Building Diverse and Inclusive Teams

Diversity means having people from different backgrounds on the team, including protected groups based on race, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, and other characteristics that make them unique. Inclusion is about building a safe environment where everyone feels welcome and valued. While the two terms are often used together, it’s inclusion that enables teams to truly benefit from diversity. These concepts are relatively new in the workplace, but recent efforts have helped raise awareness and highlight their value. The tech industry, in particular, has made significant progress in embracing and prioritizing them in recent years.

As an engineering leader, your responsibility is to invest in hiring from underrepresented groups, such as women or people of color, and create a safe environment. This is an environment where everyone is heard and treated respectfully without discrimination.

Having diversity without inclusion is not very useful. You must provide a safe environment where people from underrepresented groups feel included and can share their opinions and thoughts transparently. This might require explicit effort, especially when you hire the first person from an Underrepresented Minority (URM) group.

Note: A good manager always focuses on both diversity and inclusion, but focusing only on diversity without making an effort to be more inclusive is not enough.

Advantages of a diverse team

Diverse and inclusive teams do better when compared to teams that are not diverse in many ways.

• Diverse teams will have more creative and innovative ideas to solve problems. People with diverse backgrounds have their own perspectives and ideas, which homogeneous teams lack.

• It’s statistically proven that teams with diverse backgrounds have a lower attrition rate.

• Teams are healthier and happier when there are different cultures present. This makes the team environment more open.

• Focusing on hiring from all ...