{"id":6195,"date":"2017-03-07T01:00:33","date_gmt":"2017-03-07T01:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/premier_developer\/?p=6195"},"modified":"2019-02-14T20:23:58","modified_gmt":"2019-02-15T03:23:58","slug":"transforming-diversity-and-inclusion-di-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/premier-developer\/transforming-diversity-and-inclusion-di-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Transforming Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

When we started the Premier Developer blog, we wanted it to be a reflection of our team and business.\u00a0 Unlike many Microsoft blogs that focus on one technology or product, you may notice we cover a lot of ground here.\u00a0 Sometimes post topics are technical in nature, sometimes they are purely business or process focused.\u00a0 Perhaps the most important variables in everything we do:\u00a0 people<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 Highly productive teams learn how to work well together and the importance of diverse, respectful workplace will absolutely impact productivity.\u00a0 Software development is more than technology.\u00a0 In this post, we\u2019re happy to spotlight a post from our Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) leads, Farah Deendar<\/a>, Tamara Maniscalco<\/a><\/strong>, and Tina Saulsberry<\/a><\/strong> about our commitment to a better workplace.<\/p>\n

What can we be doing to promote a diverse and inclusive environment for our teams?\u00a0 In this post, we share some insight from our own business and challenge you to reflect on D&I in your workplace.<\/p>\n

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Why is diversity so important?<\/b><\/h2>\n

\"tree\"<\/a>Microsoft is committed to promoting a diverse culture and productively working with people from all walks of life. This is evident in Microsoft\u2019s mission statement \u201cto empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reason that diversity is so important to us as a business\u00a0is that it makes us better able to execute and innovate\u00a0as shown by the following research: http:\/\/www.npr.org\/2014\/03\/21\/292225798\/does-diversity-on-research-team-improve-quality-of-science<\/a>.\u00a0 From this article we can see that if a team is culturally diverse, they perform better and create more ground breaking research than homogenous teams.<\/p>\n

We know anecdotally that when people are committed to a goal, and they respect and work well with other competent team members, great things will result.\u00a0 We have all seen this in practice. Microsoft employs more than 100,000 employees globally, across many different countries and cultures. The technology and business world is becoming more diverse, and it’s important to remember that unconscious bias is still very prevalent.<\/p>\n

Here are some examples of unconscious bias:<\/p>\n