Employees With Different Values, Backgrounds Work Toward Common Goal
For some companies, diversity in the workplace is as important as its employees. In fact, a diverse workforce can even improve creativity and strengthen business. “Diverse companies have a more sophisticated intellectual property than less diverse companies have,” explains Wendy Lewis, vice president of strategic planning, recruitment and diversity for Major League Baseball. “You can buy all the technology, inherit all the MBAs and Ph.D.s and have the most efficient offices, but if you really don’t have a feel for how people are thinking, buying, responding and behaving, you have limited your resources.”
Bigger Audience
Diverse employees allow companies to connect with their clients on a more personal level. By employing a variety of men and women, ethnicities and lifestyles the company generates growth by appealing to a broader audience, says Lewis. “The history of diversity really came out of affirmative action,” explains Vincent Brown, managing partner at Global Lead, a management consulting firm in Cincinnati, Ohio. “Over time, it has evolved from a corrective action to being a business and marketplace advantage.” Though workplace diversity began as a means to rectify non-diverse environments using a quota system, that method of hiring is illegal today, unless specified by a judge. “The way to [create a diverse workforce] under the law is to create an equal opportunity environment, but not just say it -- mean it,” explains Weldon Latham, partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in Washington, D.C., and chairman of its corporate diversity counseling group. “The goal should be to hire the best qualified people available for the job without regard to race, sex, age, national origin, etc. The message there is you need to make sure you’re coming up with objective standards as to who the best qualified are and the people that are making the standards don’t all look the same and don’t all pick standards that have nothing to do with the job.”
Best Interest
However, even today, the law is not always common practice when it comes to hiring a diverse workforce. A recent study published in Psychology Today found that companies are 50 percent more likely to respond to job applicants with white-sounding names, such as Emily and Brendan, than applicants with African-American-sounding names, like Lakisha and Jamal. Though not all organizations filter out racially distinctive names, Lewis believes the majority of companies view diversity as a compliance issue, rather than an opportunity to expand their client base. “Good companies are not doing it because they have to do it anymore, they understand that this is in their best interest for the long-term as well as the short-term,” she says. “They know their company now is not just surviving, it is thriving.”
