What Business Diversity Means and Its Importance for Change

A diverse workplace can improve your business. But it’s not always easy to implement cultural diversity in companies. You can experience resistance behaviors, confusion, and a lack of understanding—making it hard to enact change.

Studies show several benefits of diversity in the workplace. For example, inclusive teams are more productive by over 35%. So, how can you create a diverse workplace and  make the change process manageable for your people, and achieve better outcomes for your organization?

This article explains what business diversity means, why it’s important, and how to implement change when building a diverse workplace.

What Is Diversity in the Workplace, and Why Is It Important?

Business diversity involves hiring and retaining individuals from various backgrounds at all levels of your workforce. This includes different races, genders, ages, sexual orientations, abilities and cultural perspectives. 

A diverse workforce elevates the way you do business by:

• Improving change management – Understanding cultural dynamics can improve how you communicate about change as well as how people adopt it across different groups. As a result, you’re in a better position to implement change successfully, ensuring individuals receive the right type of updates, training and resources to incorporate change.
• Generating innovative ideas – Different backgrounds and experiences bring varied viewpoints, leading to new ideas, more innovative solutions, and creative problem-solving.
• Enhancing decision-making – Diverse teams are more likely to consider a wider range of options and make well-rounded decisions. This mitigates the risk of groupthink—where team members conform with the majority opinion—leading to more effective decision-making.
• Developing a deep customer understanding – A diverse workforce brings different experiences and perspectives to the business, helping the company better understand and meet the needs of a global customer base.
• Increasing employee engagement and retention – Business diversity involves creating a workplace where people feel valued and like they belong, creating a more satisfied workforce. Employees who feel included and valued are more likely to be engaged and stay with the company.

How To Overcome Business Diversity Barriers

Take a look at some of the key barriers change leaders can face when trying to increase business diversity.

Resistance to change

Change can lead to resistance, especially when change management starts late or when change teams don't take the rights steps to actively prevent it. Entrenched cultural norms and unconscious biases can cause some of the resistance behaviors leaders might face when trying to implement a diversity strategy.

When faced with these concerns, change practitioners should focus on the following:

• Highlighting the benefits of change – Show individuals why a diverse workforce is beneficial and how it will improve their day-to-day lives. Focusing on the positives can minimize resistance and increase support for change.
• Engaging key stakeholders to ensure alignment and commitment – Hold sessions with the main sponsor, coalition members, people managers and project managers. In these sessions, use ADKAR® Assessments to check:

Adjust your change management tactics based on these assessments. For example, if awareness is low, provide more education. If Ability is lacking, offer extra training.

• Introducing change management – A clear and organized change management process helps leaders explain why change is needed, what to expect, and how it will affect everyone’s roles. This clarity boosts support for the change and ensures it is implemented successfully. Prosci offers role-based training, frameworks and resources to help leaders learn key activities and manage change effectively.

Competing initiatives

Team members may feel that different initiatives take precedence over business diversity. For example, a sales leader might consider updating the sales management system a bigger priority than diversifying the workforce.

Ways to prioritize the diversity initiative amid other organizational changes include:

• Presenting the business drivers for diversity – Show how a diverse workforce contributes to business success and economic development. Diverse companies earn 2.5 times higher cash flow per employee.
• Discussing the downsides – Highlight the risks of not creating a diverse workforce. Explain how a lack of diversity affects company culture, performance and business reputation.

Change saturation

If too much change occurs in a short period, people can experience change saturation and change fatigue. This can impact change success, making it hard for employees to incorporate change effectively and sustain it over the long term.

Some of the ways to prevent change fatigue and maintain momentum include:

• Prioritizing change – Identify the most important change initiatives to prevent too much change at once. Focus on the top priorities to ensure business success, but stagger further changes to minimize fatigue.
• Gathering feedback directly from employees – Talk to employees to see how they feel about the level of change across the organization. Monitor engagement scores, absenteeism, and retention rates to identify signs of change fatigue.
• Applying change management best practices to support people through transitions – Frameworks like our ADKAR Model ensure you follow all the necessary steps of successful change management.

