Karla and I have been racking our brains trying to figure out why the social sector is home to some of the least diversely populated organizations, and, subsequently, what can we do about it? So we have been doing our research to first find out how diversity improves the workforce (in business, government and the social sector), if it does at all. Surprisingly, we have not found a lot of empirical evidence that diversity actually improves organizations. In fact, a semi-recent study by famed researcher Robert Putnam (check out Financial Times article here) shows that diversity negatively affects civic life (not quite correlated with work life, but it’s still a blow to diversity advocates).
From the Financial Times:
His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.
However, another researcher, Scott E. Page, has found a positive correlation with diversity and productivity in the workplace and chronicled it in his recent book, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Here’s a snippet of a conversation with the auther from an article in the New York Times:
An edited version of the interview and a subsequent phone conversation follow:
Q. In your book you posit that organizations made up of different types of people are more productive than homogenous ones. Why do you say that?
A. Because diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it.
People from different backgrounds have varying ways of looking at problems, what I call “tools.� The sum of these tools is far more powerful in organizations with diversity than in ones where everyone has gone to the same schools, been trained in the same mold and thinks in almost identical ways.
This is exciting news for the diversity front! Now how can we translate that into the non-profit sector, which is mired with inefficiencies and challenges in the the talent acquisition, management and retention departments…?