A diverse business is a successful and sustainable business

Lindani Dhlamini, CEO of SekelaXabiso.

While significant attention is now being afforded by South African businesses to racial diversity, this is only one component of a truly diverse organisation. And this same attention is certainly not being given to many other diversity pillars, most notably the promotion of gender equality, people with disabilities and the youth.

This lingering gap in terms of achieving workplace equality across these marginalised groups is more than a little surprising, especially when one considers that women, young people and those with disabilities make up a massive proportion of the global population and represent the lion’s share of consumers. Against this backdrop, it is clear, then, that one cannot hope to have a sustainable business, that consistently meets the needs of its customers, without an absolute commitment to fully representative diversity.

Importantly, the value of such broad-based diversity in delivering satisfactory customer experiences goes way beyond merely ensuring that customers of different races, genders, physical abilities, and sexual orientations are served by employees of a similar demographic. Approaching diversity from this perspective is doomed to be ineffective at best. No, the purpose of a diverse workforce is not simply to have mirror the diversity of customers. The real value of a diverse workforce is that it allows all the members of that workforce to share ideas and perspectives, learn from one another, expand their understanding of the communities they serve and become significantly better at delivering exceptional experiences for all customers, irrespective of their race, gender, religious beliefs, or age.

Put another way, to unlock the full value of diversity for a business, that diversity needs to run much deeper than a mixed employee profile; it needs to be fully embedded and ingrained in the organisational culture. So, to paraphrase a statement made by leading global financial services company Forbes, if any company wants to succeed today it must not only meet the needs of a multifaceted marketplace, it must leverage the full advantage of diverse perspectives by fully reflecting and respecting different cultures, ideas and philosophies amongst its customers and its employees.

Diverse organisations have also been shown to be the most effective at unlocking and harnessing innovation that drives business growth, solving problems and overcoming challenges, attracting the best talent, and building lasting loyalty amongst customers.

From my own experience as a black woman accountant and auditor, I have witnessed the value of embracing diversity in this way first hand. Organisations that genuinely give their female employees, people with disabilities and young professionals a seat at the strategic and decision-making tables invariably tend to be more successful, relevant, innovative, better at managing risk and, importantly, more empathetic and open towards the diverse needs of their customer bases.

So, given that diversity makes such perfect business sense, the question has to be, are businesses embracing the responsibility to deliver such diversity so that they can also enjoy the rewards it so obviously brings?

Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding no – particularly in the South African context. While there are economic sectors and industries in this country that are working hard to address the historic marginalisation of many groups and achieve fully inclusive workforces, for the most part our country’s return to the world economy since 1994 has largely seen women, young people and people with disabilities still left outside of full involvement in organisational ownership and leadership.

Transforming this situation requires committed action. The struggle for equality cannot be a struggle fought by those who are still marginalised. For one, CEOs of organisations need to stop paying lip service to diversity, only to then delegate responsibility for it to their HR departments. It’s no longer good enough to just quote overall employment equity figures in an annual report. What is needed is top-down impetus built on a strategic commitment to embedding real diversity into all areas of business, but particularly within its leadership structures.

And, in the process, organisations in South Africa need to seriously broaden their understanding of what diversity really means. The traditional notion of workplace diversity being merely representation by people of all genders, races, ages, religious affiliations and ability levels is no longer sufficient. True diversity must also take into account a host of other human variables, not least of which are personality types, cognitive styles, education levels, hard and soft skill sets and, even sexual orientation.

Ultimately, a commitment to organisation-wide diversity that encompasses all these aspects has to become a number one business priority. Then only will it be undertaken in a way that engenders a real sense of belonging and enables people of all social groups to take their rightful place as leaders and contributors – not just to business success, but to the socio-economic growth and development of South Africa as a whole.