Cultural diversity in the workplace grows when employers don’t discriminate against employees (and job candidates for that matter) on the basis of their cultural background. That lack of cultural bias is, in and by itself, a positive aspect of your employer brand.
This is the key point: Top talents in labor markets all over the world wish to work for organizations that don’t encourage any form of discrimination and/or intolerance. You run the risk of missing out on the best talents if your current workforce isn’t culturally diverse. Note that hiring and retaining top talents in your niche gives you the much-needed competitive edge over competitors and, consequently, boosts your ROI. That is why you must check your cultural bias, if you haven’t done that already, and adopt an open-minded approach towards workplace cultural diversity.
To help you understand better why you need cultural diversity in your company, here are 6 benefits of cultural diversity in the workplace:
1. Increased workforce innovation
Workforce innovation stems from a better, a different fundamental approach to everything you do as an organization. When people from distinct cultures come together to discuss business prospects, they bring a wide variety of diverse viewpoints that, when harmonized, can give birth to unbelievably innovative and inventive ideas. Remember that these are people who see the world from totally different and unique perspectives. They convert your company’s thought machine from a monolith to a conglomeration of free-flowing, dynamic, and growth conscious ideas. Multicultural co-operation also helps you design more effective marketing strategies and improves your all-around service delivery.
2. A multicultural workforce is a multilingual workforce
If yours is a globally-minded organization, hiring multicultural employees will give you a better chance of expanding and succeeding outside your national and regional borders. That is because multiculturalism often means multilingual: Your workers possess fluent communication skills in multiple languages. Some of them probably speak English as their second or third language, so you can imagine how resourceful they can be in their primary language. These team members will interpret feedback from customers who cannot speak English, translate your ads especially when you cannot afford a professional translator, and proofread official documentation (web content included) to guarantee factual accuracy. They will check for grammatical errors in your social media posts and direct messages. If you have ASL speakers in your team, they will help you build a stronger sense of understanding with your deaf and hard of hearing customers. The quality of your sales, marketing, and customer support greatly improves as a result.
3. To foster workplace inclusion
Culture is a core part of anyone’s life. People feel more at home and not like they have to survive abuse when they are allowed to share their experiences and reflect their cultural backgrounds in the workplace without being discriminated against. However, if there is one dominant cultural group in your company, minority cultures are more often than not suppressed to extinction. People from these cultures feel like they need to mask core parts of themselves in order to fit in. If, on the other hand, diverse cultures are equally represented right from the top executive team down to the lowest ranks, everyone feels included. Everyone feels seen. Cap that off by eliminating cultural bias in the evaluation process and promotion opportunities and your rate of employee retention will automatically improve!
4. Increase knowledge sharing in the workplace
For starters, a culturally diverse workforce provides educational opportunities for everyone involved with the company. Workers learn new languages from one another, the company culture gets richer from tapping into multiple cultures within the workforce, and employees tap into each other’s career and life experience to grow their own professional profile.
Speaking of knowledge sharing, there is a chance that your culturally diverse team is in fact a remote team. Hiring a remote team enables you to comb every city and village and recruit the best talents in the world. It also eliminates the need to bring these talents to work in the head office. These employees work either from home or from co working spaces near them. And because they have to constantly share information via the internet, mostly by email, it is best that you advise them to download software, such as WinZip to unzip and zip files with ease. Such a tool helps remote teams to share files through email both quickly and safely. Furthermore, you can encourage the use of email automation software that reduces the repetitive labor of sending out the same email to the entire team. This greatly reduces the annoyance associated with sending emails to the team and other contacts for operational purposes, such as partnerships, sales, promotions, ultimately optimizing employee productivity.