Bidiversity

Diversity.com has come up with the top 5 ways that diversity can help you make yourself more valuable and help keep your job.  As a manager or as an employee, your willingness to appreciate innovation and talent, and your ability to relate to customers, will make you the one who survives these tough times.Here’s their advice on making sure your commitment to diversity makes you indispensable to your company:

No. 1: Don’t be negative. Emphasize how downturns can be critical times to recruit talent.

Just like recessions can offer other bargains, the ability to snap up great people, especially those in demand, is an opportunity you should push at your company.

No. 2: Don’t let your panic over the economy get in the way of being truly innovative and creative.

At times like this, diverse perspectives – and solutions – are all the more valued. “We’re looking for innovators. The key is that you’ve got to have those diverse perspectives to drive the innovation,” says Robert Crumpton, director of diversity at Monsanto Co.

No. 3: If you are in a management position, make sure your best and brightest aren’t the ones leaving and that they know the diversity commitment is long-term.

When we want to hold on to our very best talent, this is the very time at which they are being pushed by the competition and are likely to make life decisions about whether the stress is worth staying on in the industry or not.

It’s a clear profit-and-loss issue in which you, as a manager, can demonstrate your value. Susan Hamilton, assistant vice president of diversity/HR leadership for of CSX, estimates it costs up to $40,000 to lose a valued employee, and since her company has dramatically changed the composition of its work-force demographics to remain relevant to its customers, she sure isn’t going to let people she needs go easily. “We’ve recruited them, hired and trained them, on-boarded them, we oriented them. We will have a sunken crop if we lose those people,” she says.

No. 4: Use diversity to make new connections to your customers.

The demographics of this country are changing dramatically, with white people projected to be the minority by 2042. Even beyond that, people especially younger people want a work force that is inclusive of everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, orientation or disability. By relating to the evolving marketplace and devising new customer strategies, you can make yourself invaluable.

“The customers in any part of our business entertainment services, wireless services are incredibly diverse and are expecting diverse responses from us,” says Magda Yrizarry, vice president of workplace culture, diversity and compliance in corporate human resources at Verizon Communications.

This goes for business-to-business companies as well. “Increasingly, clients are talking and asking for both supplier diversity and work-force diversity, and not about what your policies are and what you’re doing, but about diverse teams–but it’s not just that they want a diverse team, they want the best teams at the end of the day, and the best teams are diverse, especially in a global environment,” says Allan Mark, America’s director, diversity strategy and involvement at Ernst & Young.

No. 5: Join and lead an employee-resource group.

The increasing importance of these groups as key to business growth and as enablers of talent development cannot be overestimated.