Diversity Through Inclusion

By Liviu Florea, Ph.D
Washburn University School of Business

Many organizations have acted toward increasing diversity of their labor force. Diversity has positive effects because organizations can draw from a large pool of knowledge and perspectives. Diverse employees have non-redundant competences that influence their thinking, feeling and behavior at work. This can yield gains in terms of innovation and decision making when the larger pool of knowledge is integrated.

On the other hand, as organizations become more diverse, there is a possibility that some employees find themselves on the fringe. As a result, such organizations may experience more conflict and turnover, less cohesion and poor performance. To derive diversity’s benefits while reducing its risks, it makes sense to conceptualize diversity dynamically, as a proactive strategy for addressing differences. 

Operational Diversity

To make diverse people work in a unified manner, organizations have to embrace inclusion. The concept of inclusion captures how well organizational members fully connect with, engage and employ capabilities across all types of differences. While diversity is about people, inclusion is about strategies to connect diverse people in ways that benefit them and their organizations. In inclusive organizations, different voices are respected and heard; diverse viewpoints and approaches are valued; everyone is encouraged to make meaningful contributions; and people of all identities can be fully themselves, while contributing to the larger collective as valued and full members. By contrast, exclusion has negative effects on inequality and psychological and physical health, whether it occurs as an overt or more ambiguous form of discrimination

Proactive Inclusion

There is a wide consensus that diverse organizations should proactively create inclusive organizational environments that provide possibilities for all their members to perform at the highest level of their capabilities.

Voluntary Inclusion

Unlike diversity that can be mandated or legislated, inclusion is usually the result of voluntary action.

Cultivating inclusion entails the development of diversity experiences and implementation of inclusion practices. In the context of inclusion, experiential learning activities can facilitate exposure to diversity and dealing with differences, understanding the challenges and benefits of working with dissimilar others, and developing commitment to collaboration, flexibility and fairness.

Virtual Inclusion

The 2020 Trends in Virtual Work Report notes a strong preference for remote working among business professionals, even when they have an option to return to the workplace. As people return to a “new normal” work routine, this report reveals that nearly 70% of the respondents want to continue working from home at least half of the time, and 94% of the respondents want to work from home at least 25% of the time. By some assessments, at least 60% of managers are often members of virtual teams. The use of virtual team structures holds great promise as virtual teams can do things collectively that collocated teams cannot.

Dramatic changes that have occurred this year have a transformational impact on how people work, underscoring the pressing need to develop virtual teamwork, collaboration abilities and inclusion practices. Despite technological challenges and barriers to effective communication due to the lack of face-to-face interaction, virtual teamwork has become critical to individual, team and organizational productivity. 

Much still needs to be learned about how diversity manifests in virtual teams and what new challenges this format can bring. What worked in a traditional workplace may need to be modified in order to maintain a similar level of productivity. Being engaged and collaborative, open to differences and working effectively with people who do not necessarily share the same attributes or characteristics are parts of being a good virtual team member.

Liviu Florea, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Management Business at Washburn University’s School of Business