Why Diversity is a Key Benefit of Nearshoring

A Diverse Perspective: 5 Overlooked Benefits of Nearshoring Your Development Team

There are innumerable benefits to nearshoring your development team, but one overlooked benefit is the diversity that comes with bringing on a team who sees a different view out their windows--both literally and otherwise--than your home team. Here are 5 ways that nearshoring can bring the benefits of diversity to your company.

Diversity is a buzzword in corporate culture. But there’s a reason: our clients are diverse, our users are diverse, our world is diverse. If we only code for ourselves, we’ll miss countless opportunities to make connections, sales, and impact.

But diversifying a development team doesn’t have to be complicated: the world today is full of high quality programmers living in developed cities just hours south of your home office. In cities like Lima, Bogotá and Quito, developers are immersed in cultures different from those of US cities, but not without profound similarities. This connection, and this distance, can be a profound benefit to a US-based company looking for diverse perspectives. Here are 5 of the top reasons why:

Diverse Life Experiences

In Quito, Ecuador, developers live and program at over 9,300 feet elevation. How does this affect the quality of their work? Trick question: it doesn’t. But it does mean they literally see the world from a different angle. In addition, they live in a country where environmental consciousness is enshrined in the constitution, and are surrounded by an ecosystem so varied that they can drive from rainforest to Andean valleys to the beach in a day. How does this affect their development work? Who knows; but it certainly impacts their worldview, the way they tackle problems, and the solutions they might see to the problems facing your team—solutions which might not be noticed by a team of developers all living in New Jersey or Newton, Conn. In other words: life experience informs work experience. And what better way to add new, dynamic voices to your team, than to step outside and open your team up to the benefits of nearshoring?

Diverse Technical Knowledge

In-house development teams are often defined by expertise related to the technology that a company already uses. This makes sense, and is essentially efficient: you hire based on need, you train based on need, and that need defines knowledge. However, what this means is, when technology or programming skills are necessary that aren’t covered under the purview of what has been needed, but are expansive, different, or iterative, in-house teams can fall short. And here enters one of the great benefits of nearshoring: because nearshore firms (like Jobsity) train, coach, and develop talent across the board, programmers in nearshore contexts can be called in to account for ongoing needs without the cost, time, or training necessary for a short-term or unplanned pivots. That’s a kind of diversity of knowledge that goes beyond buzzwords and straight to the bottom line.

Quick to Train, Quick to Pivot

As with the previous point, a significant benefit of a nearshore team is the flexibility and openness that comes with their diversity. Because, unlike in-house employees, they aren’t tied down by infrastructure, bureaucracy, or HR restrictions, if new strategy is called for, a nearshore team can respond with agility and speed to that need. In fact, because nearshore teams are slightly outside of the trends and currents of the US workforce, they are often already well-versed in the oncoming changes before an in-house team even sees them coming. We like to think of this as a great asset of diversity: when you’re a dedicated nearshore team with the goal of being a constant asset add, foresight (like hindsight) is 20/20. (That’s also why all teams at Jobsity receive constant training and support!)

Better Questions, Multilingual Answers

With nearshore teams come far-off talents! Because nearshore programmers at a firm like Jobsity are immersed in the workplace cultures of the US and North America, and because our English is as good as yours (I won’t go so far as to say “better”!), it can be easy to forget that for many of us, our first or even second language isn’t English. So what? So that means we’re linguistically connected to customers, clients, and potential users drawn from the world’s 437 million native Spanish speakers. The questions they have, we understand. The hiccups they may face, we can see a mile away. This is one of the ways diversity undeniably serves a company: if your users are diverse (and nowadays, who wants to ignore 437 million potential users--41 million of whom live in the US?), you need your team to be as well.

Diversity Helps the Bottom Line

Last but far from least: diversity is not only an asset add to a company--but it adds assets to the company’s coffers. In a recent survey administered by Covenant Investment Management which looked at the performance of Standard and Poor's 500 in terms of diversity of hiring at firms throughout the US, the research team found that “the stock market performance of firms that were high performers in [diversity related hiring] was 2.5 times higher than that of firms that invested little” in diversity related growth. We can’t wave a magic wand and say that the benefits of a nearshore development team will mean 2.5 times higher stock performance for every firm out there. But we feel pretty confident in saying that the lowered overhead costs, coupled with the influence of broad technical knowhow and the diverse perspectives a nearshore team brings will certainly have an influence on the bottom line, if not every other line as well.

If your company is ready to enjoy the benefits of diversity, there is a Jobsity distributed nearshore software team ready to help you discuss your options. Contact us if you’d like to talk.

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