In many organizations, diversity is a must to ensure high quality of work. It has an intense focus for recruitment purposes. The more the institution is diverse, the more they receive attention and good reputation. That’s what a diversity and inclusion should do. Sometimes those institution do not only focus to do better from inside, but to show how much they are stronger for the outside people.
The actual purpose of diversity and inclusion
Diversity doesn’t mean to include different people only to seem competitive in front of other companies. But, it is about innovation, as well as high level of performance and quality of service. According to the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co, companies that exhibit gender and ethnic diversity are, respectively, 15 percent and 35 percent more likely to outperform those that don’t. Thus, diversity helps to raise the performance of organizations and allows to have healthy environment.
Diversity and inclusion is for people to feel they are equal and that their skills, experiences, and behaviors are not judged by if they are females or males, white or black, Muslims or Jewish, or any other differences. At the same time, we should not over sympathy with vulnerable people because we need to include diverse team members.
Is it implemented in the way it should be?
I do remember a video for a couple of students in a class. The teacher was evaluating them for a conference participation. She was giving less for smarter and more for the most vulnerable student. That assessment seems not fair and might be funny for most people who watched it. The class was diverse, but every student was treated differently.
The point from this story is we need to recruit diverse people to our community, but before that, we have to make sure that we treat every body the same way. We cannot push anyone to the margin because of his religion, ethnicity, believes, national origins, gender, education or any other dimension. We cannot dismiss them from the community, until they feel stranger, and then, we ask them to be part of the community. That’s not what diversity and inclusion mean.
To sum up, we should not only embrace the differences of dimensions, but also to celebrate them and ensure that everyone in the team value each one’s differences. In order to implement inclusion, there should be a strong strategy that help organizations to embrace diversity in the right way. This strategy should include certain policies that are equally applied to all.
