Widen your choice of employees to improve competitiveness

• having a larger pool of potential candidates for job positions
• having a wider range of resources, skills and ideas among your employees that you can tap into
• improving staff retention, leading to lower recruitment and training costs
• increasing employee efficiency and lowering stress due to cross-functional teams, ie employees are capable of a variety of roles thanks to their different backgrounds and skill sets
• avoiding claims of unfair treatment or discrimination
• building a reputation as a diverse business
• building a competitive edge in recruitment and retention as you can select from a bigger pool of candidates

A diverse workforce can also help you understand your customers better by helping to identify:

• problems that customers may have, eg language barriers and poor access for disabled people
• how customers with different religious beliefs or from different backgrounds might react to your business or product

Customers are increasingly attaching great importance to a business' reputation. They may turn to a competitor if they feel your business is indifferent to supporting the needs of a particular sector of people. By recruiting employees from under-represented groups, you can avoid alienating potential customers. You can also avoid possible discrimination, eg by employing women in a traditionally male environment.