Building diversity and inclusion into the fabric of your business is useful on many fronts. Organisations that engage with diversity and build a diverse an inclusive workplace, do better. They embrace diversity, not only as a means of developing business, but also to build and maintain a workplace that is modern, innovative and a good place to work.
Embedding diversity and inclusion helps your business to grow and increases its intrinsic value, and competitive advantage. It also helps to develop a workplace culture in which colleagues are better engaged with each other and supported in a inclusive environment.
By harnessing diversity, within your companies capabilities, you can create many opportunities to engage with, and win, new customers, clients and recruits.
It is important to remember that embedding diversity and inclusion with a focus on your workplace colleagues, is just as important as it is for your bottom line!
This is necessary to create a workplace environment in which your employees feel a sense of belonging within your business and that your entire workforce feels a sense of belonging, and that their differences are taken into account.
Embedding diversity into your business planning activities, will help you promote visibility, thus capturing the attention of diverse groups of people. This can develop synergies and create new opportunities for engagement.
Diversity and Inclusion Increases Trust and Transparency
Diversity helps to strengthen trust and transparency. By developing a business that promotes inclusion, you can enhance trust and transparency across your staff and management teams.
Embedding diversity across your business strategy will help build trust and transparency with your brand.
By adopting an approach that fosters inclusion, your business brand will gain the trust of a wider range of people.
This, in turn, has a huge potential to grow your business, by targeting wider audiences.
Building stronger, more diverse relationships is one of the key ways that a business can be better prepared for challenges within the marketplace.
A business that develops an engaging approach with a wide range customer groups, is likely to perform better than those who operate within a small customer base.
The right approach can be a real boon for business. Operating an inclusive business development approach, results in your brand being associated with diversity and inclusion, which is a key positive identifier for customers and clients alike.
Customers are likely to view your business in a positive way if they feel their cultural, social and lifestyle needs are acknowledged, and see that your workforce and branding is positive about diversity. This will no doubt inspire trust in your brand and increase your reputation with a wider range of groups.
All of this, however, will not benefit your business if the intent being this is to initiate a tick-box approach that adds little or no value to the experiences of people from diverse communities. This cannot be a performative exercise, which in most cases is readily identifiable, as such! It must lean heavily on making changes within inclusive recruitment, workplace enhancements which support a truly inclusive brand.
Understanding the value of your relationship with social media is important to attract diverse groups. Attracting talent, customers and clients to your business from diverse groups, is not as simple as advertising in the traditional way.
Building a diverse customer/ client base requires an understanding of diverse needs.
Read our blog post '5 key Steps to Enhancing Diversity in Recruitment' for more information about attracting diverse talent to your business.
Diversity Transforms Human Capital in Business
Aligning your business strategies towards diversity is developing a strategy to win! Diversity and inclusion will propel your business in a forward facing direction, helping you to better engage and develop innovative products, services to advance your business.
Developing your organisations people, learning and development strategies, to incorporate diversity is critical. It will ensure that your business is fit for purpose in an increasingly diverse marketplace.
Building a talented and diverse leadership supports diversity and inclusion, drives innovation and improves brand visibility.
Businesses should seek to attract highly skilled talent for leadership positions, to promote inclusion and drive innovation within the business.
Strategic diversity planning and recruitment activities, will help to build diversity into your business. These processes will ensure that your business has the right people in place, with the right capabilities, to propel your business forward.
Embedding diversity into your recruitment strategy will directly impact diversity within your business, and potentially develop of your client and customer base. It will not however have an impact on inclusion, unless your business initiates process for fairness and equity around pay, gender and progression within the business.
Through the strategic and cultural alignment of your talent engagement activities, you can attract, retain and develop diverse staff who will add to the creativity and innovation within your business. This will help you to leverage diversity as a means of engaging diverse talent, but as a means of diversifying your product and service lines.
However, this is not merely about increasing the number of visibly diverse staff members within your company. There will be work to do to align your business with inclusivity.
Read our post entitled 'Diversity is Not a Numbers Game', where we discuss the reasons why simply having a diverse staff team, can negatively impact your business.
Optimising your Business with Diversity and Inclusion
Diversity can be used to optimise your business in several ways. It offers the opportunity to develop successful performance across all areas of your business.
By uncovering and delivering on untapped opportunities, you business can build lasting value, through diversity.
Optimising diversity will build lasting value for your clients, customers and staff.
The UK's leading companies focus on optimising their businesses for diversity, mindful of its business benefits. Board members, C-Suite executives, and senior managers, continually reassess their portfolios for ways to increase diversity and competitive advantage.
They are aware of the business benefits of diversity and its ability to create value. They are knowledgeable of the ways in which strategic alliances with diverse groups enable them to build their business and attract talent and customers and build their businesses.
They are aware of the the ways in which diversity impacts positively on the full spectrum of business outcomes.
By embracing diversity and building inclusive practices into your business, your business and your workforce will grow!
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Kenroi Consulting is a bespoke diversity consultancy. We provide tailor made solutions for businesses across the UK.
W: www.kenroi.com T: 0203 633 1185 E: info@kenroi.com