Today’s global marketplace is only becoming increasingly competitive. Limited cultural intelligence and restricted company diversity are ways of the past, ushering in a renewed focus on boosting an authentic representation of diversity in the workplace. With that focus as one of the primary ways to make a business competitive and successful on a global scale, diversity management is not only mandated but intrinsically vital for all businesses.
What Is Diversity Management?
Diversity management can be defined as a strategy that incorporates best practices to cultivate and maintain a diverse workplace. It’s important to understand, however, that diversity goes far beyond ethnicity and race, or even gender. The University of California Human Resource management guide notes that diversity is essentially any “otherness” that makes another individual different from our own person and the groups with which we are involved. It is these dimensions or qualities that necessitate diversity in the workplace because each individual brings a distinct composition of skills, abilities, and attitudes to the table that are essentially linked to his or her innate makeup – qualities based on more than just skin color, sex, or even religion but rather on life experiences.
Why is Diversity Important in the Workplace?
With a basic understanding of the reality of authentic diversity, we can now shift our focus to why diversity is so important. According to the VC Administration and Finance: Berkely HR, research shows that a diverse workforce actually increases staff retention and overall productivity. According to Diversity Inc. Best Practices, this one factor is also responsible for making your business or company more marketable on a global scale by improving your relationships with the surrounding community and those that are outside of your own community but are a factor in one of your employees’ diverse backgrounds. By enhancing the diversity of your team, you are also able to enable your team to address change, enhance company creativity, improve goal achievement, and increase business accessibility.
How Can You Develop Authentic Diversity in Your Company?
Diversity is more than just hiring a few individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds. To achieve authentic diversity, you have to discover how to actually manage and cultivate an environment or culture of diverse acceptance. ManagementHelp.org offers a few basic guidelines for developing and maintaining a culturally aware and appreciate workforce. According to these guidelines to develop this level of diversity in your organization, you need to:
1. Identify your own biases, preferences, and understanding.
By understanding your own nature and style of working, based on your experiences, you will be better able to help others identify and accept others.
2. Recognize that each sector of your organization has an already established culture within which employees work, function, and communicate.
Don’t necessarily try to change these elements but work to incorporate cultural awareness within these established subcultures.
3. Be the example of cultural sensitivity in a positive way.
You can begin by expressing to employees that you understand everyone works differently depending on their own personalities and culture and that you are interested in developing a workforce that relies on and utilizes those differences.
4. Seek out additional resources and use the ones you have.
If you are beginning to work with a new organization or business representative that is from a different culture than your own, consider requesting additional guidance or support from an employee or other individual in your organization from the same culture. This demonstrates your authentic desire to serve your business partners and utilize your employees’ skills.
How to Determine if You Are Managing Diversity Well?
Being aware of your own ability to manage diversity is one of the key ways you can further develop your organization’s diversity. The University of California offers a comprehensive list of questions you can ask yourself to determine how well you are managing diversity. In short, though, you want to consider:
– What assumptions you are making and how you act on them?
– If you are willing to accept different ways of doing things and whether you express this acceptance to your employees?
– If your relationships with all of your staff members are authentic supervisorial roles? (Are you able to give constructive criticism as well as commendation to employees with a different cultural background than you?)
– How do you respond to other employees when their behavior is less than accepting and supporting of different cultural backgrounds?
– What tangible measures do you take to incorporate diversity in your workplace?
The competitive culture of the global workplace is ushering in a new area of diversity out of necessity for meeting the needs of a globally diverse world. You can choose to meet this change and benefit by improving workplace efficiency and efficacy, or continue losing business, time, and money. The choice is yours.
