How To Know If Your Company Invests In Diversity

And Why Diversity Is An Innovation Strategy

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Your company should welcome diverse perspectives from underrepresented groups if it wants to unlock profit potential and drive innovation forward.

A significant reason why we, humble ventures, do what we do is that we’ve had similar experiences and know the feeling of disbelief when you aren’t valued as a person. We’ve also seen the cultivation of a single crop stifle innovation and weaken companies.

An influential executive that’s invested in diversity and inclusion can change the culture, yielding profit, and financial gain. Until that happens, an unsustainable culture of innovation will persist within the company’s four walls. One area to uncover inequities and barriers to innovation is the workforce. Below are a few signs to know if a company isn’t investing in diversity:

• Portfolio of work, investments, data, and hiring is evidence of a monoculture.
• The work environment is toxic.
• Hire people of color into a role that structurally cannot be successful.
• She has to rationalize to her boss what the value is of the time spent working on specific projects like an affinity group, for example.
• They bring her in because it helps their diversity numbers.
• Don’t give her any resources.
• No support.
• No one is advocating for her internally.
• No one’s inviting her to meetings or looping her into decisions.
• No one includes her on internal hiring decisions.
• She’s isolated.
• She feels left out of things.
• No one’s supportive of her professionally.
• The job feels like a losing battle without career-enhancing advantages.

It’s hard to be innovative when you aren’t motivated or empowered by executive leadership. Additionally, if employees sense no executive buy-in or don’t have resources to carry out the role effectively, they leave. With that turnover, the company loses diverse perspectives, institutional knowledge, past plans to address the issues, and connections to the community and external partners. When enterprises have this turnover, it also leads to steep learning curves for new leadership.

Enterprises who want to solve problems realize diversity and inclusion link inextricably to innovation. If diversity is how employees get in the door, inclusion is how employees stay and positively contribute to an organization. Organizations with inclusive cultures create breakthrough ideas and make better decisions. Studies have found inclusive cultures are:

• 2x more likely to meet or exceed financial targets
• 3x as likely to be high-performing
• 6x more likely to be innovative and agile
• 8x more likely to achieve better business outcomes

Diverse entrepreneurs and those creating solutions for different audiences are solving problems for the fastest growing demographic segments in the US, provide opportunities for disproportionate returns and represent the markets of the future.

humble’s mission and expansive network enable us to help enterprises vertically incorporate diversity as an innovation strategy to acquire new customers, gain innovative insights, and be better positioned for the future. To learn more about partnership opportunities and how we link inclusion to optimal outcomes in innovation, visit humble.vc, or email start@humble.vc.

About humble ventures

Humble Ventures is an inclusive alternative to venture capital.

We are a venture development firm that accelerates growth for tech-enabled startups in partnership with established organizations and investors.

We focus on diverse entrepreneurs that are solving problems for the fastest growing demographic segments. We believe that diverse entrepreneurs provide opportunities for disproportionate returns and represent the markets of the future.