Top Reasons To Invest In A Diversity Strategy And How To Get Started

There are many academic studies that focus on the organizational and managerial factors that drive sales, profitability and financial performance. Diversity in the workplace is one such area that plays a critical role and is a strategic prerequisite for business success in today’s hypercompetitive global environment. In particular, a diversity strategy can help companies to improve financial performance in terms of achieving commercial goals and the quality of products and services. This is the reason that this strategy is so popular among practicing managers today.

The ultimate business outcome is financial success which narrows the gap between success and failure and this can be achieved by the commitment of its members and facilitated by an executive acting as a facilitative-leader. In doing this, corporate leaders need to focus on the critical human assets such as commitment and thus help followers to effectively implement organizational changes with both efficiency and effectiveness. They can shed light on the strategic role of follower attitudes and values to accomplish a higher degree of effectiveness, and highlight the importance of employees in implementing changes at the organizational level. When corporate leaders show concern for the employee’s individual needs, individuals begin to contribute more commitment and they become more inspired them to put extra effort into their work. This extra effort improves the quality of products, customer satisfaction, and impacts the return on assets, sales, shareholder value, and finally improves financial success and operational risk management.

Financial success mentioned above can be only achieved by a diversity strategy. Follower’s diversity of skills and interpersonal relations that is based on trust and reciprocity can improve innovation and the performance of group cohesiveness. At this point, you’re probably asking why the diversity of skills is so important. The simple answer is that companies that may lack diversity in the workplace cannot share their knowledge. With an effective diversity strategy, global leaders may improve knowledge sharing and learning that can eventually enhance financial performance in global markets through empowering human resources and enabling change at the organizational level. Executives can increase workplace diversity to facilitate knowledge sharing and build relationships, aiming at improving customer satisfaction through acquiring additional knowledge from customers, developing better relationships with them, and providing a higher quality of service and/or products for them. Furthermore, creating an expert group or steering committee may be short-sighted because such groups may not have sufficient diversity to comprehend knowledge acquired from external sources.

Leadership in some companies has failed to pay attention to this important matter and create a team that makes diversity a priority and represents a variety of ideas and perspectives. A leadership status that is not only a failing platform but one that represents destruction as opposed to innovation and expansion. This leadership gap can provide lessons for CEOs and executives in today’s organizational challenges. The fact remains that leaders that manage diversity and use it as an important driving force for financial success find their companies to be more competitive and on the cutting edge.

In conclusion, the question posited for top management executives and leaders in any and all companies is to accept the challenge of diversity strategy implementation in order to address the current gaps in business effectiveness and improve their financial performance and competitiveness in global markets. Thus, I suggest that executives embrace a diversity strategy. I attempt to blend scholarly concepts with real world application through thoroughly looking at an effective strategy for maximizing financial performance. Based on this article, executives can now see that they must be aware that their diversity in the workplace can fundamentally affect the way a corporation performs its functions and can make a fundamental change in the processes by which a company achieves commercial objectives, improves sales and profitability and also increases financial performance. Thus, financial performance is dependent upon how executives formulate their diversity strategy. And business success for companies in today’s global business environment can be better achieved when a diversity strategy is effectively applied and widely used to achieve a higher degree of effectiveness and financial performance. Therefore, when companies can have a very diverse employee population, they will secure a foothold in the ever-expansive global business environments.

Written by Mostafa Sayyadi.