The draw of diversity

It's almost a corporate mantra: Diversity is good for business. Many companies recruit with that mantra in mind. They devote meetings to it and tout it in ads. But does a workforce with a mix of races, genders, and cultures really make a difference to the bottom line?

Not as automatically as those glossy ads suggest. At least that's the conclusion of a recent study that looked at four companies with diverse staffs.

Overall, racial and gender diversity did not have any resounding impact - positive or negative, the researchers found. At one company, store branches where employees were as diverse as their customers did not outperform the others. In some instances, racial diversity seemed to hinder teamwork.

But the study's key conclusion: For businesses to make diversity a real asset, they have to know a lot more about how to manage it well. It's an idea that's starting to push companies to move beyond feel-good messages.

"When you look at it strategically, there's very little science attached to it," says Luke Visconti, cofounder of DiversityInc magazine. "[Diversity] as a management subject is in its infancy."

Measuring diversity's impact isn't easy, and it's not just a matter of dollars and cents, diversity experts say. But the challenge is to figure out how best to use the varied perspectives that people bring to the office.

"Our concern is that some consultants are still focused on diversity awareness and [changing attitudes] ... but that puts people in a defensive posture," says Thomas Kochan, professor of MIT's Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Mass., and lead author of the report from a group of independent scholars. "You can get more positive results from diverse groups if you provide the skills to help people learn from each other's background - communication skills, conflict and negotiation skills, drawing out the strengths of different people."

Commissioned by a group that advocates for diversity - the BOLD Initiative (Business Opportunities for Leadership Development) - the five-year study tested many diversity theories.

Since the report was published in the Human Resource Management Journal earlier this year, at least one large company has responded by shifting its whole diversity approach, says Beatrice Fitzpatrick, president of BOLD.

Rather than continue with diversity-awareness training that dwells on people's feelings, it plans to help managers tap into diverse work groups to increase productivity, Ms. Fitzpatrick says of the company, which did not want to be identified.

Some workplaces are still trying to recruit a more diverse staff. Others may look like a rainbow but have an undercurrent of cynicism because employees equate diversity with "annually being held hostage for a seminar," Mr. Visconti says. But where there's a top-down commitment to diversity, it's becoming much more intertwined with other aspects of employee development and accountability.

The term some consultants use is "inclusion" - creating an environment in which people feel valued as individuals.

"Here in the US, we like to pretend to be all the same ... so we list five or six criteria that mean you are professional - generally based on the values of white males ... in their 40s or 50s," says Elmer Dixon, vice president of Executive Diversity Services in Seattle. In trying to conform, "people lose parts of who they are, and you're not getting the most out of them."

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