What is Organisational Diversity: Understanding Diversity is Not A Tick Box.

For many organisations, diversity has become a buzzword. The reality of organisational diversity is that it is often reduced to a box ticking exercise. While businesses and media are eager to showcase diverse representation, diversity is often mistaken as simply having people from various ethnic backgrounds. However, true diversity goes far beyond appearances.

What is Organisational Diversity?

Organisational Diversity is the inclusion and appreciation of unique perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds and abilities. It includes and goes beyond visible traits like race, ethnicity or disability. It rejects rigid categories, recognising that people are dynamic and evolving. It embraces the whole range of variation and perspectives that people can bring.

Problems With Organisational Diversity:

There are a range of problems with the way that organisations understand and manage diversity. It comes from seeing diversity as a problem to be solved. Trying to solve the problem of diversity has led to some common and counterproductive assumptions in many organisations.

The Superficial Approach to Diversity

It’s become common for marketing campaigns, TV shows, and films to present a visibly diverse range of characters with people of different races and ethnicities. On the surface, this seems like progress. But all too often hey think the same, talk the same, act the same, believe the same things. Their representation is merely skin-deep. This is little more than card board cut-out diversity. 

Diversity is much more than we can see.

Diversity isn’t merely about how people look, but about the richness of their unique perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. By actually ‘being’ different.

Diversity is Not Interchangeable Faces

Some marketers think diversity is simply changes the colour of someone’s face on a poster. Simply filling a quota of different skin tones without acknowledging the differences in thought, experience, and culture can actually undermine diversity. It’s akin to steamrolling over the real variations that make people unique. Diversity is not about making everyone fit a cookie-cutter mould: it’s about celebrating the variety of lived experiences, values, and viewpoints that each person brings.

The Problem with Putting People into Diversity Boxes

Another common mistake is to classify people into rigid categories. All too often we get people to tick a box to determine what group they are in and pretend that’s respecting diversity..

 There’s a tendency to assume that individuals from the same race or ethnicity are somehow the same. For example, is a Black person from Nigeria the same as a Black person from Venezuela? Probably not. But in the rush to promote diversity, organisations often oversimplify and lump people into broad categories, ignoring the vast differences within these groups.

Diversity is Not Comparing Boxes on a Spreadsheet.

We compare the boxes to one another. But we never ask ourselves. Do the boxes really mean anything? Who are we to choose what the boxes should be? How do we even know who belongs together? There is huge diversity in the communities we so often lump together. More often than not they are not even communities at all.

BAME: A Misguided Concept of Diversity

The term “BAME” (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) is a prime example of this oversimplification. It was introduced as a convenient label for all non-white people, but this approach ignores the immense diversity within these communities. When you dig into the data, you’ll find that certain ethnic groups within the BAME category fare better than the white population in areas like education and income, while others struggle more. 

This highlights the fact that the differences within BAME are often greater than the differences between BAME and white communities. Using such a broad label doesn’t accurately reflect the complexity of human diversity. Changing BAME to the term ’non-white’ or ‘ethnic minorities’ does nothing to fix the problem.

Understanding Organisational Diversity

Diversity is Variation.

Diversity is not one thing. It’s many. It encompasses the full range of peoples’ knowledge, experience, skills beliefs. It is the natural variation that comes with human existence. We are all a unique assemblage of everything that makes us who we are. That uniqueness means that we all vary from another. As soon as we say people are the same we deny that variation and that diversity.

Diversity is About Constant Change

Diversity isn’t static. People are not fixed into categories: they are constantly evolving. Everyone is a unique blend of their experiences, education, environment, and personal growth. In some ways, two people may be very similar, but in other aspects, they can be worlds apart. This dynamic nature of diversity means that putting people into fixed boxes doesn’t reflect reality. Putting people into boxes of our choosing is not diversity. It is enforced conformity.

Embracing Real Diversity

To truly embrace diversity, within our organisations, we need to move beyond what we think we know about people. Diversity means recognising that individuals get to define themselves, not us or our organisations. It’s about understanding that people are constantly growing and changing, and we must give them the space to tell us who they are and what they want.

The Benefits of Genuine Diversity

When we embrace diversity, we open ourselves up to new perspectives and ideas. It challenges us to think differently and helps us explore new possibilities. True diversity brings fresh insights, encourages innovation, and points us toward a better future.

Diversity in Decision Making.

It is not enough to ‘have’ diverse teams. You need to create space for them to contribute to decision making in order to get the immense benefits they provide in better understanding your organisation and your customers. However, the simple logic that is used to make many of our organisational decisions too often squeezes out the potential for real diversity to make a difference and acts as a platform for bias.

Making Our Organisations More Diverse.

To make our organisations more diverse we need to change the way we recruit people. Our typical recruitment processes encourage people to make safe and ‘fair’ decisions to recruit people who look sound and think like them. This blog article explores the subject and how we can recruit to make our organisations more diverse. 

Conclusion:

Diversity within our organisations is not about categorising people into predefined boxes. It’s about recognising the ever expanding range of differences that make each person unique. When we appreciate diversity in its fullest sense, we unlock new potential for our organisations and society as a whole.