At Drees & Sommer Belgium, diversity isn’t just a statement—it’s part of our everyday work. In our teams, across roles, and through close collaboration with colleagues in different countries.
This reality inspired our colleague, Wilson Sedano, to explore how diversity and performance are connected at Drees & Sommer.
Wilson, how did you approach the study?
For the quantitative part, I first anonymized all Drees & Sommer teams with at least five employees that are involved in revenue-generation – that is, all teams that are active in the market and involved in customer projects. I then clustered them based on performance. There were 475 of them. I didn’t include smaller teams and internal teams that don’t contribute to sales. For the purpose of the study, performance was defined as the revenue from projects divided by the team’s in-house budget. I then calculated a diversity coefficient for each of these teams. This included the diversity characteristics that are available for each Dreso, mainly age, gender, nationality and contract type (full-time or part-time). The more diverse a team was in terms of these characteristics, the higher the coefficient: So ‘0’ indicates fully homogeneous, ‘100’ completely diverse. At this point, it is important to emphasize that no value judgement was involved. It is not about achieving 100 percent everywhere, but about taking stock.
What did you find out?
Diversity is one success factor among many, but it is a significant one. According to the study, under certain conditions diversity leads to an increase in performance of between three and five percent. Simply put: The findings of other studies do apply to many Dreso teams and diversity makes you more successful. But it also has to be well managed.
And you then examined this in the qualitative part?
Exactly. Our Diversity and Inclusion core Drees & Sommer team conducted a total of 32 interviews with people from eleven different teams. The interviews looked at how we manage diversity, and at how team members and managers view diversity.
How do the interviewees perceive diversity?
That varied. Generally speaking, managers tend to regard their teams as more diverse and successful than they are in reality. The team members, on the other hand, are more critical and openly shared their experiences, which I think is great.
What does this mean for us? How should we deal with the findings?
We need to get to know our people better. After all, they are our greatest assets. This is also about communication. Does someone think in a linear and structured way? Do they prefer to communicate directly or indirectly? Communication is often easier in homogeneous teams. Managers have the responsibility of creating a safe space, that is, an environment in which all colleagues feel safe to share opinions – including critical ones – and unusual ideas. That’s the only way innovation can take place. As a manager, you need to be prepared to integrate someone new into the team and to understand to what extent the new person will change the team dynamic. Of course, this also requires diversity-friendly HR processes and professional leadership to support teams and ensure a healthy, productive dynamic.
Thank you, Wilson, for sharing these valuable insights with us.