Workplace diversity seems to affect team performance in many ways, which is clear from my research. What I found was quite interesting, and today, I would like to share that with you. So, how does workplace diversity impact team performance? 1. Stand out from your competitors 2. Foster a sense of inclusivity 3. Diversity prevents grouping 4.
What I want to emphasize in this blog is that, although diversity is clearly linked to company performance, inclusion in some ways is more fundamental, as it can increase both the level diversity and the performance of a company. Intuitively, it makes sense that inclusion would influence diversity.
Individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds can provide ideas from distinct perspectives; their experiences will make easier to inspire creativity, and will accordingly promote a team performance.
In fact, what many companies have found out is that trying to increase diversity by hiring for diversity at the entry level often backfires, leading to internal strife and high churn rates, as the new employees face incidents that cause them to leave.
With a diverse team, a company is able to come up with more creative ideas, and also have a large pool of talent. These two factors help in improving the performance of the team overall, and as a result, the performance of the organization.
When working with diverse people, it can be easy to form groups based on some similarity which you may find with the other. This is known as the herding instinct. However, a diverse team pushes employees past this instinct to ensure that the team is truly diverse and that the team members communicate with each other.
When you put diverse people in a team, there is a great possibility of conflicts arising. Repeated conflicts can reduce team morale, and it can also reduce the efficiency of the group. An effective conflict resolution strategy should be drawn up by the manager of the team who has a special insight on each of the members.
1. Stand out from your competitors. When a company has a diverse team, it ultimately helps them stand out from their competitors. It is not a surprise that most have still not understood the importance of having a diverse group. For most companies diversity does not seem to be the priority.
Without agreeing upon a single goal, the communication within a team is affected adversely. Hence, in order for diversity in a team to be effective, all members need to agree on a single goal for the team so that each person knows that the intention of the other is the same. 2. Differences in communication.
When an organization values inclusivity, it can also help strengthen the relationship with employees and thus lead to improved individual performance as well. However, while diversity is known to bring about a lot of positive changes, it can be challenging to incorporate effectively in an organization.
Conflict is usually caused when people have a different perspective or opinion about a topic or a task at hand because of differences in their personal needs or demands.
The bottom line is that both diversity and inclusion can contribute positively to the success of a company. However, as companies struggle to increase diversity, I would strongly encourage them to consider the critical importance of inclusion, and to assess and increase their level of inclusion before trying to force an increase in diversity.
In other words, being more diverse does not guarantee performance improvements, unless the experiences of individuals are positive. But even without data, a simple thought experiment can illustrate why it makes sense that inclusion drives performance.