Managing Diversity

What comes into your mind when you hear the word diversity? Most of you may already hear or known this word. Diversity means understanding that every individual is unique and different, it could be in the dimension of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies.

Diversity has been hot business topics for over the last two decades. The word diversity can invoke a variety of responses in people, this term has been traditionally considered by the human resources department as fair hiring practices, discrimination, and inequality. But diversity today is considered more than just that.

Now, we are going to define workforce diversity and why managing it is so important. Workforce diversity is defined as the ways in which people in an organization are different from and similar to one another. Managing it is so important because by doing so it will create a sustainable culture that is accepting of differences, open to new ideas, and able to create a competitive advantage in the marketplace. The benefits fall into three categories which are people management, organizational performance, and strategic.

People management benefits revolve around attracting and retaining a talented workforce, and what makes an organization successful is the people, their skills, abilities, and experiences. Organizational performance benefits include cost savings and improvements in organizational functioning. The organization also benefits strategically because they can extract the best talent, performance, market share, and suppliers from diverse countries, and organizations can better anticipate and respond to changing consumer needs.

There are a few types of workplace diversity which are age, gender, race and ethnicity, disabilities/abilities, religion, and sexual orientation. And there would be challenges in managing these diversities such as personal bias, which results in prejudice, a preconceived belief, judging a person or a group of people and the major factor is stereotyping, which is judging a person on the basis of one’s perception of a group to which he or she belongs. Both prejudice and stereotyping will lead to treating other groups unequally resulting in discrimination, which is when people act out their prejudicial attitudes towards people that are targets of their prejudice.

To effectively manage the workplace it needs more than just understanding and complying with federal laws, it also needs to use additional diversity initiatives and programs. These are the four aspects: top management commitment, mentoring, diversity skills training, and employee resource groups.

In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, organizations have the need to establish a diverse workplace. It’s equally as important to make diversity and inclusion an integral part of every organization’s structure from the workforce, customers, and suppliers to products, services, and the communities served. Secondly, mentoring programs can be beneficial, mentoring is a process where a mentor provides guidance to a mentee (a less experienced person/people). A good mentoring program would aim all the employees to be able to move up the organization’s career ladder. Thirdly, diversity skills training means employees are educated in specialized training about the importance of diversity and teach them the skills for working in a diverse workplace. And lastly, employee resource groups are made up of employees connected by some common dimension of diversity. It gives these employees a chance to voice their opinions and not to feel invisible.

Last but not least, my opinion on this matter is that in any organization it requires diversity and unity in order for the organization to run smoothly. If we don’t apply this diversity awareness to the employees the organization itself can fall apart. Therefore, understanding the importance and managing diversity in the workplace is very important.

Work Cited:

Robbins, Stephen P., and Mary K. Coulter. Management. New York, NY: Pearson Education, 2018. Print.