Diversity is always, one of the most talked about topic in modern industry, especially in the IT industry. Despite being discussed, in almost every corporate event and function, Diversity is still not up to the mark, in most of the organizations. I will try to outline the real meaning of Diversity; it's need to the organization, including the top roadblocks in implementing the key measures to increase diversity and what can be the possible solutions to overcome those.
What is Diversity?
We certainly don't need a definition from a book for this word, as it is very subjective to the use case. In corporate world, Diversity should not only be limited to that people coming form different gender or religion/segment, nationality, but it is more about how to get different ideas, perspectives. In other words,
"Diversity is the enablement to get diverse ideas, to fix the common problems and improve continuously, by welcoming the new ways of working and respecting individuals."
Clearly diversity is not only about getting a few female employees in the team, or celebrating different religious festivals at workplace, it's about value sharing and respecting each other. Diversity goes beyond the target gender, religion and nationality ratio.
Why Diversity?
Every company is there to sell something. In many of the cases, the customers are individuals, coming from varied and diverse backgrounds, socially, economically, regionally and even comes from different genders. Hence, it requires a great amount of study and effort to understand individuals behaviours, requirements and feedbacks. Surveys can not be of help for everyone.
Consider a company is trying to launch a community platform for millennials, globally. The company needs to include many feature, considering various genders, nationality, religions, economy, literacy level etc. Still it will not get up to the mark for most of the users. The reason is simple, you can't just include everyone's view, just by googling or following some texts on some books, which were written decades ago.
How about we do it this way, that we include the diverse people in the company itself, who are coming from various religions, gender, nationality, economy and even literacy. If company include their ideas and views into the product, there are high chances that the platform will be liked more.
Roadblocks
Diversity as Compliance
The main showstopper is considering Diversity as a Responsibility.
"Diversity is not a Responsibility, but a Pathway to Success!"
Many organizations thinks diversity as one of the lose end and they just want to do it for the sake of compliance. However, by doing so, they remain very monotonous in their decision making and same people continue to make decisions and in many cases, doing the same mistakes again and again.
Culture and Mindset
Second problem is a inherited from the first one. Non-diverse groups, often stuck into a mono-mind set, where people sense a phobia, from moving away from the current ways of working. These people consider changing the culture as a risk, hence stuck in their frog-well for ever. Many people just consider themselves superior than others (at gender, class, socio-economic level) and hence feel disrespected working together the non-alike minded people, coming form other divers background.
Key Stake-Holders
In many cases, people at key positions are usually male and from good economies. For them numbers are everything when it comes to fill a key position at CXO level. Apart from People Officers (CHRO), most of the CX levels are suffering form Male dominance. In many cases, same group of people are just changing chairs in various companies, to become CXOs. In most of the cases, companies see diverse people at key position as a risk and often not willing to take that in order to secure the stakeholders wealth.
"It's a loop of Stake-holders, Wealth, Risk and Minimalist, when it comes to appointing a diverse person on a Key position"
In most of the cases, companies just fill entry level positions with few diverse workers, e.g Women, while lateral hiring does not consider any diversity boundaries and often dominated by a monopole.
What to do?
"When it comes to diversity, everyone talks about it, but hardly act what is necessary."
Take the next Step: Inclusivity
Diversity is not done, until you get the ideas from most of the people. It's about getting and letting people involved in decision making and encourage/empower them to put forward their ideas, without a sense of fear.
"Recruiting diverse people is one thing, but getting them to work collaboratively is the key."
Take the right steps, to ensure no one feel embarrassed, due to their failure and non-reciprocated actions, for such failures.
Create an Open Culture
Open culture doesn't end by putting cosmetic auto emails, with women shadows in background, but it starts from there. Create policies, where people are encouraged to put their own ideas forwards, rather than giving them choice to pick one form your own 5 ideas. Take their views into the account, include them in the decision making and create a healthy environment, which supports challenging the status quo and welcome new ideas.
Zero Tolerance to Racism and POSH
People feel secure, when they are protected by written laws, which are followed, when in need. Create fair examples and take a zero tolerance towards the critical issues like Racism and crime against different gender people, especially females and LGBTQA+ members. Create events, which burst the fun out of LGBTQA+ and the phobia associated with it.
"Do whatever it takes to feel people secure, so that they can focus on their job and ideas, rather than worrying about what other people thinking about them."
Diversity has been and will always be one of the key pillar of organizational growth. Diversity impacts more to the bigger orgs, than it does to the SMEs. The larger orgnizations, works on larger scales, and hence covering more diverse people, as compared to the SMEs. Hence their requirement for a sound diversity and inclusion is important to ensure they are addressing most of the target segment.