Work with Prosci change experts to develop appropriate change management plans to support effective communications, training, sponsorship and resistance management.

How To Use ADKAR To Support Business Diversity

If you plan to increase diversity in your business, the Prosci Methodology and our ADKAR Model can help. Our change management framework ensures that everyone understands the need for change, its impact, and what they need to do to incorporate it successfully.

Prosci ADKAR Model

Let’s walk through how to use the ADKAR Model to implement change when diversifying your workforce.

Awareness

The first step involves explaining the for the reasons for the change.

Ways to increase Awareness of the need for business diversity include:

• Communicating the importance of business diversity – Explain the value of a diverse workforce and its alignment with your organizational values. Outline the benefits that come with it, what the process looks like, and the results it can achieve.
• Sharing success stories and data on the benefits of diversity – This presents employees with hard evidence that diversity change initiatives are worthwhile, showing why it’s necessary for business success.
• Launching a diversity awareness campaign through multiple channels – Create compelling content highlighting the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and then distribute it through company emails and updates.

Desire

Once employees understand the need for change, the next step is encouraging them to support and participate in the change.

Here are some steps to increase the Desire for buisness diversity:

• Conducting workshops – Engage employees in workshops to foster a deeper understanding and commitment to DEI. Help them understand about unconscious and implicit bias and the value of creating a highly inclusive workplace. 
• Allowing employees to ask questions – Provide a nonjudgmental space for employees to ask questions or express concerns about DEI changes. Addressing their concerns can increase support for change.
• Encouraging allyship – People sometimes feel like diversity isn’t something they need to care about because it doesn't impact them directly. Encourage them to change their thinking by encouraging allyship, showing that a diverse workforce is important for everyone.

Knowledge

Knowledge is the next step in our ADKAR Model. It involves ensuring individuals know how to change and how to perform the change effectively and intentionally. 

There are many ways to increase Knowledge. Examples include:

• Providing diversity training that covers policies, behaviors and resources – Training is an excellent way to build knowledge about diversity.  Just be cautious about requiring employees to attend training sessions and events. For some people, forced participation can ignite resistance. If you feel like this might be the case, emphasize the personal and professional benefits of attending.
• Developing a diversity resource hub with articles, videos and FAQs – Create a central location where employees can access all the information they need to incorporate the change successfully. 
• Offering specialized training for executive leadership and human resources personnel – Diversity initiatives are important to people and can be a sensitive topic. As a result, you need leaders who are sincere about DEI, which is where the training can be so help. Implementing inclusive leadership training ensures that all change leaders understand the personal nature of DEI and why creating a diverse workforce is the right thing to do. 

Ability 

The fourth step of ADKAR is where the change occurs. It’s defined by people implementing the change to achieve the expected performance results.

During the Ability stage, there are some measures you can implement to increase the chance of successful implementation:

• Implementing mentorship programs to practice inclusive behaviors – Pair mentors with mentees to help individuals sustain diversity practices. This provides individuals with an experienced point of contact to ask questions and be held accountable for their role in the change. 
• Providing tools for employees to give and receive feedback on DEI practices – Conduct regular DEI surveys, organize feedback sessions, or introduce platforms for anonymous feedback that help you identify any issues surrounding the change.

Reinforcement

Reinforcement is the final step in the ADKAR Model. It focuses on maintaining change and preventing individuals from reverting to the old way of working. 

Here are some of the ways to ensure sustained change: 

• Recognizing individuals and teams that exemplify diversity values – Develop formal recognition programs, such as rewards or certifications—to celebrate individuals who continue implementing diversity initiatives. 
• Reviewing metrics of your business diversity efforts – Conduct regular reviews of your diversity metrics—like hiring, retention, promotion rates or employee surveys—to identify areas of improvement. If you’re veering off course, you can implement measures to reinforce the change. 

Handle Change Successfully With Prosci 

Business diversity is important for every workplace, but it’s not always easy to implement it successfully—especially if it means changing existing processes and ways of working. This is why having a strong change management process in place is important. A change management process like our ADKAR Model equips you to gain support from leaders and stakeholders, and give people what they need to implement DEI changes that make a difference for your entire organization.