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The Business Case for Diversity and Inclusion

Lauren Shufran

Lauren Shufran

Content Strategist

Posted on

September 27, 2019

Talent teams may find themselves arguing for why resources should be allocated to diversity sourcing. Here's the business case for diversity and inclusion.

Next week, Gem is publishing the first of a three-part series we’re calling The Ultimate Guide to Sourcing and Nurturing Diverse Talent Pools. We wrote Part 1 (“Diversity Sourcing 101: The Talent Leader’s Handbook”) for everyone in talent acquisition… but we were thinking of TA leaders in particular, because they occupy a crucial space between sourcers and upper management.

As such, talent leaders are in a position to educate their teams on strategies for sourcing more diverse talent pools and best practices for outreach and nurture campaigns. But they’re also in a position to affect the kinds of organizational change necessary to inclusive environments: holding hiring teams accountable for checking their biases during interviews, for instance, or strategizing with managers to cultivate cultures of belonging on their respective teams. After all, if new hires don’t stick around, the burden is back on sourcers to uncover more talent for the company’s diversity initiatives. And so begins a vicious circle of getting more candidates in the door who walk out as quickly as they walked in—because there’s no structure to support them once they’re there.

We realized while writing Part 1 that talent leaders might find themselves in the position of having to argue for why their team’s resources should be allocated to diversity sourcing. Workplace diversity breaks cycles of discrimination and oppression, eases the struggle for representation, and increases respect among peers, yes—and those are powerful arguments in and of themselves. But there’s also a business case for diversity in the workforce, and it’s the one your C-levels might need to hear: Companies that embrace D&I strategies in all aspects of the business statistically outperform their peers. This likely isn’t news to you; but we’ve collected some of that data for you here. This way you can make your case based on the numbers if you need to.

D&I Drives Employee Productivity and Performance

D&I Fosters Creativity and Innovation

  • Organizations with inclusive cultures are 6x more likely to be innovative and agile than those with non-inclusive cultures. (Bourke and Dillon / Deloitte)

  • When employees believe their organization is committed to diversity and they feel included, innovation increases by 83%. (Deloitte)

  • Companies with above-average diversity scores see 19% more “innovation revenue” (revenue generated from improved or entirely new products) than those with below-average diversity scores. (Boston Consulting Group)

  • Companies that fulfilled a series of nine “positive diversity requirements”—including women and minority CEOs and positive policies on LGBTQIA+ employees—announced an average of two more products a year than their less-diverse competitors. (Mayer, Warr, and Zhao)

D&I Grows Your Talent Pool

D&I Reduces Employee Turnover

D&I Increases Profits and Grows Your Market

We’ll let the numbers speak for themselves.

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