How to Build Diverse Teams Using Assessments & Why It Matters
Increasing workplace diversity for tomorrow’s workforce is a good business decision. Ultimately, an organisation can realise its true potential with a diverse and inclusive workforce.
As a key source of business growth, the push for diversity in the workplace has become a top priority for business leaders. New research has continuously made it clear that non-homogenous teams possess high competence, yield more innovations, increase the bottom line and cause significant business shifts compared to a homogenous one.
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The Importance of Workplace Diversity
A recent study by Center for Talent Innovation(CTI) found that organisations with “two-dimensional diversity“—leaders who exhibit both inherent and acquired diversity traits—were 45% more likely to record year-over-year market share gain than organisations without it.
There are different types of diversity, but a higher percentage of its component lies in the diversity of thought. Diverse backgrounds and thought processes elevate the team, foster communication, and help bring unique perspectives to the organisation that aid in tackling issues for the best outcomes.
In addition, diversity has a way of helping organisations bolster their employer brand or reputation. As a hiring manager, you have the opportunity to tap into the skills, ideas and experience of a diverse team to enhance your corporate culture, build an enviable employer brand and positively impact how others perceive the organisation.
When hiring, it’s critical to identify candidates whose values coincide with the organisation. However, most thriving organisations recommend that diversity is another crucial factor that recruiters/employers must consider after establishing a core value connection.
Despite this, due to their unconscious bias, many hiring managers still make the costly mistake of hiring the same type of employee or identically mirroring their existing teams.
Unfortunately, they source from the same narrow list of companies and even go as far as selecting candidates with the same background, skillsets, and personality traits as their existing employees during the talent acquisition process. The result would usually be an entire company that looks and think alike- and probably even act alike- which inadvertently affects the diversity of thoughts.
Every employee wants to feel seen and heard; they want to know that their contributions are valued and that the organisation’s culture promotes a sense of belonging.
There is no way that innovations can come about without a deliberate focus on diverse thought processes; it is a major factor in building successful teams. For this reason, diverse thinking is the only means to change the world and challenge the status quo.
Hence, to question ingrained internal beliefs, present unique perspectives or bold new ideas, fill capabilities gaps and make selections without biases, you must build a truly diverse team by incorporating assessment tools early in the selection phase.
Utilising assessments can be a great way of understanding the traits, the potential employees’ level of emotional intelligence and why or how they act the way they do. It also may be used to forecast the future behaviours of a candidate.
Additionally, assessments make it less likely that subjective criteria like “likeability” will creep in or inadvertently impact your hiring decisions. As a result, you can maximise assessment tools to effectively build proactive teams, drive diversity of thoughts, and positive growth among your potential team.
How Can Employers Use Assessment to Build Diverse Teams?
If you want to realise the full potential of talent, foster greater workplace diversity, discover solutions, and improve the overall productivity of your businesses, you must start with how you assess candidates.
Here are five (5) ways that talent assessments can help employers build a more diverse workforce:
1. Objective hiring decision
Regardless of a candidate’s background, testing their skills before hiring enables companies to make sure they are selecting the ideal person.
Assessment can provide more objective data on talent and give employers the data that their hire would approach problems in varying ways and think creatively. It can also reveal to what extent the candidate will add to the team’s diversity and be able to perform the role effectively.
2. Create a more engaging assessment experience
The development of a screening procedure that places greater emphasis on the behaviours, abilities, and skills needed for the position in an unbiased way motivates applicants to apply and be more engaged in the process because it is a fair assessment of how they perform.
3. Measure attitude and predict future behaviours
To minimise the interference of bias, HR professionals can opt for an assessment such as a psychometric assessment to understand which candidate may be a flight risk, which is cultural fit or possess some competence or abilities that will be helpful.
Assessing people’s attitudes can help teams and business divisions identify potential problem areas.
4. Check that diversity training is working
Talent managers can identify if there are any critical job skills or job traits that current employees lack or should develop by using assessments to analyse existing employees.
Competency-based assessments offer detailed information on the talents, skills, abilities, and behaviours that must be developed. As a result, businesses can design specialised, individualised learning paths for their employees.
5. Set Benchmarks to assess relevant competencies and potential
Rather than identifying candidates similar to existing employees or oneself, assessment can be essential for identifying high potential candidates and nurturing such talent. Also, there is an opportunity to establish benchmarks to pinpoint the vital qualities and skills required to excel in a particular role and use that as a yardstick to evaluate all applicants fairly.
What We Can Do For You
You can make your workforce more diverse, build a world-class employer brand and drive cultural change by leveraging Workforce Group’s science-based solutions and assessment centres to gain access to top-tier talent in the emerging market.
Our solutions can add objectivity, reliability and fairness to your hiring and development process. Schedule a consultation to learn how to build a more diverse team with assessment.
Akindele Afolabi
Director, Workforce Resourcing