This article was written for our sponsor, Vaco.

There’s been a demand for more diversity in the workplace for years now. The year 2020 has only magnified this call-to-action as national brands like Target have publicly committed themselves to a more diverse and inclusive work environment in response to movements like Black Lives Matter.

Why is diversity important? The reasons are many, but aside from being the right thing to do, more diverse companies have also proven to be more profitable.

A 2019 McKinsey analysis found “companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25 percent more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile—up from 21 percent in 2017 and 15 percent in 2014.” Earlier, in 2018, a Boston Consulting Group study found companies with more diverse management teams have 19 percent higher revenues “due to innovation.”

“To bring about innovation, it really does take different perspectives and also the right amount of tension where you can bring all those different ideas to the table,” said Erin Miller, vice president of people and culture at publishing company Lulu Press, Inc.

Miller was also formerly the vice president of people at PrecisionHawk, a commercial drone and data company, where she helped the company become more gender and ethnically diverse.

“When I started at PrecisionHawk, it was only a 20 percent female company in Q2 of 2018. By the second quarter of 2019, the company was 40 percent female,” said Miller. “We also increased our non-white population from 20 percent to 33 percent.”

Diversity in the workplace is especially needed in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) industry, which skews white and male. In fact, data from the Pew Research Center revealed the majority (69 percent) of STEM workers are white, with blacks and Hispanics underrepresented across most STEM job clusters.

Miller plans to bring a lot of her strategy and experience into her new role at Lulu Press, Inc. and said the key to making companies more dynamically diverse is to start with leadership.

“You’ve got to have a lot of conversations with the executive team, as well as the hiring managers. Talk about what the greater vision is for your company,” said Miller. “We need to think like the world, look like the world and act like the world. And you cannot do that if you have a predominantly white, male employee base.”

Beyond these high-level conversations, it’s making inclusion “the norm” according to Miller. She said diversity in the workplace shouldn’t be a “movement” but instead, the thing companies do from day one.

“Don’t have the hiring manager be the sole decision maker — instead have an interview committee where everyone has the same weight in the decision,” said Miller. “And, second, ask yourself who is going to contribute to the company culture in a way that’s not already heavily represented.”

It’s important to note diversity isn’t just about gender and race. Diversity also includes differences in skill sets, career backgrounds, thought, socioeconomic status and more.

“One of my best hires in technology had no background in tech — she was a director of housekeeping at Marriott,” said Miller. “When I asked her what her most challenging day in her career was, she relayed how a hotel fire had started in the middle of the night and told me how she dealt with it. She had this palpable skillset of just a tenacious work ethic. What she had already was easily transferable to what we needed her to do. She came in as an office manager and we quickly moved her into employment engagement and recruiting, and now she’s in her dream job.”

“For a technology company, she never would’ve broken into our industry unless gatekeepers like myself and others looked past her nontraditional past experience and instead, really looked at her skillset,” Miller finished.

Miller also pointed out in STEM, oftentimes a company’s mission statement references how they’re “changing the world somehow.” In order to do this though, she said you have to adequately represent the world from within.

Rose Lorenzo, CEO of Hackathon Jr., a youth learning competition to encourage children ages nine to 13 years old to engage in STEM education, is trying to bring diversity into STEM long before a person even submits their first official job application.

“Hackathon Jr. is a problem-solving-with-technology competition, not a coding camp. We teach the children how to code, but then they’re instructed to use that code to come up with a solution for either a social or environmental issue during a competition,” said Lorenzo. “One day these same children are going to create an app and solve problems like climate change or ocean pollution or cyberbullying.”

Lorenzo founded the nonprofit with three of her colleagues at the University of Phoenix during her doctoral program in response to a research study on children that found those immersed in technology exhibited higher levels of emotional intelligence and empathy.

Lorenzo warns diversity alone, isn’t enough.

“Diversity is great. I think our biggest issue in the corporate world, including in STEM, is the lack of equal equity. For organizations to have a very diverse employee base, that’s great, however, if that diverse population doesn’t have a seat at the table to help make decisions then their presence isn’t really creating a diverse company culture,” said Lorenzo, who also owns a financial consulting company and has worked with businesses of all types. “Insert somebody with a different life experience or perspective and different questions will be asked, which opens up an avenue for better ideas.”

Lorenzo emphasized diversity in any organization is essential because it brings a variety of skills and different perspectives that allow an increase in innovation and creativity.

“There has long been anecdotal evidence supporting the idea that diversity fosters innovation. Now there is a databased case as well,” wrote the Boston Consulting Group. “The evidence is clear: companies that take the initiative and actively increase the diversity of their management teams — across all dimensions of diversity and with the right enabling factors in place — perform better. These companies find unconventional solutions to problems and generate more and better ideas, with a greater likelihood that some of them will become winning products and services in the market. As a result, they outperform their peers financially.”

Vaco, a business management consulting company with a location in Raleigh, champions companies to become more diverse for all of the illustrated reasons and more.

“Having a diverse team is important from an equity standpoint but there are also proven benefits to overall company culture when an organization is more diverse, not just racially, but in thought too. The true value of diversity isn’t in skin color, gender, ability or any other way we characterize people. Its true value is in diverse thought,” said Sid Mitchener, senior managing partner at Vaco. “Those unique thoughts, histories and experiences hold others accountable for their unconscious biases and lend to more well-rounded decision making, ultimately powering a more strategic business operation.”

Added Lorenzo, “I think that when organizations can really embrace equal equity in a diverse culture, then it opens the door for growth.”

This article was written for our sponsor, Vaco.