Does talk of hiring diversity make you cringe, or does it mean something positive?
“Hiring diversity” often takes on highly-charged meanings due to personal experiences, historical events and/or substantial media attention.
Fact is, diversity means many things, each of which can strengthen a company – just as the introduction of a foreign substance like reinforcing iron bars (rebar) strengthens a concrete structure, allowing it to bear heavier loads.
How diversity opens new markets
A few years back, my software’s user base was expanding to the north and south. When it reached Canada, we hit a wall because we didn’t support their European-style tax systems.
When we became the only software to support the then three different Canadian national and provincial sales tax structures, it opened a large new market to us. As our Canadian market grew, we were reminded that the province of Quebec requires that business documents presented to the public (our customers’ customers) are available in both French and English, but it doesn’t require that your entire software program be bilingual.
Until my software could produce receipts, invoices and other customer-facing paperwork in French, it would be risky for a customer in Quebec to use our software. They’d be taking the chance that someone would ask for a French-language invoice, be refused and report them to the agency that monitors such things.
Why risk that? Why take the chance of silently telling their French-speaking customers that they’re “less important” than English-speaking customers?
Internationalization is a big, often costly investment for software companies. We decided to add additional language support, but we did so strategically (rather than globally) by adding the ability for customers to replace the text portions of invoices, receipts and other customer-facing paperwork with the appropriate French word. We didn’t do the translation – we made it easy for our customers to do it so that their paperwork would say exactly what they wanted.
The result? We were the only product for our market that could legally be used in Quebec – a point that our salespeople were quick to point out when a Québécois prospect compared our software with another.
Our investment paid off again when our customers in primarily English-speaking countries found new non-English speaking customers who were ready to buy. It showed they cared enough to produce paperwork in their language – whatever it was. Our software made them look good – which made us look good.
Product internationalization, in any form, is one kind of diversity.
You could take the opposite view and limit your market – the opposite of what most business owners want. These changes were made without adding additional language speakers to our staff, so they were relatively inexpensive to implement.
What can you do to expand into other markets and geographical areas?
Diversity solves hiring problems
Diversity in hiring often refers solely to gender and skin color. I think it should take on a far broader meaning that includes remote and/or part-time employees.
Business owners often comment about the difficulty of finding great quality, highly-motivated employees, ie: “A players”.
Businesses either can’t or won’t take advantage of telecommuting. For those who won’t, fear of telecommuting reflects on management’s attitude, rather than on the best of breed employee they “couldn’t” hire.
Having staff members in multiple states and time zones isn’t the easiest situation to manage – particularly if your business systems are weak. Yet the payoff of having the best available people doing your work is worth it, even if they’re two time zones away.
What about people who choose to work part-time? Would you choose a high-achieving “A player” from 9:30am to 2:45pm three days a week, over someone who perhaps isn’t as skilled or motivated, but is happy to fill a chair from 8am to 5pm?
Think about all the experienced professionals with young kids that they drop off and pick up from school each day. They fit that midday time frame. I have no doubt that there are people in this situation who have exactly the expertise you need.
Another overlooked angle is the impact of a diverse range of industry background / culture. People from different cultures or industries can offer a perspective that, when combined with your existing expertise, might transform your business’ answer to your market’s challenges.
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