How a Diverse Team Brings More Creativity and Engagement to Your Business Across the board, a more diverse team is a more creative team.
By Eric 'ERock' Christopher Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It's been just over one year since I helped to produce a globally televised KISS concert in Dubai on New Year's Eve 2020. We brought people from all over the world to collaborate with people from the local community to create a diverse and unforgettable experience that won awards for it's video production value.
There's no hotter format than video right now, and studies show that 33 percent of all online activity is spent watching them. As appealing as they can be to consume, creating fresh content can be a struggle for many businesses to maintain. All too often the creative process can be mystified, but in truth, it's all about putting the right environment and team together so ideas can flow freely.
Video production in particular requires individuals with different skill sets to come together to produce something that any sole individual would be hard-pressed to create on their own. Productions call for an experienced team of videographers, editors and more just to get out of the gate, let alone turn in a quality product.
While diverse skills are widely regarded as necessary, it's become more evident that diverse worker backgrounds boost the overall creative potential of a project as well. Diversity has emerged as a key component of creativity by business leaders around the world, and by embracing it in the workplace, the rate and quality of creative output trends upwards.
1. A diverse crew has more experiences to draw upon
Studies show that teams with diverse members are 70 percent more likely to capture new markets with their projects. The reasoning follows that by having more diverse members able to add their personal input, the overall well of experiences to draw upon is both wider and deeper than a team composed of similar individuals.
This trend is reflected by industry leaders, as Google releases annual reports on their internal diversity metrics, and shares insights on how hiring from a wider pool of candidates have positively affected their business. Rates of hiring minorities have steadily climbed year over year, and they have outlined concrete diversity goals to be met by 2025.
Google cites this as one of the contributing factors for their impressive 61.58 percent, year-over-year growth rate. While each production and business has its own specific needs in terms of team member abilities, one thing they all have in common is benefiting from multiple perspectives being present throughout the creative process.
Related: Why Diversity In the Workforce Is Imperative
2. It causes reflections, which leads to innovation
When working with diverse team members, individuals can't help but reflect on the different circumstances that surround each colleague. These internal team dynamics encourage an innovative thought process as the members must compromise and work with one another throughout production.
The end result from all the back and forth is a more creatively fueled project that's likely to appeal to a wider demographic. A recent phone call with Bereket Taffese, co-founder and CEO of Gebeya Media, helped illustrate this concept first-hand:
"While our studio HQ is based in Ethiopia, our team and clients are located around the world. Every day we work to incorporate the thoughts and concerns of so many backgrounds — race, age and cultural values. By bringing about such different viewpoints all under one roof for a project, we find an increase in innovative and creative ideas."
Continued Tafesse, "We incorporate these insights into our video projects, and feel like the final product benefits from us doing so. When you are working towards putting forth inspiring video content. You need all hands on deck to reflect and see how they can best contribute."
Putting together teams from diverse backgrounds creates a unique mix, one that's unique from any other, and ultimately a more interesting piece of content for the viewer to enjoy.
Related: How Diversity Helped Bring My Company Together
3. Diversity increases empathy and trust between team members
Trust is a necessary foundational block for any creative team to function, and it can be built by honest communication. Once colleagues empathize with the conditions and lives of one another, they are more likely to share their ideas and concerns.
Cohesive cooperation, an increase in focus, and higher levels of creativity are psychologically linked to trust, so instilling this from day one in any effort is vital to overcome differences in an individual's mindset.
With video production in particular each part of the team must have trust in areas beyond their immediate reach, and in the creative vision as a whole. Once the initial reservations are overcome between team members, the diversity of the team's skills and background becomes one of its most powerful assets.
From the top-level down this sentiment is shared, as 91 percent of CEOs believe empathy directly leads to better financial performance. This is why so many industries go to great lengths to ensure that their teams communicate effectively and empathize with departments beyond their own. It's a bonus to the bottom line of a company, but also to the creative potential of a project.
Creativity and diversity are intertwined far more deeply than one might imagine at first glance. Ensuring productions receive feedback from different points of view is a trend unlikely to change in the foreseeable future as it consistently yields such positive results.
Video productions in particular creatively soar from receiving this kind of input, but all creative projects can benefit from teams that make an effort to hear from diverse sources.
