Diversity - Reality or Myth || A Business Case or a Fashion Statement

I draw on the blog written by my colleague and a dear friend Satyam Singh. He raised some very poignant points. And that set me thinking on this subject. It is interesting that companies are ok to be "diversity - compliant" if the maternity benefits were restricted to 13 weeks, but have an issue at 26 weeks. I do provide a link to his article, for people who have not yet read the same.

When I started working, there was no focus on Diversity. Women talent was hard to come by, they were hired if available. There was no focus on keeping them in the company or retaining different talent. Over time, Diversity became one of the values that organizations needed to exhibit. This started an over-drive of women based hiring, or women related policies....leading to different scenarios at the work place. Men colleagues felt women had an added advantage to growth - promotions were given directly, exceptions were provided, additional leave was guaranteed, headcounts blocked. Women colleagues who were really passionate about their careers, generally hated this word, and were agitated to hear this in context to them. There were others who used these new policies to their advantages. This however, did not lead to too many changes to the retention of women at the middle management level.

Most organizations embraced "diversity" as a fashion statement, as yet another platform to become a Great Place to Work, as metrics that looked. Some forward looking organizations figured out very early, that bringing a diverse workforce together contributed to better business results. There are immense studies and research on the net that allows organizations to see how Diversity helps business outcomes.

Diversity is not limited to Gender, it encompasses diverse cultural backgrounds, hiring global talent, hiring specially-abled people, different age groups,.....but why? Because enterprises today realize that their solutions are used by a diverse set of end-users. Each of these sets of end-users experience their solutions differently. How a visually impaired customer / user will view the experience of a solution is very different from a person who has full vision, is very very different. Millennials need to experience agility, mature end-users need to experience stability, consistency and security.

If the organization does not have in its development arm, a representation of the user set of its solutions, chances are that the solution will not appeal to that set. Agile scrum teams need to be cross-functional....this is just another way of saying that the composition of a team of ten should have diverse talent in it....talent representing business needs of the domain, technology talent, niche skills in development, ability to design test scenarios.....each of this is a diverse and different talent.

To succeed, organizations including start-ups need to invest in talent that represents a cross-section of their business and IT customers and their end-users. This also includes Women talent. Not hiring them, because they come with biological constraints would definitely have adverse business results. I hope the firms are listening.