Investors in People Direct

• Home   ›
• Valuing people's differences

Valuing people's differences

Overview

Organisations working with the Investors in People Standard recognise the importance of having strategies in place that provide equality of opportunity so that everyone can improve their performance through learning and development. The Profile framework takes these further, asking organisations to consider how their equality and diversity strategies are linked to their business strategy and applied throughout the organisation.

So what is diversity? Diversity is now seen as an important business issue and there is an ever increasing amount of guidance available for employers to encourage them to be more diverse.

The Profile definition is:

Diversity is "valuing, recognising and taking account of people's differences". These differences could include their cultural background, sexuality, gender or a range of other characteristics. Diversity is also about valuing different skills and life experiences.

Or simply - Diversity is what makes people different from each other.

This diagram depicts this simply.

Everything above the line we can see about a person, whilst everything below the line is what we can't see about someone. However, these characteristics make us all different and should all be valued and respected.