Diversity and inclusion in hiring, over the years, has developed into more of a staffing strategy than a socially responsible business initiative; aiming to encompass people from different socio-economic standings while recruiting to build a dynamic company. A diverse group of people working together in an organization adds value to businesses by driving innovation, creativity, and effective problem solving while alleviating issues that come with cultural unawareness, cognitive homogeneity, and limited market coverage.
Myanmar companies are now more than ever are turning to recruitment diversity as one of the biggest differentiating HR strategies in response to the influx of numerous foreign business investments. They’re also recruiting groups of people from all walks of life to make the company more culturally blended and to add distinctive skillsets to the team. Here below are three major ways any organization can benefit from an inclusive recruiting strategy.
1) Diverse Culture
It goes without saying that diversity in people brings about diversity in culture. Culture is one of many things that some job seekers usually look at first while contemplating to work for a company. Employees who last longer in a company are the ones who can acclimate to the company culture and can coexist with their colleagues while being able to excel at their given roles. Companies that have many such employees are the ones that have developed an organizational culture that everyone can relate to in their own way. A culture that only caters to the interests of one group of people apparently does not serve the purpose of allowing everyone to find a culturally supportive group in times of difficulty, personally, or professionally. Cultural singularity is one of the many reasons employees quit because they do not have much they can strongly relate to in terms of activities, events, topics of interest in the workplace, etc. Diversity in hiring not only allows employees to experience different cultures among different co-workers, but also helps to create multiple different cultural atmospheres that many employees find comforting or home-like and make them feel a sense of belonging.
Many local companies in Myanmar are becoming more open to hiring international workers than ever before due to a number of varying factors, anywhere from that they have a different training in education, a different perspective on a problem, and a different approach to decision making which all can benefit the local workers by giving them ample capacity to learn within a differently paced professional environment. In a similar vein, many international companies in Myanmar are now recruiting more diverse groups of people like traditionally underrepresented workers, practitioners from different religions, and ethnically divergent locals to take on important roles in the company because they have individual ways of living life along with compelling stories to tell and most importantly, they can add their unique fingerprint to the company’s overall makeup.
2) More Informed Decision Making
Making important decisions is part of every business, and the bigger the stakes the more important the responsibility it is for the company to make the right choice, whatever it may be. People with similar thought processes or interests tend to converge at a similar conclusion within a short period of time when it comes to decision making due to their ideological mutuality. Meanwhile, people who do not share the same culture, interests, or thoughts tend to find it harder to reach a conclusion since they have to spend more time than the former group to reconcile their individual decisions and reach a consensus that everyone could agree on. This process yes takes a longer time and much more effort than the other but as a result, the ensuing decisions are usually more informed, thoroughly thought through, and vetted like no other since different people have contributed to the conversation. An eventual agreement resulting from different people is more solid than that resulting from groupthink.
Internships used to be an underrepresented and often neglected form getting experience in the workforce just some years ago in Myanmar because most internship opportunities were financially uncompensated and people were unsure of wanting to spend three or four months of their lives without getting paid. But now, many Myanmar companies are not only stressing the importance of pursuing an internship, paid or unpaid, before graduation, they’re also creating many opportunities for college students to pursue different internships during their undergraduate career because college students are mostly affiliated with generation Z and they are a great value addition to any corporate team because one, they’re more exposed to new technologies than any other generation has been and two, they’re more open-minded thinkers who usually take an out-of-the-box approach to solving problems. Although there may be inevitable clashes between these newer generations and older ones due to differences in training, thinking, and actioning, companies are more and more accepting of differences as a healthy form of professional conflict that can contribute to better decision-making opportunities.
3) Better Business Opportunities
Employees are important stakeholders of a company and by virtue of being stakeholders, they can provide a business with a certain level of competitive advantages despite not being direct customers or investors. For example, a company that recruits foreigners or an international workforce might benefit from foreign investment opportunities or an internationally interested customer base. Similarly, recruiting traditionally underrepresented people usually succeeds as a socially responsible action which can attract customers who care about the company’s level of sensitivity and response to societal problems. Last but not least, diverse recruits can position the business more sustainable than others because in times of crisis or economic turning points; companies with diverse recruits are able to use creative minds from more than one source of group and in turn, companies with creative responses to difficult situations can outperform those that live by the books and use a homogenous group of people who think in a similar vein, thus eliciting less dynamic solutions to complex problems.
Myanmar is now more inviting than ever to foreign investment and external economic opportunities, making it one of the countries in Asia to be an international business interest. Companies that limit the diversity of their recruits tend to face challenges of all sorts during times of major market upheaval while others exponentially thrive. There has been substantial research focusing on this disparity of business success among different Myanmar companies and what has been proven is that one of the reasons some businesses thrive and some not much is attributed to the diversity in recruitment. For example, companies that foresee the foreign opportunities recruit linguistically diverse people to make the process of international communication more seamless. These results in a smooth flow of conducting business between different companies from different areas while culturally homogenous companies are deprived of such opportunities, especially in a country with as much differentiation within its borders as Myanmar has.
To recap, diversity and inclusion is an effective HR strategy that many companies have started to employ because giving job opportunities to different people who embody different qualities does not just sound like a business strategy but it also has positive social impacts to the community.