More Diversity, Better Performance

When we come back from vacationing in another country, we rave about all the unique food we ate. We tell our friends about the cultural customs we experienced, the history we learned on the tours, and our new companions that hosted our Airbnb. Even on a typical Saturday night at home we ask ourselves, “Am I feeling Chinese, Sushi or Italian for dinner tonight?” We embrace diversity in our personal lives because it gives us unique perspectives and broadens our experience. Doing the same in our business life not only makes work more enjoyable but also adds to team performance and improves business results.

From a business performance standpoint, studies show that more diverse teams leads to more innovation, revenue, and adaptability to change. But creating diverse teams doesn’t just happen on its own. You need to create dedicated initiatives and build a plan around team diversity. 
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Why is Diverse Better in the Workplace?‍

Diversifying your teams through gender, race, cultural background, and sexual orientation allows for a broad range of perspectives when dealing with problem identification, idea generation, and approaches to solutions. These benefits are seen regardless of industry:

• Healthcare studies showed patients generally fare better when care was provided by more diverse teams
• For VC firms, diversity significantly improves financial performance on measures such as profitable investments at the individual portfolio-company level and overall fund returns
• Businesses across the globe that have diverse management teams lead to an average of 19% more revenue‍
  

What You Can Do to Boost Team Diversity‍

Here are some simple initiatives you can take to kickstart building more diverse teams.

• Talent Acquisition: Data suggests that homogeneous organization will tend to become even more so as it scales up. So it’s important to encode diversity in a company’s DNA at the earliest stages through recruiting and talent acquisition initiatives. 
• A Culture of Inclusion: Before you can truthfully implement a diversity initiative, you’ll need to ensure the management team and key stakeholders adopt a culture of inclusion. From a recent Forbes study, “Companies that fail to be inclusive toward employees, especially those whose characteristics differ from the characteristics of majority employees, will find it hard both to recruit and to retain a diverse workforce. ” 
• Match Your Customer: At a very minimum, the diversity of your company should be similar to that of your customer base. If you have plans to grow your product internationally, this is critical if you’d like your product to lead the market.  

You can see how a lack of diversity impacts performance in a study in 2017 by The American Society of News Editors. They found that almost every major newspaper in the nation, from the New York Times to the Boston Globe to the Washington Post, is whiter than its audience city.

How Admios Can Help with Your Diversity Initiatives‍

Admios provides technical talent to engineering teams from countries throughout Central and South America each with unique backgrounds and perspectives. We believe our mission to hire more female software developers and promote female talent in the workplace is something every software company should employ. Check out our Develop[HER] video series for more on this initiative and how you can get involved. 

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If you work on talent acquisition teams and are looking to diversify your company, chat with us to see how we can help.