Expand Your Diversity Dividend

Diversity is a market-based issue with real financial advantages. People with disabilities are widely distributed across race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic levels, sexual orientation and age. What makes this community unique is it represents the largest minority market segment and accounts for approximately $1 trillion in discretionary spending. Building an inclusive culture continues to be a top priority on most companies’ strategic agendas, bringing innovation and profitability to the organization.

Diverse Workplace

Diversifying the workplace goes beyond increasing the variety of identity groups on the payroll to actually valuing diversity and its contributions to the organization’s development and bottom line. Disability adds another dimension to your diversity efforts, bringing a wide range of skills, perspectives, and creativity to develop business solutions. Employees with disabilities have unique and competitively relevant knowledge and perspectives about work processes and, as noted in the Harvard Business Review, bring different perspectives on how to successfully meet work requirements and goals. This helps your company grow by improving functions, strategies, operations and practices.

Competition for the best talent requires organizations to reach out and embrace an increasingly diverse labor pool. Diversity issues are considered important and are projected to become even more important in the future due to increasing differences in the U.S. population. Smart companies are awakening to, and leveraging, the power and potential of workers with disabilities.

Workforce diversity is smart business – it lifts morale and enhances productivity. A recent study conducted by Adecco USA found that, not only do the majority of workers think that a diverse workforce makes their organization more successful, but also over half of the respondents (53%) felt that the more diverse their company, the more productive a worker they would become.

Diverse Marketplace

Diversity is a bridge to attract a more diverse customer base. The broadly networked disability community reaches a wide range of people. And Peter Drucker takes this concept a step further, indicating that when you make disability an integral part of your company’s hiring initiative, you engage in not only a social endeavor, but also a sound business strategy.

Global economies require that organizations have diverse workforces to reflect and reach an increasingly diverse customer base. A diverse workforce leads to increased market share, while a lack of diversity leads to a diminished market share.