Top 6 benefits for companies that embrace employee individuality

It's often been claimed that technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) have the capacity to replace humans in the workforce. However, for the foreseeable future, people and recruitment still matter. Having the best talent on your team remains a crucial ingredient for business success. As any HR professional will attest, strong candidates are always in demand, even in a sluggish economy. Having spent time and resources finding those individuals, it also makes sense to try to hold onto them.

If talent remains a crucial part of organisational success, it's important to offer the kind of workplace that attracts them, and keeps them. The marketplace for prime candidates is noisy, with many other parties vying for their attention. However, by standing out as an authentic place of work, an employer can already create an edge over the competition.

One good way to foster that authenticity is to embrace people's individuality. While staff obviously benefit from this, so do their employers. In fact, organisations that allow team members to bring their true self to work, and value their individual perspective on things, save costs, work smarter, and infuse new levels of energy and creativity into their teams.

In today's competitive market, tapping into that human spark can actually make the difference between surviving and thriving. A range of short term and long term benefits await companies that can truly commit to this idea. Six of the key wins are outlined below.

What is employee individuality?

Employee individuality is each person's uniqueness. If people are accepted as individuals and their different viewpoints are met with a positive response, they can operate within the group environment of the workplace without having to adopt any particular persona. The ability to fully express their uniqueness can help an organisation to enrich its collective thinking and introduce new, often unexpected ideas.

Profitability

Comfortable employees are happier and therefore more engaged, and the numbers back this up. That engagement factor can translate into a healthier bottom line. Less engaged employees cost the world $8.8 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP. On the other hand, strong employee engagement can deliver up to 23% higher profitability.

Brand building

Companies that are known to embrace individuality enjoy a good reputation in the market. This helps to position as a good employer, but it can strengthen the company's brand, especially amongst clients that value diversity and social responsibility. These seemingly softer benefits can have a major impact on brand equity, with benefits for attracting and retaining not only staff, but clients too.

Less demotivation and burnout

When employees are allowed to be themselves at work, they have a higher sense of belonging and motivation. They find it easier to believe in the place and people they share their working life with. Robust diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives underpin that commitment to accept people as they are. This is especially so when they are implemented with a view to building a healthy internal ecosystem, rather than simply ticking compliance boxes. Happy people aside, the cost of sick leave and missing personnel can be considerable, so it makes economic sense to provide the support and recognition people need.

Lower turnover

Companies that celebrate individuality tend to have lower turnover rates. If people's perspectives are recognised and valued, they will tend to stay on longer. This has obvious benefits when it comes to reducing recruitment and training costs. Stability is another important factor, teams feel more comfortable if turnover amongst colleagues is low. Clients feel better if their contact person doesn't keep changing. Additionally, when an employee leaves, years of organisational learning can sometimes go with them, and that kind of intellectual property (IP) can take years to rebuild.

Creativity and innovation

When a group of different people work together, and feel safe to share and create, new perspectives open up for an organisation. They have the opportunity to retain talent, harness ideas and find solutions that might otherwise have been missed. In an unpredictable market that constantly evolves with new technologies and customer demands, this capacity to think outside of the box will be critical.

Agility

If a workplace is prepared to embrace individuality, and to jump on smart new ideas, it can be one of the more agile players in its competitive space. Employees bring different experiences and backgrounds to the table. They have their own way of looking at things. Listening creates space to enrich decision-making processes, solve problems, and fuel innovation programmes. Individual viewpoints help to build an environment of continuous learning, which can be used to stay ahead of the competition.

Turn an obligation into a benefit

Employees are more discerning than ever before, and their choice of workplace is influenced by much more than salary. If this has become the new reality for employers, and if new DEI initiatives must be put in place to be compliant anyway, it makes sense to get fully on board with the idea.

Organisations that can go beyond what must be done, and discover a new way of being can future proof themselves in ways they never could have imagined. At the same time, employees have a job they want to stay in - it's a win-win for everyone.

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