Without growth, your business would perish. That should be your company mantra, especially given how everything changed over the past year. Any business not focusing on growth will wind up left behind in a crowd working diligently to grow at unheard-of levels.
To that end, you must do everything you can to spur growth, including adopting new technologies, adapting your marketing strategy, and adding new revenue streams and pipelines to your business.
Aside from that, there’s something else you can do, something you might not have ever thought of: hiring a diverse team of engineers.
The importance of a diverse team can’t be stressed enough. For too long, the tech industry has failed to be inclusive of women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community. Over the past year, an awakening has begun. It’s slow, but building momentum. As more and more businesses stretch their diversity to include these groups, they are finding their addition is helping to accelerate growth in ways they never imagined.
But how can that be? How can a more diverse team of developers help your company accelerate growth? Let’s take a look at the ways.
New languages
When you hire from different communities, you’ll find a wider variety of programming languages to add to your team. You might already have plenty of Java, JavaScript, and .NET developers. As you cast a wider net, you might include Python, Ruby, C++, Golang, or Swift.
Although it doesn’t require you to hire more diverse engineers to bring in new languages, this is a bonus you shouldn’t avoid.
Varied points of view
This is where we start seeing the benefits of adding diversity to your hiring process. When your development team is composed of the same type of people, you wind up with the same general points of view. This can make for a very limited scope of experience and problem-solving skills.
When you hire through the lens of diversity, your team will benefit from perspectives that cover a wider spectrum. This means you’ll have developers who approach problems in very different ways. With more problem-solving styles, chances are very good you’ll find your development teams more able to resolve issues faster and with more consistency.
But it’s not just about problem-solving. Having more points of view on a team also means your engineers will approach the design phase of a project with a wider range of ideas. In the end, the software your team creates will be more creative, more reliable, and released faster.
Added areas of expertise
You’ll probably find that hiring from different communities will bring new areas of expertise to the table. Instead of only having the best engineers on your team, you might add analytics, cybersecurity, cloud, container, web applications, and mobile expertise to your business. These are all areas you must consider if you’re looking to seriously accelerate your growth.
Without these new skills, your company will find growth very challenging. You need web and mobile applications. Cybersecurity specialists are no longer optional. Data analysts are a must if you want to get the most from the data you’ve amassed about your customers.
Multiple layers of innovation
Hiring a diverse development team can also add layers of innovation to your business. Developers from the same cross-section of society tend to innovate along the same lines. They face the same issues, use similar approaches, and tend to function within the same Venn diagrams.
When you hire a diverse team, you bring into the picture fresh ideas and approaches, because you’ll have developers who come from completely different backgrounds and view the world with a very different lens. You might find that hiring from one particular group will bring to your team concerns your other engineers might never have considered. For example, a team of developers hired from the United States might not take into consideration there are countries where data limits in mobile devices are a very real issue.
Added business value
You might not realize this, but diversity adds business value. The Harvard Business Review concluded that diverse teams tend to bring gains, while teams of similar engineers create costs. In that research, HBR studied the Venture Capital sector and realized the more similar the investment partners were, the lower their investments’ performance (by 11.5%). When ethnicity is shared, that success rate was redacted by anywhere from 26.4% to 32.2%.
When you hire a diverse team, you’ll find productivity increases. That alone should be enough to have you placing diversity at the top of your business goals.
Improved reputation
This issue can’t be overstated. When your hiring process includes diversity, you will be seen as an innovator in business and your public reputation will skyrocket. The court of public opinion is incredibly important in this day of constant and deep connection. Word spreads incredibly fast through social media, and consumers are ready to call businesses out for a lack of diversity.
If you want to accelerate your growth quickly, hire diverse engineers. The more you do this, the more people will want to work for your company. As that reputation continues to rise, you’ll find yourself in a position where growth comes far more easily.
Conclusion
Growth isn’t just about productivity. When you allow your business to expand and progress into a more diverse territory, there’s almost nothing you can’t accomplish. Begin the process of implementing diversity strategies into your hiring process and you’ll see just how quickly growth can accelerate.
