How Diversity is the Secret Sauce of Remote Work—at Jobsity and Beyond

It’s become a commonplace refrain in the corporate word: Diversity makes companies stronger.

If you want to grow, if you want to be a more humane and equitable company, and a happier place to work: become more diverse.

These aren’t just truisms: McKinsey’s 2015 study, “Diversity Matters,” found this reflected in the bottom line: gender-diverse companies “perform 15% better” than their homogenous counterparts, and ethnically-diverse companies “perform 35% better” than theirs.

In another study, Procter & Gamble shows the following data about the benefits of having a diverse workforce.

Yet, “becoming diverse,” while a lofty and important goal, is not just a matter of hiring a few new faces, asking those in your company to look, think, or act differently, or worse yet, to pose for photos that you’ll use for recruitment. It’s not an issue of optics: having diverse faces at the table only matters if those people are given a voice, power, and a chance to leave their mark on the company.

At Jobsity, we believe one of the great assets of a remote work team is that diversity can become central to the very fabric of that workforce. In other words, if your team is not defined by geographic location or one central office, the people that make up your team can be from anywhere and can bring those perspectives to everything they do. This gives you access to a high level of diversity without additional cost; and if you let it, this diversity can become part of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of your work—not just the ‘who’.

When we started in 2012, Jobsity had offices in three countries and a group of developers from five more: Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Peru, France, Russia, and the US. Now, with a remote team of 150 teammates across nearly every country in Latin America, from Brazil to Mexico, we know that providing access to a mix of cultural, racial, religious, age, gender, and ability diversity means we offer staffing solutions for our clients that go beyond the technical skills we’ve mastered and the innovation-oriented culture which is the core of our business model.

At Jobsity, we believe diversity is in our DNA. But it’s not just because our employees are from a variety of national homes, speak a range of languages, and come to our staff meetings with a wide breadth of life experiences. Rather, diversity is at the core of what we do at Jobsity: we invite diverse perspectives, encourage diverse methods of thought, and build concrete practices within an inclusive culture into everything we do.

The question isn’t who is diverse on your team, but how you create an environment in which this diversity can take center stage and become a part of the culture of your company.

At Jobsity, we know how important it is for people to feel good about their work, and we know that feeling good about your work is just as tied to feeling connected to your workplace community as it is to feel successful in the completion of your core work tasks. That’s why we encourage our developers to bring their whole selves to what they do, to get to know each other as full people, to share their cultures, languages, perspectives, and experiences with our team and with the external teams they support. Because while understanding how to do great work for North American companies is our work, our asset is doing so authentically as ourselves: and we are diverse.

Giving our client access to a talent pool from across Latin America has been a pillar of our growth in the last eight years. Our developers come from many different walks of life, regions, homes, but they all share a passion for coding and learning. We make that passion work for our clients exponentially by celebrating diversity and encouraging our team to learn about other cultures, their own cultures, and the cultures of the companies they work with. It has been a huge fuel in our success, and the success of our partner companies as well.

If you center diversity in everything you do, then it becomes a secret sauce that fuels all levers of growth, depth, advancement, and achievement—a defining mindset of openness, engagement, and growth.

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