Workforce Diversity Management for Creativity and Innovation

Diversity is quickly becoming a key practice among organizations looking to establish more ethical and all-inclusive working environments that more effectively represent modern time. While these diverse hiring methods allow for organizations to genuinely reflect their own respective values, developing a diverse workforce can also help businesses work towards continual success and longevity in over-competitive markets.

Innovation is about the execution of creative ideas that generate value to our customers’ business or life in a new, simple way. Diversity increases your chances to understand your customers and what value means for them.  At the same time, it provides different points of view to promote creative breakthroughs.

However, for all its advantages, its benefits are being overlooked. According to one recent survey, 35% of companies reported that ensuring workplace diversity was their top inclusion priority.

Not surprisingly, our workplaces tend to mirror the sociocultural dynamics at play in our lives outside work. Having built and scaled a multinational enterprise over nearly two decades, I’ve learned that diversity in the workplace is an asset for both businesses and their employees, in its capacity to foster innovation, creativity and empathy in ways that homogeneous environments seldom do. Yet it takes careful nurturing and conscious orchestration to unleash the true potential of this invaluable asset.

In this era of globalization, diversity in the business environment is about more than gender, race and ethnicity. It now includes employees with diverse religious and political beliefs, education, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientation, cultures and even disabilities. Companies are discovering that, by supporting and promoting a diverse and inclusive workplace, they are gaining benefits that go beyond the optics.

Business has the transformative power to change and contribute to a more open, diverse and inclusive society. We can only accomplish this by starting from within our organizations. Many of us know intuitively that diversity is good for business. The case for establishing a truly diverse workforce, at all organizational levels, grows more compelling each year. The moral argument is weighty enough, but the financial impact as proven by multiple studies makes this a no-brainer.

Innovation

Most employers understand that diversity is good for promoting innovation in the workplace, but they don’t understand why. However, thanks to a recent Harvard-funded survey, the impact that diversity has on innovation in the workplace is now measurable.

The nationally representative survey helped to measure diversity’s impact on innovation by determining two types of diversity needed for success inherent and acquired. As established by the survey, inherent diversity includes traits individuals are inherently born with. For example, a person’s ethnicity and sexual orientation would be considered inherent diversity. Whereas, acquired diversity involves traits individuals gain from experience like living abroad, higher education, previous job occupations and so on.

 The study encourages companies to work towards establishing two-dimensional diversity, which can be done by creating leadership teams that demonstrate an even mixture of inherent and acquired diversity. Two-dimensional diversity encourages free-associative thinking, innovation and a safer workplace where differences are showcased and embraced. Companies exhibiting two-dimensional diversity are more likely to report market share growth than companies lacking diversity. These same companies are also better able to develop compelling and innovative ideas to serve underrepresented, and previously underserved, markets.

Disruption and innovation

The coming together of people of different ethnicities with different experiences in cities and societies is a key driver of innovation. The food that we eat every day is a result of this blending of cultures. The most successful musical genres, such as jazz, rock’n’roll or hip-hop, are the products of cultural amalgamation.

Diversity and Business performance

There is substantial research to show that diversity brings many advantages to an organization: increased profitability and creativity, stronger governance and better problem-solving abilities. Employees with diverse backgrounds bring to bear their own perspectives, ideas and experiences, helping to create organizations that are resilient and effective, and which outperform organisations that do not invest in diversity.

Ways to Use Diversity to Drive Innovation

You’ve developed a diverse workforce, and now you want to maximize your innovation. Here’s a four-step plan to help you do it.

Promote Inclusion

A diversity of ideas and viewpoints can lead to creative ideas to fuel innovation. Therefore, to take advantage of what diversity has to offer, minorities need to feel that they are heard and encourage to celebrate the differences, to feel that their opinions matter and therefore will bring their ideas to the table.

Provide a safe environment

Protect the budding innovation in your organization by focusing on promoting a safe environment to make decisions and make mistakes. There is no way to get to an innovative idea out without trying ideas that do not work. This is important regardless of the makeup of your workplace but much more important when you are in a diverse workforce where minorities already have the burden of thinking they have to be better than their white male counterparts. Be purposeful about providing permission to fail.

Encourage Decision-Making

When you have workers from many different training and cultural backgrounds, you’re naturally better-able to draw on different ideas and come up with unique solutions. Enhance this by using innovative techniques to brainstorm like diverge/converge techniques so the decision-making is as horizontal as possible. This process will promote independent thinking and encourage better decisions within your company. It’s also a great way to foster innovation faster.

Boosting your Culture

Workplace diversity has historically been a soft-sell, but now is the time to use it to promote higher returns on equity. When you onboard a diverse team that’s unified around sales goals, understands your customer and has a vibrant innovative environment is a good sell to your customers as much as to attract talent. Use it boost your company into the stratosphere.