The importance of diversity in our teams and organizations is something that has been written about extensively over the years.  The general consensus is that a diversity of experiences and perspectives helps teams to come up with fresh thinking, but that sometimes this comes at a price in terms of coordinating those teams around a single vision.  A new study suggests that previous attempts to understand the importance of diversity have been flawed in the sense that they only really looked at an isolated moment in time, which can result in conflicting results and an unclear narrative emerging.

To rectify this, the researchers analyzed over 800 teams at a Swiss service company over a seven year period.  They were looking specifically at the gender and age of new team members, with a hypothesis that the more ‘unusual’ the new team member was to the norm of the team, the more likely they would be to suffer from discrimination at some point, which in turn shape how those people feel about the team in the following years.

This general satisfaction and integration with the team was measured by totting up the number of times that person was absent from work, with the expectation that an unhappy person would be absent more frequently than a happy individual.

“We evaluated 2,711 persons in total: date of team entry, team composition, team swaps, absenteeism – all completely anonymously, of course,” the authors explain. “The trend is pretty obvious: during their first year on a new team, new members remain inconspicuous regardless of their fit. But after that, the curve rises, and quite steeply in many cases. After a few years, women in purely male teams, and older employees in very young teams, are absent almost twice as much as their colleagues in teams where they have a good fit. It comes down to about eight annual days of absence compared to four, which is pretty significant.”

Dangerous diversity

The authors are realistic enough to accept the limitations of their work, as they only looked at diversity in a relatively narrow range of characteristics, so don’t take into account other aspects of their character, or indeed their individual workload and performance levels.  Equally, the analysis took place purely in a blue collar environment where diversity tends to be more limited, especially in terms of gender diversity, so discrimination may be more pronounced than in a white collar environment where the gender split is less pronounced.

“But all in all, I think we can safely draw the conclusion that women in male-dominated, as well as older employees in younger environments experience more discrimination. And this experiene of discrimination increases over time,” they say.

Whilst it’s by no means conclusive, it does add an extra degree of nuance to the debate around the merits of diversity in teams.  What would have perhaps been interesting would have been a greater exploration of whether there was a tipping point where minority members of a team stopped suffering for their minority status, and whether some teams had different tipping points than others.  Despite the absence of this nuance however, it’s nonetheless an interesting contribution to the debate on diversity at work.