Working in a startup or growing venture can be stressful, time consuming and creatively exhausting. Building a team of employees who are diverse and who can complement your existing strengths and talents can only help to improve your operation. While it may seem easy to hire those like you (people with a similar age, education, etc.) it’s more effective to grow the diversity in your workplace and hire those who are different from you. This can encourage new ideas and inspire new ways to accomplish your company’s goals.
A writer at Women 2.0, author and diversity expert Donna Ruffin explores what diversity means and how increasing your company’s diversity can help its growth.
Set Goals & Educate Your Employees: Start with the end in mind—have set goals and communication those goals with the entire team. Ask current employees for ideas and feedback about seeking diversity, whether through hiring or training initiatives.
Recruit a Diverse Staff: It can be difficult to find a diverse group of candidates when posting a new job. You may want to try posting the position through various local mediums and through different job-posting organizations as to encourage a diverse population of applicants to select for the interview round.
Training Your Team: There are a variety of online diversity training programs, covering topics from workplace harassment to conflict resolution. Be sure that your team is familiar with these issues so that they can be avoided, as a diverse team can help improve your company’s problem solving capability and lead to an increase in ideas and creativity.
Partnering Diverse Talents: When forming teams, keep diversity in mind and create groups that have a variety of individuals from various age groups, ethnicities, gender and even different departments within the company. Have a diverse group of individuals coming together in a team setting can lead to new and unique ideas.
Mentorship is Important: Try pairing up younger staff members with older employees—yielding benefits from both parties. For example, older staff tend to be a bit more knowledgeable about the industry and younger staff members’ strengths can be to share their knowledge of new technologies related to the industry.
How does your company build a diverse staff? Share some of the ways that you find effective in bringing a diverse group of people together in your business.
For more information on this topic, please visit: http://www.inc.com/donna-ruffin/how-to-increase-diversity-at-your-startup.html
Thanks for reading, and until next time… stay WISE!
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