Implementing diversity management: the advantages

Implementing diversity management has many advantages. It has also become an important aspect of personnel development, which ultimately benefits your company enormously. If you focus on employee retention, want to establish a strong employee brand and have set your sights on international markets, you should focus on diversity management. We show you how to do it.

What is diversity management?

Diversity management is a sub-area of human resources management. Diversity management is about consciously utilizing the different backgrounds of team members and integrating them into the company.

For example, recruiting potential can be expanded and the internationalization of the company can be formed internally.

But there is one more question. How can I recognize a diverse team? The diversity of employees can be recognized in many different ways:

• Internal factors such as: Age, gender, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, ideology / religion & disability
• External factors such as: Marital status, education & work experience, income, habits and hobbies, parenthood

The term “diversity” fundamentally sees differences as something positive. Diversity management is therefore about accepting different people and utilizing their diversity.

Implementation of diversity management

The implementation of diversity management is not a task that an HR manager should do alone, but should rather be tackled as a team.

Management must exemplify diversity management

Company management plays a decisive role here, as it must exemplify diversity management. It is best if new values are set out in writing. This way, everyone has the opportunity to view them and they quickly become anchored in the company.

Set goals

Diversity should therefore not just be an empty promise, but a real goal that is implemented. To achieve this, a few questions need to be answered first.

• What problems are there?
• What helps the company to grow?
• Is the fluctuation rate above average?
• Do you work a lot with international clients and are you successful in doing so?
• Do you have a wide range of products?

Define & implement measures

Once you have defined the goals, you now need to draw measures from them. At this point, it is a good idea to create a catalog of measures in order to maintain an overview.

• The following measures can be taken here:
• Language courses to prevent language barriers among employees
• Company daycare center or a playroom if many colleagues have a child
• Offer flexible working time models such as hybrid working
• International cooking or theme evenings
• Hiring an equal opportunities officer
• Variety of food options (vegan, vegetarian, kosher, halal, etc.)
• Creating disabled-friendly workplaces
• Provide prayer rooms
• Equal opportunities in recruiting
• Marketing strategies that are culturally adapted

The measures are therefore as individual as your employees. The best way to find out what is important to the team is to let them take part in a survey in advance. You can then use these answers to gauge their wishes and plan and implement your measures.

Regular performance review

Regular success monitoring is important when implementing diversity management. Is the fluctuation rate still high or has it fallen thanks to the measures? How is the general working atmosphere? Are colleagues actively participating in the theme evenings and attending the language courses?

You can also request feedback from international customers. Were there any language barriers or did your colleagues warm directly to the customers and their wishes? As a company, you can benefit from diversity management with the help of regular performance reviews.

We have summarized the 4 steps for successful implementation of diversity management below:

1. Management must exemplify diversity management
2. Set goals
3. Define and implement measures
4. Regular performance review

Why is diversity management important?

We would like to answer the question of why diversity management is important. The best way to do this is to look at the benefits of diversity management.

As diversity management pays full attention to employees and thus responds to their wishes, it has several advantages. For example, it has a positive effect on the employer brand (you can find an interesting article on employer branding in times of crisis here). It also increases employee retention (find out more in our blog on employee retention in the home office ).

These are just 2 advantages, so we list many more below:

• Increased productivity
• Better creativity
• Team spirit is strengthened
• Employee turnover decreases
• Positive corporate image
• Diverse skills
• Tolerance is encouraged
• Advantages in personnel recruitment
• Advantages of internationalization
• Increase profit

All of these are important aspects for a successful company with satisfied employees. For these reasons, you too can benefit from the successful implementation of diversity management.