Why should you bother with diversity training? After all, you’ve got enough to be getting on with, right? Well the benefits of this kind of development for yourself and your staff could be far wider reaching than you realise. From impressive cost-savings to innovation and market expansion that will drive your business forward, this is way beyond the fluffy box-ticking exercise you might be imagining. Below we’ve summarised the five main benefits to your organisation in investing in diversity training.
Recruitment and retention
By the year 2025 (not far away at all now!), millennials born between 1981 and 1996 will make up 75% of the global workforce. Amongst that group, 47% look for diversity and inclusion when sizing up potential employers. If you want to attract top talent now and in the years to come, you will need to demonstrate a commitment to creating an inclusive culture.
Furthermore, diversity training will help you to evaluate your recruitment and interview processes to ensure you are reaching, engaging and appealing to a wider range of potential talent, as well as making your organisation accessible to a broader variety of people who can bring new skills and perspectives to what you do.
Once you have staff on board, keeping them is pretty essential. It costs an average of £30,000 to replace an employee, taking into account not only recruitment costs but lost productivity and knowledge as well as the need to train the new person, so there are some major cost-savings to be had in keeping your employees happy and engaged. Creating positive and welcoming cultures where all employees feel valued and able to progress should be a key priority for your organisation. Unless you like wasting loads of money and losing important knowledge and relationships.
Staff performance and results
Think about it – if your staff are happier, they’re going to perform better, right? They’ll be more committed to your organisation, more motivated and more productive. So it’s no surprise that research shows happiness increases productivity by 20% and results by 37%.
Diversity training helps your team to cultivate better relationships amongst themselves and to communicate more effectively, creating a happier, more harmonious environment. Investing in this form of training also shows your staff that you’re committed to supporting everyone and making them all feel included, which is certain to make them happier and more positive at work.
Imagine, then, for diverse members of your team how happy it will make them to see that commitment from you, and the impact that will have on their feeling of belonging within the organisation. That, in turn, will encourage them to work harder for you and enable them to give their best.
Avoiding costly mistakes
Employment tribunals are on the rise in the UK, and are costing employers an average of £8,500. Making sure that everyone in your organisation has the training to ensure they know what behaviour is expected of them will help to reduce costly tribunals and settlements.
Effective diversity training will also help to avoid your team making any unfortunate blunders or causing offence to potential customers, clients or partners, which could cost you a great deal of money in lost business.
Not only does diversity training improve interpersonal relationships, but diverse and inclusive teams make better business decisions 87% of the time. So creating a more inclusive environment will make your team more effective AND reduce the chances of them making poor decisions and mistakes that prove to be expensive.
Innovation
Improving your team’s abilities to look at things from different perspectives and to be open to challenging their usual way of thinking increases their ability to think creatively and drives greater innovation. In fact, diverse organisations drive 19% more revenue from innovation than their competitors.
Understanding and being sensitive to different backgrounds and outlooks also expands an organisation’s ability to do business: diverse organisations are 70% more likely to capture new markets than the competition.
Not only are organisations that promote inclusion more effective, but they are more efficient – teams that follow inclusive processes make decisions twice as fast with half the meetings. So understanding inclusion is a valuable skill for your company to learn.
Reputation
All of this will give one hell of a boost to your reputation. The large number of job applicants to your organisation, the high retention rate, the strong performance and enviable results, the high level of innovation and efficiency, and the lack of interpersonal issues creates a powerful name for your organisation, and one that should attract quite a bit of attention.
Not only that, but by investing in diversity and inclusion training, you’re demonstrating your commitment to creating a fair and positive environment, which will mean a lot to people inside your organisation as well as those considering doing business with you.
What’s not to like about that?
If you’d like to reap the benefits of effective diversity and inclusion training, take a look at the wide range of options we offer. If you would like bespoke training created specifically for your organisation, email us at hello@watchthisspace.uk.
