Improving organizational performance

Sustaining innovation: A diverse workforce will bring the company a consistent influx of ideas for new products, services and/or processes. Research has shown that heterogeneous groups outperform homogeneous groups, if the diversity is managed. With a constant source of innovation, a company's competitive advantage will be enhanced.

Improving teamwork: Increasingly, employees are working in teams. Moreover, many quality and other concepts rely on teamwork. By addressing communication and tensions between different employee groups, you will improve the functioning of your unit's teams.

Improving global competency: Diversity initiatives help a company become sensitive to cultural differences among various countries around the world. This sensitivity is needed to compete in the global marketplace. Mastering diversity issues improves a company's ability to handle complexity, thus enhancing its ability to deal with the complexity found in the global marketplace.

Enhancing the success of acquisitions: Dealing with diversity issues means learning how to integrate the values and styles of different cultural backgrounds. These integration skills are similar to the ones needed to integrate acquisitions into an acquiring company.

Reducing the cost of discrimination and harassment suits: A proactive diversity effort can help to prevent costly discrimination and harassment suits. In addition to the dollar cost of any settlements, the negative publicity can harm a company's reputation and have a huge impact on future sales and recruiting programs.

Optimizing performance: When diversity issues are addressed, employees can become more productive and effective, thereby increasing the financial performance of the company.

This toolkit is provided for informational purposes only. It is not intended to replace legal, compliance, or other professional advice. TWP assumes no liability for the use of this toolkit.
Web-based Leaders' Toolkit, © Copyright, 2002. Technology Workforce Partners. All Rights Reserved. Technology Workforce Partners was a consortium of high technology companies that worked collaboratively on diversity issues in the workplace from 1995-2005.