How Celebrating Employee Diversity Can Skyrocket Your Business Success

One of my first jobs was as a Mario impersonator. Okay, that wasn’t the exact job description, my shirt was the wrong colour, and only hard-core video game enthusiasts had even heard of Mario at the time (the late 1980s). But I did spend an entire summer dressed in blue dungarees and a cap with a bright yellow shirt while flipping burgers. At the time, this was a significant step up from cleaning out dog kennels, and I was grateful for the work.

But wearing a uniform was not a lot of fun. Maybe part of this was because the uniform I was given was so battered that in the middle of most shifts, I had to resort to using the staple gun to reattach the straps on the dungarees, and there was no question of getting anything the correct size.

I want to think that things have improved since then, and workplaces that require uniforms now make them available in various sizes, recognising the natural variation in human body shapes. However, when I visited a construction site for work last year, the high-vis overalls I was issued were certainly not a perfect fit, and I will not be sharing the photos!

But even when employers recognise physical differences like height and waist size, there is still a long way to go before all the other differences between individual employees are acknowledged and adequately catered for. Whether we are considering clothing or anything else involving people, one size never fits all, and any claims made are for the provider's convenience, not the employee's benefit.

We are all different in an almost infinite number of ways. Even identical twins can have considerable differences in preferences and natural strengths and weaknesses. So, it is high time employers stopped trying to turn every individual in their workforce into a clone of some mythical perfect employee.

Being inclusive means providing for everyone, not forcing everyone to fit into some cookie-cutter profile. But this should never be seen as a chore – employers who recognise and embrace the diversity of their workforces are likely to benefit hugely from doing so. How can this work, and why is it important?

The Benefits of Choice

One key way to embrace diversity and recognise differences is to provide choices in as many areas of working life as possible. This can range from the physical environment to communication preferences and working methods. So often, leaders become mesmerised by the process rather than recognising that the results should be the key focus. This is not to say that good results justify appalling work practices but that there are almost always several perfectly valid routes to the same destination.

I find, too, that in modern workplaces, even where there are choices for employees, they tend to be variations of the same option rather than genuinely different ways of doing something. For example, I once queried an email telling me essential information would be shared with employees by joining a live stream of a conversation between senior leaders. I explained that I struggle to take in information orally and asked what alternative methods of receiving the information were available. The only option offered was to watch a video of the conversation rather than viewing it live! A real choice would be to watch and listen to the conversation, read the key points in a document, or perhaps receive the information in a small group and discuss it with others. That way, everyone can obtain the information in the way that best connects with them.

Similarly, many modern offices claim to offer a choice of workspaces so that employees can move between them and use the right area for each task they carry out. But again, all too often, this is more of an illusion of choice than real variation. The vast majority of the areas are variations on meeting spaces. You can talk with colleagues in formal meeting rooms, on bean bags or sofas, or around coffee tables. You can even have ongoing conversations at a block of desks (if you can hear anything over everyone around you on Teams or Zoom calls!). But you are probably out of luck if you want a quiet space to think. ?There is indeed a wide variety of spaces, but they are all variants of a meeting room, which just does not work for everybody.

Furthermore, employers then demand that their people all attend these offices, even when they are manifestly unsuitable for some of us. Despite what some seem to think, most of us who work at home do indeed work. We do not choose to work at home to avoid working—we prefer to do so because we work better in an environment that is in our control. I cannot help but feel that there is an element of projection in the claims that people working at home are constantly skiving! In my experience, too, there are people in many organisations who may be present all day, every day in the office, but are well known to do little or nothing at all.

It is undoubtedly better for some people to be in a busy working environment with others, able to chat and bounce ideas off each other. But not for all of us. We are adults, and we generally know what does and does not work for us as individuals. Let us be ourselves, and you will reap benefits beyond happy employees.

Our Differences Are Our Strength

Imagine you are a widget manufacturer. You compete with three other widget makers, all of similar size and all making similar products priced roughly the same. Chances are, most widget buyers have their usual brand of choice and tend to stick to that, subject to special promotions and so on. There is little to choose between the products, so there is no real incentive to switch brands.

How can you grow your market share in this situation, apart from offering a heavy discount, which is likely unsustainable? One way is to build a better widget. Perhaps one that lasts longer is easier to use or has additional features. In short, you need to innovate. This is true in most areas of business. Innovation is key to progress and growth. If you can be the first to market with a significant innovation, you have a much better chance of success.

You need ideas and independent thinking. As a rule, these do not come from trying to turn all your employees into clones. You need to embrace their differences because it is these alternative perspectives that can provoke important ideas and breakthroughs. If someone has brilliant ideas whenever they are allowed to work on the beach at 3 am instead of 9-5 in a cubicle, what are you achieving by enforcing the latter? Yet, all too often, this is precisely the approach that employers insist upon.

Rigid corporate structures are a surefire route to groupthink, where new ideas are scarce and quickly extinguished and ludicrous decisions are made because everyone is too scared to point out that the emperor has no clothes. The more you insist that every task and subtask is not only done but done in a specific way, such as by having templates for absolutely everything, the more you are driving out any scope for innovation and progress, not to mention dehumanising your workforce.

No robot or AI is anywhere near as valuable as a human being. You could ask AI to write an article about the importance of diversity in the workplace, and none of them would start by discussing the impersonation of a video game character, as I have done here! The great ideas have all come from human beings, and they always will. The more you suppress the humanity of your employees and force them into arbitrary boxes for your convenience, the more you are designing out the chance of the next big thing coming from our organisation.

We should embrace the humanity of our staff and colleagues. We are emotional, inconsistent, and erratic; we all have hopes, dreams, fears, and insecurities. These most human parts of us are the most valuable and should be encouraged, not forbidden. You may make your organisation predictable by insisting on clones, but you are both abusing and insulting your team and guaranteeing that the ongoing wave of innovation and progress will leave you behind.