The Benefits of Working in Diverse Teams

Many businesses are constantly aiming to achieve diversity through well-built and successful diverse teams. Although in our current business environment it has been found that team diversity extends beyond just gender. Team diversity includes all the skills, cultures, experiences and beliefs employees have.

Having a diverse workforce and ensuring your organisational employees and management embraces diversity is a top priority that organisations should ensure is occurrent. Many HR managers and further organisational leaders must champion and communicate the benefits of diversity within teams and throughout the organisation to ensure a common culture for working in diverse teams is well built.

Likewise, highlighting the various benefits is essential to ensure that diversity improves to be constantly accepted throughout an organisation, so we have provided the top five benefits of working in diverse teams in this blog to help you highlight and understand its importance.

Sparks Creativity and Innovation

Through working in diverse teams’ organisations may observe a greater rise in creativity and innovationthroughout employees. Innovation and creativity are extremely important in any organisation as it is the driving force of competitiveness. When employees show innovation and creativity solutions, ideas and thoughts that promote higher levels of business success are attained.

Likewise, through working in an inclusive team it has been found that innovation and creativity is likely to be attained. Boston Consulting Group reported that organisations that had a diverse team in operation where able to make innovation revenue that was 19 percentage points higher than those companies that did not have any diverse teams.

Diverse Skills, Experience and Resources

Through working in diverse teams’ organisations are able to effectively ensure that teams have a wide variety of skills, experience and further resources available. Diverse teams ensure that there are employees with a variety of skills present in one team, for example, this means that an employee who has strong data management skills may be paired with an employee who has strong resource collecting skills. Both these employees are able to effectively cooperate their skills together to ensure strong outcomes for their teams.

Moreover, through working in a diverse team a wider level of employee experiences may be found which in turn ensures that the mistakes employees have found from the past may be avoided more often when working in an inclusive team. Furthermore, through these employees having more experience and further openness to a variety of tools, teams have a larger pool of resources. The diverse range of resources, skills and experience may effectively give rise to team success through the power of diversity.

Improved Problem Solving and Decision Making

Another extremely essential benefit of working in diverse teams that organisations work to attain is improved problem solving and decision making. The Harvard Business Review  wrote about a study that found people who work in non-diverse teams are inferior to solving problems against individuals who work in widely diverse teams. This means having diverse teams creates a strong competitive advantage that many organisations wish to achieve to effectively drive operational success.

With the efforts and collaboration of an inclusive team, team members are able to come up with highly thought-out problem solutions and decisions to ensure the best outcomes may be achieved as efficiently as possible. Moreover, when diverse teams collaborate in extremely well it can be found that they will outperform individual decision makers a large majority of the time.

Strengthens Employee Retention

Another important benefit that arises due to organisations having teams diversity is that employee retention will effectively become stronger. When organisational employees see that management cares about creating an environment of diversity in the workplace and further ensuring talent pools that will lead to strong diverse teams are being created, employees become increasingly satisfied with the organisation.

This is largely due to employees wanting to work for an organisation that does its best to not only meet diversity norms but further build a strong workforce were sharing resources, learning new skills and communicating with a diverse workforce is easily occurrent. Likewise, employees that understand when working in a team their opinions matter in a diverse group will find an increase level of motivation and in turn become easier to retain.

Stronger Company Reputation and Employee Engagement

Through effectively assuring employees work in an inclusive team it may be found that company reputation and employee engagement will increase. Deloitte had found that a key driver of employee engagement was actually diversity. The research demonstrated that when employees found that the organisation works to ensure diversity a positive influence on employees’ level of work engagement would be found.

Moreover, through encouraging strong employee engagement through diversity the company’s reputation built through employee advocacy and external views would be positively influenced. This is due to allowing diversity in an organisation is aligned to the values of many in the business environment today. Likewise, ensuring that management encourages working in diverse teams may effectively positively influence both employee engagement and company reputation.