For companies with thousands of employees, it’s usually the work of years to change the tide.

But for startups and small-to-medium businesses, your next new hire can make all the difference – and so can taking advantage of the hires you’ve already made.

Change happens fast in the small business space. There’s a reason you hired your employees. You saw something in them. Are you making the most of that?

The numbers don’t lie

New research from Forbes shows that investing in gender diverse, geographically diverse, and age diverse employee voices leads to 60% better business results.

Teams that follow inclusive processes make decisions twice as fast – with half the meetings – and make better, faster decisions up to 87% of the time. Teams outperform individuals in decision-making 66% of the time.

Meanwhile, the downside to diverse teams: they may have more trouble executing the decisions they make.

So while their decisions are better for the business, there’s still friction in terms of operational processes. That’s where you need to look when you want to improve.

Compared to individual decision makers, all-male teams make better business decisions 58% of the time. Gender diverse teams do so 73% of the time.

“This research highlights the potential value of team diversity as a practical tool for architecting decision-making processes,” said Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino.

“That our decisions get sidetracked by biases is now well established. While it is hard to change how our brains are wired, it’s possible to change the context of decisions by architecting the composition of decision-making teams for more diverse perspectives.”

Inclusive decision making contributes directly to the bottom line. Every employee’s voice is an asset – from those on day 1 to those on day 1001.

The inspiration for this story was spotted on Bloomberg.

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