Diversity Makes the Company Grow

Applicants are placing increasing value on diversity in the workplace when looking for a job. This means that applicants want diverse teams made up of people from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds, combining as wide a range of views and perspectives as possible. However, at SIX, additional questions about gender, religion and sexual orientation also come up in job interviews. Companies should therefore do justice to individual differences among employees, such as abilities, skills, needs, motives, values or goals, and thus promote meaningful interaction between people and the organization. Diversity also means creating interdisciplinary project teams: people from different disciplines working together to achieve a goal.

But is the investment in good diversity management really worthwhile for a company?

This is not an easy question to answer, and there is probably no perfect way to deal with diversity in the workplace. But at SIX, we believe that different demographics, education or values lead to different skills, viewpoints and perspectives. Diversity in teams helps solve complex problems in innovative ways that add value for the customer. We are still in the early stages, and like any change, this is not a temporary endeavor but a long-term commitment. We are continuing our activities because we are convinced that diversity is an important aspect to leverage for our future success. Our growth strategy and our ability to innovate depend on exploring new ways of forward thinking in a complex world. We are therefore approaching diversity internally at various levels to attract a more diverse workforce. The basis to this is an inclusive culture that we live and breathe at SIX, especially with our values of collaboration, trust and personal responsibility. Our culture provides the framework for workshops and training sessions to highlight biases and the impact of inclusive language, and to make changes to our own HR processes – for example, our new recruitment process to attract more women to SIX, which was recognized with an Advance Best Practice 2020 award. This year, we used International Women’s Day as an opportunity to dedicate an entire week to the topic of diversity. Organized by our internal gender diversity network, a week-long series of discussion rounds, workshops and training sessions were held to inform and engage our employees on the topic of diversity.

SIX is also committed to increasing diversity, for example with programs such as IT Internship for Migrants or IT Internship for Career Changers. Learn more about how SIX is growing the company through diversity.