Ensuring your company is culturally diverse is important for so many reasons. Not only is it the law, but cultural diversity brings with it many benefits for businesses. If you own a business, you should be making a conscious effort to be more culturally diverse if you want the best for your employees and your company. Here are just seven amazing benefits of promoting cultural diversity in your own business.
What is Cultural Diversity?
If your business is culturally diverse, this means you are open to hiring employees from many different backgrounds, regardless of religion, culture or race. Retaining a good set of employees from different backgrounds encourages diversity and brings with it may skill sets and advantages. Many businesses are already culturally diverse without the need to think about it, and this needs to continue to ensure every person has equal rights and to make sure the world continues to become a better place. As mentioned, cultural diversity in the workplace is part of the law and no employer should ever withhold a job due to someone’s religion or race, just as they cannot withhold a job due to someone’s age or sex. In a world full of diversity, the workplace should be the same.
Reduces Racism
Unfortunately, racism does still exist. By providing a culturally diverse workplace, you are discouraging racist behavior and enlightening others on the importance of inclusion for all. For some, racism just boils down to not understanding others’ beliefs or religious views, but allowing people from all walks of life to come together to work; this allows each one of them to better understand one another. Exposure to other backgrounds makes you much more aware of why people believe what they do or act in a certain way and therefore reduces the risk of racism. Providing your workforce with diversity training is also essential to reducing racism. You can hold diversity training in your workplace or online, with the help of findcourses.com. This ensures that your employees understand the need for cultural diversity and why they should also be promoting it.
Brings a Wide Range of Skills
When your business hires employees from many different backgrounds, you are instilling a new set of skills into the team. The more diverse your workforce, the more skills your employees will bring to the team. Each employee will already have a unique skill set and ability, but when you broaden your horizons and find those who may have a completely different background, you are also opening your business up to a new way of working. Many people have different ways of working, so putting all these together ensures that you find the best way of many to work. Diversity in skills can lead to better products and services offered by your business too.
Provides a Positive Reputation
Being culturally diverse in your business will give you a better reputation. Nobody wants to work with a business that is not culturally diverse and having a wide range of employees from different backgrounds will mean that you will appeal to the mass market, rather than just one culture or background. This is because each individual employee can help you change your aim and business to appeal to more people. You will also become a more reputable employer and more people will want to work for you. Those looking for a job would happily choose a culturally diverse employer over one that is not interested in diversity. Understanding diversity begins on a personal level, so bringing in a diverse workforce allows you to think outside the box and appeal to everyone, therefore giving your company a better reputation.
Reduces Employee Turnover
As you are enticing more candidates to your business when you are culturally diverse, you are better able to sift through possible candidates and find the one that is right for your business. If you do not promote cultural diversity and you only have a small number of candidates apply, it may be that you do not find a suitable candidate, and this may lead to hiring someone that is not right for the job. If you want to be spoilt for choice and reduce employee turnover, ensure that your business is culturally diverse. Make sure that you show potential candidates that you are culturally diverse, as this will attract more candidates and they will be aware that you do not partake in employee discrimination.
Increase Profits
There have been many workplace studies carried out that show how cultural diversity can lead to better profits. As stated earlier, cultural diversity can lead to better and more diverse skill sets, as well as more potential candidates, leading to less staff turnover. Taking all of these into consideration, your profits can increase significantly. For example, a study taken in 2013 by the Center for Talent Innovation discovered that 48% of U.S. companies who were culturally diverse at senior level increased their shares on the market. Those who had less diversity in their management had less growth, with only 33% of these businesses reporting the same amount of growth. This may be for many reasons, including global business trends and the benefit of diversity in language. If your employees can speak different languages, you can open your business up to more potential buyers.
Increase Creativity
The more cultural diversity in a team, the more creativity there will be. This also means that you will gain more perspectives and solutions to problems within your business. This leads to more ideas being developed and more than one way to fix a problem, meaning you could combine solutions to not only fix a problem, but improve your business further. Businesses who encourage cultural diversity in their workplace will inspire their staff to perform better and work together with others.
Improve Productivity
A diverse business can lead to better productivity. No matter what a candidate’s background, when they work for your business, each employee is working together towards one common goal, using a wide range of skill sets. This allows employees to learn from each other, combining skill sets to become more productive. Learning from a different perspective can often lead to employees being able to critically think about situations. Bringing new ideas to your employees in the form of other employee ideas ensures they break away from their comfort zone and provide you with the best work possible. Different backgrounds may mean different education systems, different workplaces and different ways of thinking. Combining these together ensures you find the best solutions to every problem and create a better workplace with better productivity.
Cultural diversity is incredibly important and if you are not already, you should be actively promoting this to ensure that your business is the best it can be. If you want to increase the productivity of your business, improve creativity, increase profits, improve employee engagement and reduce employee turnover, improve your company’s overall reputation and reduce the risk of racism, then being culturally diverse is the way to do so. Finding new ways to do things is what can make your business unique, so find employees from all different backgrounds who can all bring something different to the table to make sure your business is a success.
