Diversity: your key to business success

A workplace with employees from different backgrounds, perspectives, opinions and experiences can deliver a range of positive outcomes to business.From retention to employee wellbeing to creative thinking, workplace diversity is key to not only healthy internal relationships, but also those with customers and stakeholders.

As Australians, we can take pride in the mix of people in our country, and reflect its success by fostering diversity in the workplace. But – how do we do it – and what steps does an organisation need take to benefit from diversity?

Workplace diversity offers a range of benefits, including:

• Improved customer and stakeholder relationships.
• Different perspectives help to solve complex business problems.
• Stronger employee retention, performance and wellbeing.
• The opportunity to reach a wider customer base, improving sales and outcomes in today’s competitive marketplace.
• For larger businesses seeking government contracts, demonstrated employee diversity is increasingly a criteria in tenders and proposal submissions.

Discuss diversity

Start with the basics and ensure the people within your organisation understand what diversity is. A simple definition? Diversity in the workplace is about empowering people by respecting, understanding and appreciating what makes them unique, in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, education, religion, sexual orientation, and national origin. Diversity can refer to people with different ideas or mindsets, who can come together to work on a common project or problem. Do people in your organisation currently embrace diversity? Why or why not? It helps to have facts and figures explaining the benefits of diversity to discuss with your employees.

Be aware of cultural practises

To encourage diversity, we need to recognise that different workers have difference cultural practises that should be taken into account. To help encourage tolerance and respect for your employees, consider the following:

• Appearance.
• Religious practices.
• Customs.
• Social values, non-verbal behaviour, family obligations and more.

“Where an organisation is able to manage its cultural diversity and be inclusive, it is more likely to reduce the cost of staff turnover, more likely to minimise legal and compliance risks, more likely to negotiate any negative publicity that may arise from mismanaging a case involving diversity.”

Dr Tim Soutphommasane

Race Discrimination Commissioner

Hire with diversity in mind

Employment Plus has access to a wide variety of job seekers* who can add a new dimension to your business. Our mix of motivated candidates can help your business meet its diversity targets. Our job ready candidates include (nationwide):

• 8,600 mature age job seekers
• 4,470 Indigenous job seekers
• 2,160 refugee job seekers
• 8,825 young job seekers
• 7,130 Culturally and Linguistically Diverse job seekers

Diversity goes beyond just cultural diversity and can refer to any group made up of individuals with different experience, perspectives and opinions.