Nigeria is home to multi-cultural people with diverse backgrounds, customs, and agendas. With so many differences among the people, businesses must find a way to harness these differences to their advantage. This is what business diversity entails, as it attempts to promote a platform for bringing in these differences and using them to grow businesses.
This article will provide insights into the importance, opportunities, and challenges of diversity in business. It’ll also cover examples of core Nigerian businesses capitalizing on the several opportunities that it brings.
What is business diversity?
Business diversity refers to the different kinds of people who work together in a workplace. They could be different in age, race, gender, belief, ethnic background, and more. As a result of these differences, they all have their quota that they can contribute to seeing their company succeed.
Each member who makes up the diverse community within the workplace can share their knowledge and experiences with others, which will lead to accomplishing the company’s goals.
Furthermore, business diversity offers a lot more insights for innovation, creativity, and growth to businesses that choose to explore its opportunities.
Importance of Diversity in the Business Landscape
The concept of business diversity within the business world is really important, and here are some reasons why:
1. Ease of Innovation and Creativity
Innovations and creativities that are seen thriving in businesses and organizations result from people’s “brainchildren,” ideas, and insights. The greater the difference in how they think and what inspires their ideas, the more innovations will be made.
Having different individuals with diverse backgrounds in a workplace will provide multiple perspectives informing the extent of creativity during that business.
Read also: Innovative culture in business: Building a path to success
2. Broad Customer Understanding
It’s often said that your first set of customers in your business are your employees.
According to Sybil F. Stershic, a renowned author,
The way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel. And if your employees don’t feel valued, neither will your customers.
Having employees with diverse cultural backgrounds, perspectives, and age ranges working in your business, it will be easy to know how they feel about your business. As a result, you’ll have the insights that you need to understand your broad customer base and how best to model your products or services to meet their needs.
Read also: Customer behavior analysis: Why it matters for growth
3. Attraction and Retention of Talents
Another important aspect of diversity in the business landscape is that it helps you attract and retain really talented individuals to your business or organization.
Inclusion, diverse cultural backgrounds, and employee growth are some factors that attracts new talents and give them the zeal to join your company and help it grow.
When they realize that working in your business positively impacts their lives, they’ll pledge their loyalty to you and ensure that your company grows. Hence, as a business owner, if you want to see new talents approach your business, you must embrace business diversity.
4. Global Competitiveness
One reason you need to incorporate diversity into your business is that it gives you the platform to grow on a global scale and compete successfully with other companies at that level.
Businesses, as well as yours, also aim to offer value to customers globally, and this can happen when your business encourages diversity.
With the diverse minds of your employees, every innovation and creativity that could give your business global competitiveness will come from them. It will also help you understand how to penetrate diverse cultures and policies to meet your broad customer base with your products.
Opportunities for Business Diversity in Nigeria
As a Nigerian business owner, exploring the opportunities that embracing business diversity brings is important. This section will dwell on four such opportunities:
1. Cultural Understanding
A country like Nigeria is rich in diverse cultural backgrounds. With over 250 cultures, Nigeria offers business owners many opportunities they can harness.
By paying close attention to these different cultures, you’ll know how best to bring your products that appeal to them across local markets. Also, through business diversity, you can connect with your customers across different cultures through local retailers.
2. Market Adaptation
With a diverse team of employees, you are better positioned to understand Nigeria’s various markets and consumer needs. Your diverse team of employees will provide insights into these market and consumer variations, helping you make the necessary adaptations to meet the different needs across different regions or demographics within the country.
3. Innovation for Local Challenges
Nigeria is a country that faces different unique challenges that they can solve through innovative solutions. These creative solutions will come from employees with different perspectives and insights. They’ll develop new innovative solutions that can address the local challenges businesses face across sectors like health, and infrastructure.
4. Brand Loyalty and Reputation
Companies that embrace business diversity without discrimination receive commendations from their customers. This confidence that consumers have in Nigerian businesses with diverse teams leads them to establish positive relationships that enhance the reputation of businesses.
The better a business’s reputation, the more customers will be loyal to them. So, by embracing diversity, companies can build their reputation and customers’ loyalty to their brand.
Read also: Build your brand from scratch in 8 easy steps
Challenges of Business Diversity in Nigeria
While diversity in business has presented many opportunities, it still faces challenges. Let’s take a look at three notable ones:
1. Differences in Culture
Since cultural differences should be an opportunity to be harnessed, especially in Nigeria, different cultures have their own beliefs that may be limitations for individuals.
For example, a difference in language could be a barrier to communicating with others; their work practices and cultural norms could lead to misunderstandings or conflicts when not properly managed.
2. Educational Differences
Business diversity attempts to promote opportunity for all without discrimination or sentiment. But what happens when education becomes the separation factor?
This happens in Nigeria, and because of the diverse cultures, some regions may not be very interested in attaining the desired heights of education. This may affect the inclusion of all cultures within the workplace because educational qualifications may not all meet the standards that allow diversity in business to thrive.
3. Religious Diversity
Religion shouldn’t be a challenge in the workplace, right? Not necessarily. In a country like Nigeria, religion and religious beliefs could pose a challenge in a workplace that promotes diversity.
However, when there’s a clear line and respect for the religions of different employees within an organization, there can be an understanding that will help them manage this difference well.
Examples of Nigerian Businesses That Capitalize on Diversity
Here are two examples of companies in Nigeria that have embraced business diversity and are capitalizing on the opportunities it brings. They include:
Dangote Group
The Dangote group of companies is one example of a Nigerian company capitalizing on business diversity. As a company that Aliko Dangote leads, its goal is to give all and sundry opportunities within and outside Nigeria.
The company’s workforce includes different kinds of people from across the country. Embracing diversity in business has led him to utilize the opportunities it brings while tackling the challenges and offering the best his company can to Nigerians and Africa.
Nigerian Breweries Plc
This is Nigeria’s own bottling company, which was incorporated in 1946. Over the years since its incorporation, it has witnessed significant growth, even now. It boasts of diverse individuals from all parts of the nation who make up the workforce. By harnessing this diversity, the company has understood its broad customer base, offering products that suit their needs.
Conclusion
Nigeria is a unique country with people of diverse cultural backgrounds, perspectives, and work ethics. Harnessing the differences in people and applying them within the workplace poses many opportunities for businesses, but it also poses some challenges. Hence, by exploring these opportunities, businesses can gain insight into how best to meet the needs of their customers.