4 Reasons Why Google Should Embrace Diversity

A Michael Maulick viewpoint:

This past week, Google once again finds itself head-lining the news with the company’s continued struggle to create and maintain a more diverse workforce. Since 2014, Google has been working to address the diversity issue, from openly sharing its diversity workforce numbers, to spending $265 million dollars on the effort and recently, hiring a vice president of diversity. All hell broke loose last Friday, when a senior engineer posted a controversial 10-page memo arguing for less emphasis on diversity causing Google CEO Sundar Pichai to cut his vacation short to mitigate damage.

Whenever negative news like this breaks, a positive outcome is that it causes other corporate executives to reflect upon their own organization. As the CEO of SunLink, I am fortunate that we’ve long been champions of diversity with more than 30 percent of our total workforce female with 50 percent of our workforce employees African-American, Latino and Asian-American. Additionally, I’m most proud of the fact that 50 percent of my own executive team are women. Despite the fact that the solar industry has deep roots in construction, our company has always embraced diversity so much so that it’s just a part of who we are.

 It’s interesting to me that in this day and age, we’re still questioning whether women and minorities can perform at the same level as white men. While many tech companies in Silicon Valley have long been accused of propagating the privileged white male culture, there are known, direct benefits that positively impact a company’s business that result from having a more diverse workforce:

 Creative Problem-Solving – It’s scientifically proven that problem-solving is improved when you have a diverse group of individuals addressing a challenge. This is why universities are increasingly bringing different students together from different backgrounds to develop stronger skills in problem-solving and there are numerous examples of where “thinking outside the box” has resulted in breakthrough innovations. Think NASA and the African-American women mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists who cracked the code to launch astronaut John Glenn into space orbit.

 Product Innovation – Designing new products require an intimate knowledge of the end-user. And that end-user is increasingly diverse, requiring a broader understanding of how customers will use and enjoy the benefits of a product or service. In our own company, we’ve seen the benefits of having both female and male engineers jointly design new products, thinking of not only practical solutions but also new features and enhancements resulting from incorporating broader perspectives. 

 Improved Communications – While having a more homogeneous workforce may seem like it’s easier to communicate, we’ve found that having a diverse, culturally-rich workforce stimulates more conscious effort to communicate more effectively. This creates empathy, which creates improved understanding of where we are each coming from, allowing us to have richer, more emotionally intelligent conversations. We believe in encouraging “healthy conflict” where we give everyone a chance to be heard, we then make the right business decision relative to the correct level of context. We don’t focus on consensus, we focus on the context and when it comes time to make a decision we do so with whatever information we have. In the end, we  get to the right business decision efficiently and collaboratively.

 Attractive Employer – The best talent want to work for a company that shares their same values. Having a diverse workforce with women in leadership positions has been one of the primary reasons that we’ve been successful in securing talent in a highly competitive market. We’re not located in a major metropolitan city but talent chooses our company because they see that we have a workforce that is widely diverse – all ages, sexes, sexual orientations and cultural backgrounds – and that there is a solid leadership path for women and minorities.

We’ve been fortunate in that diversity has always been a strength at SunLink. For any company that truly wants to be productive and maintain its competitive edge, having a diverse workforce embraced by all levels of management is the key. Creating and nurturing a diverse workforce shouldn’t be hard – it just takes a conscious decision to focus on talent that is reflective of the real world.