Workforce Diversity for a Resilient Organization

Workforce diversity is positively related to organizational and group-level outcomes, it is perceived as a great enabler of business performance and part of strategic priority for gaining market advantage. Acknowledging values that a diverse workforce brings to an organization- firms highlight their strong diversity policies as part of their employer-brand building initiatives. An opportunity to work in a diverse work atmosphere is expected to provide greater learning and development opportunities to employees adding to the ‘employee value proposition’. Diversity is recognized as multivariate in nature; be it surface levels such as genders, ethnicity, educational background, or deep-level diversity such as diversity of thoughts and values. Operating in the global markets, today firms have multiple possibilities to establish and maintain a competitive advantage by having easy access to a diverse workforce who bring advantages to the firm in the form of an enhanced pool of expertise, knowledge, and perspectives.

While we know the positive effects of diversity on productivity, the potential alliance between diversity and resilience has remained mostly unmapped. To begin with, it is important to understand the concept of resilience which has evolved from the passive idea of bouncing back or regaining the original state to a bunch of capabilities that go beyond managing the rare instances of full-blown crises. Given the volatility and complexity of the business environment, organizations are often vulnerable to ‘creeping strain’ in which challenges incrementally escalate to overwhelm resources leading to devastating effects. Limiting such strains depends on resilience capabilities which are seen as an inherent rather than an abstract goal or reactionary measure.

A common thread between resilience and diversity in the workplace setting is the value placed on human capital, which is based on employees’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics. Reiterating the importance of the employee’s role in creating a competitive advantage for the organization, human capital plays a central role in building resilience. Diversity of human capital resources is welcomed since it would mean multiple knowledge areas, perspectives, and tools for creating responses to a complex and ambiguous business environment.

Building resilience requires the ability to identify and comprehend opportunities and threats; implementing real-time solutions; followed by reflections to create learning repositories for the future. To remain sensitive to changing business scenarios, diversified resources are important for bringing in flexibility and reducing dependencies on a single source. Diversity in knowledge and experiences should be welcomed since it helps create wide-ranging perspectives, constructive discourses, and multiple solutions. Hence, diversity matters in a world that is deeply interconnected for its enhanced power to sense, register, and regulate complexity.

Hence, diversity helps organizations to take advantage of the disruptive business environment and creates avenues for learning, innovation, an increase in client base, and organizational resilience to name a few.

References available on request