Diversity often feels like difficult topic to discuss at the corporate level; polarization from social media and political candidates have muddied what should be a straightforward conversation within the company. Make no mistake, the history and complexities of race and gender for our society is a complex conversation… but when it comes to the value it brings to a business, the advantages are clear.
In discussions I’ve had with other business owners they often credit diversity in their team as important, but nearly every case for the wrong reasons. Much is made of diversity being a cultural “nice to have” with the impression that diversity is how they give back to the community. This is all well and good, but usually takes on the feeling that diversity hiring is a “check the box” social item rather than a core business strategy. Even worse are companies who view diversity as a means to avoid litigation expenses… an approach that is almost certain to deliver the exact problems they are trying to avoid.
Ultimately, diversity in the workplace is essential for one very basic and fundamental reason: it creates better products and services.
To help understand the biggest value diversity brings to the workplace, an important parallel to review is the “echo-chamber” behavior of social media. Several recent studies have come to the same conclusion: the more time people communicate via a curated list of friends and contacts through social media, the more they disappear into bubbles. Consuming the same sources, opinions and viewpoints has a rapid and dramatically negative effect on our own opinions and decisions.
Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law Professor and former Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has extensively studied the phenomenonof group or attitude polarization that occurs within closed group discussion. The found behavior is shown to move groups of people of accord opinion, “toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own pre-deliberation judgments”. What’s more troubling is that the shift of opinion happens at such a rapid pace that most people never notice the shift toward a very narrow perspective, which in turn becomes the basis for their decisions as fact.
The end result on social media is obvious; we appear to have a more divided and polarized society than ever before, even though this too is likely more perception than reality. But it’s hard to deny that the initial goals for social media, namely growing friendships and broadening our understanding of the world around us, have taken a back seat to arguments, entrenched viewpoints and commercialization. Social Media is an unavoidable echo chamber of ideas, narrowing our perspectives rather than expanding them.
Now consider this behavior against the workplace and you begin to see the most important reason that diversity isn’t just nice to have for a business, but the single most critical factor to success.
Hiring people from different ethnic, gender and social backgrounds into your company is the only way to avoid the trap of thinking too narrowly about your products and services. Once upon a time companies could get away with providing a service to a very small audience, but in today’s global economy you simply cannot succeed unless you are thinking about your product broadly. Having a product vision defined from a very narrow set of opinions and perspectives all but guarantees failure in the market.
Diversity in the office brings different life experiences, perspectives and understanding of the world; which in turn translates to more thoughtful and well-reasoned problem solving, concept development and creativity. Most of the attention is spent on cultural benefits and workplace satisfaction, and certainly those benefits exist… but for companies focused on base line revenue and advantages in a competitive marketplace, the tangible value of avoiding the echo chamber of ideas is paramount. It’s icing on the cake that it also brings about stronger talent retention and community benefits.
In turn, having diverse viewpoints throughout the various levels of your organization is also critical. This isn’t an argument around who you should and shouldn’t promote as much as it is about making sure the viewpoints of your company are listened to and respected at all levels. Creating a diverse management team is a great idea for a many reasons, but at the end of the day a company will have fewer management positions than the available opinions a diverse staff will provide. In other words; once you’ve brought in diversity to your company, you have to ensure you have a mechanism to listen and engage it.
There is nothing wrong with social good, but it’s hard to a business to fully commit to an ideal that is intangible by its very nature. You can’t wave a magic wand and change the way a company full of people emotionally reacts to the world, but you can build on diversity and inclusion to create better experiences for what you build and sell. Put another way: companies aren’t designed to solve social issues, but they are designed to sell products. Better products are easier to sell, and diversity creates better products.
A global understanding of your business is what separates niche companies from truly successful ones… and the easiest and most effective way to achieve that understanding is to hire, promote and most of all listen to a diverse workforce.
Update (2/7): As an update; a few weeks after publication of this article I was contacted by Nikki Barua, who had written an article back in November around diversity and the impact on innovation. While I hadn’t seen her article until she brought it to my attention, we both used similar data points to make our cases, and both of us used the same image from New Profit. We have different means and opinions that lead to our conclusions, but the underlying topic is the same and remains powerful. In the interest of fairness, I’m updating the article to use a new image in the header, and I also do recommend people read Nikki’s original article here. The topic itself, that a variety of opinions and considerations creates stronger innovation, remains a critical one for product and service development.
