For the team members, diversity helps to avoid group-thinking. A discussion with conflicting thoughts requires more effort from all team members, which leads to an increase in performance and the quality of their work.

For a designer, different point-of-views can also help reduce bias from the work and, consequently, coming up with better, richer solutions. Divergent point-of-views are particularly valid for the early stages of a design process to collect different ideas and insights.

This is valid not only for business, scientific research also benefits from it. As Richard Freeman’s study concluded: “if you write a paper largely with people of your own group, it’s likely the paper gets fewer citations than if you write it with a broader group of people. You tend to do better if you stretch”.

Diversity is a requirement to design

If you want to know what America will look like in a generation, look at its classrooms right now. In 2014, children of color became the new majority in America’s public schools. — Sarah Carr

The world is diverse. Companies just cannot afford not being. The future demands it.

We are designing for a global, diverse audience. In our 2017 State of UX Report, we said that companies are starting to realize they were not only responsible for their impact on society, but also that the transformations in society can impact their product design. The same way we cannot just hire from our bubble, we can't just design for our bubble. And we can't design for this beautiful, plural world inside the vacuum of our bubble. It requires having diversity in our mindsets, in our day-to-day.

Isn’t this what design is all about?

We cannot effectively design without curiosity, empathy with our users, and some consciousness of our bias. We know that our work can always be perfected.

If designing is questioning, diversity is a requirement.

I’ll see you in the next story.