Widen your choice of employees to improve competitiveness

The business case for diversity

Recruiting a diverse workforce has tangible business benefits. Many businesses find it helpful to have a workforce that reflects the community they trade in.

This can help them tailor their goods and services so as to build trust and goodwill among customers and suppliers.

Other benefits of building a diverse workforce include:

• having a wider range of resources, skills and ideas among your employees that you can tap into
• improving staff retention, leading to lower recruitment and training costs
• increasing employee efficiency and reduced stress due to cross-functional teams, ie employees are capable of a variety of roles thanks to their different backgrounds and skill sets
• avoiding claims of unfair treatment or discrimination
• building a reputation as a diverse business
• building a competitive edge in recruitment and retention as you can select from a bigger pool of candidates

A diverse workforce can also help you understand your customers better by helping to identify:

• problems that customers may have, eg language barriers and poor access for disabled people
• how customers with different religious beliefs or from different backgrounds might react to your business or product

Customers are increasingly attaching great importance to a business' reputation. They may turn to a competitor if they feel your business is indifferent to supporting the needs of a particular sector of people.

By recruiting employees from under-represented groups, you can avoid alienating potential customers. You can also avoid possible discrimination claims, eg by employing women in a traditionally male environment.

Subjects covered in this guide

• Introduction
• The business case for diversity
• Recruiting a diverse workforce
• The effect of staff diversity on your customers and suppliers
• Here's how a diverse workforce has helped my business

Print options - What are my print options - Opens in a new window

• Add guide to my print portfolio (print later as PDF)

Email options - What are my email options - Opens in a new window

• Tell a friend about this page
• Send me an email alert when this guide changes