CIO And Diversity: A Match Made In Heaven

The term ‘Diversity’ is usually associated with nature. But, looking at how businesses are evolving beyond boundaries leveraging diversity by adding a sense of dissimilar viewpoints for business makes a lot of sense. Today, diversity among enterprises is not just a ‘good to have’ thing, but has real business value embedded in it.

Consumerisation and commoditisation of technology has changed the way we make decisions. Social media is changing the interaction patterns among the generations. This is impacting how we react to the environment. As organisations become communities and business becomes an ecosystem, diversity in workplace can be considered as a potential growth catalyst.

Diversity can exist in many forms – different characteristics of people, different age groups, different IQ levels, different genders, nationality, priorities, thought processes, preferences, and so on.

Within CIO circles the concept can gain a new relevance in terms of building diversified teams that can give the CIO office a deep-rooted access to the different domains, and customer requirements – both internally and externally. Further, in the CIO’s hand thanks to the technology enablement, diversity can get further push into the organisation, unlocking its business value more effectively. Either ways, CIO and diversity is a match made in heaven.

The question then that needs to be answered by enterprises is - how to leverage diversity for business value?

Unlocking The Business Value In Diversity

Diversity within the organisation needs to be broken down to the level of each team, for it to be successful across its length and breadth. Hence, the start needs to be made with each team, including the CIO’s team, to unlock its true business value.

Different cultures and cross section of people experience different circumstances and come out with a variety of ideas which contribute to the business. Working with gender diversity helps in building good socially acceptable practices and increases engagement among employees. Differently abled people come with extraordinary capabilities of concentration and intelligence which is needed in certain roles. The next generation of transformation will revolve around driving engagement, and diversity helps in bringing that about.

Also, organisations undergoing globalisation has made them hungrier for diversity as it helps them understand and penetrate different markets and engage more meaningfully. A high level of employee engagement, in turn, results in high employee net promotion score (NPS) which is a very important metric for shareholders as well as customers as an engaged employee generates loyal customers.

Team Diversity: Dos And Don’ts

If you think of putting all your smart people in your most challenging project, think twice as you may be heading for a disaster with all smart people challenging each other’s views or may have opinion of their own running in multiple directions. For the CIO it would be a much better idea to create a right mix of people who contribute at different levels and engage effectively, which will give wonderful results.
We often see organisations using standard measures to identify people with different strengths and, in my view, each individual is unique, and that quality of uniqueness is his or her strength.

Standardising the behaviour and strengths may kill diversity and the organisation may lose its competitive advantage. Organisations should identify and appreciate diversity in individuals and encourage individuality.

You will come across people within your team who could be lacking in one skillset but excelling in another. For instance, someone might not be very technically sound but could be excellent in technical writing or able to manage customers well. Diversity helps identify right people for the right competency and align them with a purpose. As long as you understand diversity and make the best use of it, you can create a winning team and organisation.

CIOs need to strive for diversity within the team to create a healthy mix of people with varied interests and backgrounds. While a good technical writer can handle documentation requirements, an excellent communicator can handle interfacing with users, while some will create a more relaxed atmosphere to take the stress out. Diversity of characteristics prepares the environment for challenging assignments.

Today, decisions are made less of top down and more of bottom up. What people think creates perceptions, and perceptions further lead to decisions. Diversity leads to different experiences and different perceptions, and views become more democratic and challenged rather than amplified by similar perceptions. In addition, experts believe creativity and innovation thrives in diversity and we need to appreciate that in order to establish a creative organisation.

What Technology Can Do

As mentioned earlier, CIOs can help their organisations leverage the benefits of diversity through technology enablement. This includes engaging employees through social media, leveraging BYOD and mobility, as well as taking the business increasingly online. Technology works as an enabler and catalyst for leveraging diversity.

Breaching cultural constraints and geographic boundaries, social media is connecting and bringing people together in organisations and driving engagement. We are seeing myriad views from people with diverse backgrounds coming together to create a healthy and more dynamic work atmosphere. Video conferencing has made it possible to have more frequent exchanges with employees around the world and, thereby, help leverage diversity. I have seen cross pollination of employees from various functions and domains adding to diversity and providing wonderful results.

CIOs can go one step further by enabling organisations measure employee engagement from diverse views originating within the ecosystem. A practical example of this is a virtual trading portal over the company’s intranet. It is similar to the stock market where employees can buy and sell virtual shares on a virtual trading site hosted in intranet. This is more of a fun and game activity and also can be converted into reward by tapping the gains. The virtual stock prices are directly linked to employee perceptions and sentiments. This can also help in gauging how employees would react if something goes wrong in real time and can help the organisation fix an issue faster. Mostly organisations rely on employee feedback surveys for engagement measurement which may not give accurate or timely results and are mostly conducted only at fixed intervals.

Imbibing The Culture

Creating and leveraging diversity in business is not just restricted to HR leaders but also an organisational effort which involves technology leaders and other business leaders as well. A culture of entrepreneurship results out of diversity which helps organisations to enhance business value. Winning organisations value and foster diversity and imbibe it as a part of their culture..