How to stop destroying your team
Diversity and inclusion has gained more interest among scholars and practitioners over the past few years as shown by the number of times this topic was searched in Google.
Gender equality is the 5th sustainable development goal by the United Nations. This means there is a global acknowledgement about the importance of gender balance and equality while there is hope and expectation for more active efforts to promote gender equality and balance in the workplaces.
Today, around 28% of managerial positions are held by women while the global population balance is almost 50–50 among men and women. So, there is a long way to go to achieve this goal and move from a mainly male dominated leadership and managerial landscape to a more balanced one.
According to Swiss Re Group, organizations have started to announce official goals to increase the share of leadership positions held by women as part of their diversity and inclusion efforts. Based on UBS data, Countries carefully monitor gender balance in a variety of areas and develop policies to move towards a more balanced presence of different groups in various areas of economic, societal and political activities.
It is generally believed that a more balanced presence of different groups in teams and organizations can lead to higher rates of innovation, financial success and employee satisfaction. There are a few studies about the positive impact of a more balanced distribution of genders in the workforce on organizational performance.
However, according to Harvard Business Review, conversations in organizations about the importance of active efforts to move towards a more gender equal workplace sometimes get stuck in some ideological and/or political duel of ideas and show of power. Despite all the efforts over the past few years in awareness raising and diversity and inclusion campaigns, there is still not much empirical evidence to help promoters of this issue (importance of gender balance) easily persuade their doubtful colleagues about the real benefits of working towards this goal.
Our analysis of more than 100 teams with various gender compositions shows that a more balanced gender distribution is clearly improving the performance of teams in solving problems. Indeed, the data shows that an improved gender balance is very strongly correlated with improved performance of teams. In the below chart, a 50–50 balance of population results in a 100% balance score. Unfortunately, the teams that were subject of this analysis were not representative of other sexual orientations, but the general trend and message is clear: Moving towards gender balance in teams positively impacts on the performance of teams.
If you are looking for an objective way to get a full picture of your current organizational state with regards to diversity and inclusion based on real behavioral data and the power of advanced machine learning techniques, we are here to help. Inoteam’s library of solutions enables you to get a clear and evidenced-based profile of your organization about the impact of your current diversity and inclusion setup on organizational performance and well-being of your employees. You can check www.inoteam.io
