A diverse team working together leads to an influx of unique ideas and approaches
Regardless of the type, every successful organization requires innovation, a strong talent pool, and a productive workforce with good organizational skills. One of the ways to get these requirements is through a diverse team. Consequently, this article will discuss the steps involved in creating a diverse team for an organization.
What Is a Diverse Team?
A diverse team involves a healthy mix of people from different backgrounds. These backgrounds could be ethnic, religious, cultural, sexual orientation, or any type of identity available at any given point. Thus, a diverse team has members from different backgrounds, collaborating and working harmoniously to achieve a common goal.
Importance of Diverse Teams
Variety of Ideas
With a diverse team, a group, business, or organization benefits a lot. Firstly, you get an unending flow of creative ideas and approaches to solving problems. According to Fundera, companies with inclusive and diverse teams are 1.7 times more innovative than the average company.
This is because every unique identity comes with its inherent experiences. Thus, for every team member from a different background, you get ideas and suggestions from a different perspective.
Market Reach
Secondly, your business can deliver a wholesome service or product when you work with a diverse team. For service or product-based organizations, having a diverse team helps to create a deliverable that resonates with different people across diverse backgrounds. A study by Harvard Business Review showed that companies with more diverse teams have a better chance of capturing new markets.
This is possible because the inputs from the team members represent the experiences of specific demographics in your consumer base. For example, if you had a diverse team of UI/UX designers working on an app, a lot of the demographics in the consumer base will likely be represented. Consequently, the resulting product or service resonates across all bases.
Reputation
Finally, the organization gets a good reputation for building a diverse team. Nobody wants to work or collaborate with a company that discriminates against people based on their backgrounds. Building a diverse team is one of the best ways to prove that your organization is not discriminatory.
Steps Involved in Building a Diverse Team
Optimize the Company Culture
As much as building a diverse and inclusive workforce is not a day’s work, it starts from somewhere, and the starting point is the redefinition of the company’s culture. The management needs to put policies that encourage inclusion and shun harassment. Providing a clear-cut path for workers who feel aggrieved or left out to air their grievances is also an important step.
Optimize the Recruitment Process
After making inclusion and diversity a core aspect of the organization’s policy, you need to attract talents from diverse backgrounds into the workforce. Your organization can do this in numerous ways.
First, improve on the languages or vocabularies used during recruitment. Some words tend to be divisive and rub people the wrong way. As such, it is better to avoid using these words while posting jobs. Instead, you should opt for neutral and more inclusive terms.
The organization can also use personality assessment tools to better understand applicants in terms of their goals and what they are passionate about. Understanding your applicants is key to building a diverse team.
Remove Any Form of Bias
Despite the provision of inclusive workplace policies, there may be forms of unconscious biases. These biases make it difficult to build a diverse team. Therefore, the best course of action is to identify these biases and remove them as soon as possible.
In most cases, unconscious biases are hard to identify. However, talking to employees and allowing them to provide honest feedback on the company’s policy makes it easier to identify these unconscious biases.
Celebrate Diversity
One of the ways to successfully build a diverse team is by encouraging team members to showcase their diverse identities and celebrate them while at it. This way, other team members get to understand these identities better.
This also helps to build better interpersonal skills within the team. This celebration could be in the form of monthly meetings where the team talks about diversity topics. In addition, you could organize seminars and events centered on these diverse topics.
Conclusion
Seeing the benefits of a diverse team, it is not surprising that many organizations opt for a more inclusive workforce. If you have a diverse team, enrolling them in coding boot camps such as General Assembly, Thinkful, Springboard, and App Academy is also a great way to help them grow and work together, promoting a diverse and inclusive workforce. Since the Coding Dojo acceptance rate is quite high, it is an ideal Bootcamp for employees with minimal tech experience.
Using the steps espoused in this article, your organization can also benefit from a diverse team of professionals, such as data scientists or developers.
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