How does Cultural Diversity Add to a Company’s Success?
Posted on:
Diversity and Inclusion
“What is your ideal work environment?” That's one of the first questions I always ask candidates while conducting interviews for potential new hires for our team. It’s also a question I asked myself when I was job hunting a year ago.
But before diving into the perks of hiring and developing a diverse culture in a company, we need to get to the base of the concept.
What does the word “culture” mean? The best way to describe it is “the way things work around here”.
In a business environment, when we talk about culture, that includes certain of things:
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Company’s values
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Beliefs
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Behaviours
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Leadership
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Company’s policies
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Reward systems
“What does it mean to have diversity within a company?” It sums up to “having people from different backgrounds”. Having a diverse culture at work was super important to me, as a person who emigrated from the other side of the world, and was on my “must have list” while job hunting.
I believe that having a workspace that hires people from different countries and cultures will bring so many advantages. Let’s dive in:
Why is cultural diversity important?
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Diverse teams are more productive and perform better
Diversity of ideas has been shown to propagate creativity and drive innovation, helping to solve problems and meet customer needs with innovative approaches.
Companies with racially diverse teams tend to outperform others lacking in diversity by up to 35%. Having a team with multiple ideas, backgrounds, traditions and perspectives will allow thinking outside the box and will allow increasing the levels of productivity.
Forbes echoed this notion saying that “the best way to ensure the development of new ideas is through a diverse and inclusive workforce.”
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More opportunities for personal and professional growth
Having an inclusive and culturally diverse business will attract talented and ambitious professionals who will appreciate the opportunity for personal and professional growth.
Working with people from different cultural backgrounds will become an enriching experience, and it will allow others to learn from each other and get new perspectives. It will create bonds, similarities and differences that can help the people around the team to become global citizens, abandoning prejudices or an ethnocentric worldview.
For example, at GemPool, we’re massive fans of snacks and cakes. We enjoy trying out new foods all the time, and for that, every time one of our members goes away, we bring different snacks to share at the office and everyone enjoys it. In our team, we have people from different parts of Ireland, India, Argentina and Israel. It’s a fun activity to try different dishes and learn about their cultures.
As well, as we did during the Christmas Holidays, we all have different traditions and it was nice to hear all the different stories in our Christmas celebrations at the office.
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Ability to develop skillsets
Having people with different skill sets, talents, and strengths in one group can help the team as a whole to learn from each other and develop new sets of skills.
Learning from your peers is one of the most effective ways to learn and has proven successful in the past. A workplace that provides everyone with an equal opportunity to contribute, can only generate more effective ideas that would, in turn, lead to company-wide success.
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Retention of staff
Providing your staff with an inclusive work environment will make your employees feel more appreciated, valued, and comfortable. If you work with your diversity and inclusion policies, but also, listen to what the employees need, it will lead to earning their loyalty.
If the employees feel safe and comfortable in the workspace (working remotely or in hybrid mode) it will create bonds, and with bonds comes loyalty. They will stick around and the quality of work will improve over time. Investing in your employee’s well-being will create a successful business.
It’s important to know what your staff needs and hopes are from their employer, and to improve that quality of work environment, listening to them is the key. For example, running employee’s satisfaction surveys every 6 months anonymously is a great way for them to feel comfortable and to give you real information about how they feel, what they need, what are the challenges that they are facing and what kind of changes they would like to see in the future.
It is a great way to learn from them, but also, give you the opportunity to increase your retention levels once you implement those changes.
The more time and research you invest in building a diverse culture by having employees from different backgrounds will boost the atmosphere and the growth of the company.
It’s so rewarding to see how many companies are putting in the effort to build a healthy and diverse culture within their teams. If you really want to improve the quality of your services, the best way to start the journey is by starting in your own company. Taking care of your employees, and how they feel and building a healthy work environment, will definitely increase retention and reputation and the quality of work.
As we’ve been working in this space for a long time, we do understand what candidates seek in their future, so if you require more insight into this particular topic and what is being said in the market, do get in touch with us at info@gempool.ie and we would be happy to share our knowledge.
