Secondary diversity traits include personality, family and
community.
Organizational diversity in the
workplace refers to the total makeup of the employee workforce and the amount
of diversity included. Diversity refers to differences in various defining personal
traits such as age, gender, race, marital status, ethnic origin, religion,
education and many other secondary qualities.
Diversity Management
Closely related to organizational
diversity is the prominent topic of diversity management. This refers to the
human resource and management process of proactively planning to optimize
benefits of diversity while down playing challenges. Traits of diversity
management usually include sensitivity training and cultural awareness. Some
companies include diversity training for all new employees as part of initial
orientation and training. Highly diversified organizations often have ongoing
diversity management programs.
Benefits
Diversity can provided many benefits
to organizations. A primary benefit is that a wide array of employee
backgrounds means the organization as a whole has more experience and expertise
coverage in critical areas that affect the company. Similarly, discussions
typically produce a broader range of ideas when employees have diverse
backgrounds. Additionally, companies that serve a diverse population or a
global audience can more adequately serve that diverse market with employees
that can speak the language and relate from a cultural standpoint.
Challenges
Language and communication barriers
are among the greatest challenges to effectiveness in a diverse organization.
With global diversity, employees may speak many different primary languages,
making accurate communication difficult. Culturally, different perspectives on
communication and different viewpoints on discussions can get in the way of
efficient decisions and resolution of conflicts. Conflicts are not only more
common in a diverse workplace, but they are often more difficult to resolve
because employees have a more difficult time seeing each other's perspective.
Leadership
Along with providing training, company
leaders need to set the tone for a highly functioning diverse workplace. This
means setting the tone from the top by rewarding employees for involvement in
diversity programs and supporting tolerance and acceptance of diversity. Some
employers also participate in or financially support diversity awareness
programs in the communities in which they operate. Finally, company leaders
need to promote a non-discriminatory work environment.
Diversity
in Organizations
Organizations
have enormous power to focus efforts on collective goals, objectives, issues,
problems, and results, if they so choose. It's the power of an organization's
convergent effect -- people coming together in a planned way to accomplish
something mutually beneficial for all involved. That's the theory of
organization.
If
organizations exist to unite diverse perspectives, capabilities, and talents in
pursuit of common purposes and mutually beneficial results, why do they stifle
diversity, seek sameness, discourage individuality, promote conformance, reward
uniformity, and punish nonconformity? Because managing diversity is harder than
managing uniformity -- managing diversity is more challenging, expensive, time
consuming, demanding, stressful, and prone to fail.
Managing
uniformity requires little more than an authoritarian hierarchy, strict
enforcement of procedures and performance standards, command and control
management styles, and a conforming workforce -- the allure of uniformity lies
in its ease of administration, stability and predictability, efficiency of
operations, low cost and on-budget performance, minimal volatility with few
surprises and quickly conforming culture. However, an abundance of research and
experience shows that organizations and work environments with high levels of
required uniformity inevitably stifle creativity and innovation, retard
initiative-taking, prevent widespread accountability for results, limit freedom
to expand and create value, and weaken individual motivation, commitment and
fulfillment. A truly diverse organization or work environment, on the other
hand, unified through common vision and purpose is healthy, strong, innovative,
dynamic, and capable of blending a multiplicity of perspectives, experiences,
and abilities, and it is able to weather significant competitive challenges.
An
abundance of diversity exists in nature until it's altered. An untouched acre
of ground in Maine, for example, may contain up to 10,000 different varieties
of tree and plant life. Such diversity is not only inspiring and beautiful, but
also ecologically robust. If you were to level an unharmed acre of ground in
Maine, removing all indigenous plant life and then letting it sit untouched,
new growth would bring less than 10 percent of the former diversity in terms of
tree and plant life. The trees and plants that first gain root in the newly
leveled ground would dominate the space, preventing additional diversity from
developing. Once removed, diversity rarely returns on its own. The uniformity
mandate of the dominant species makes it impossible for diversity to flourish
naturally. The lesson for modern organizations and their management teams is
obvious: Diversity must be carefully and constantly nurtured, because creating
an organization is a lot like leveling ground. Both activities create new space
where the initial staffing or first species will attempt to dominate and
control diversity. The very act of establishing and staffing an organization
begins a process of limiting diversity, unless diversity is genuinely valued
and vigilantly nurtured. Diversity by definition is the attempt to bring
together competing interests into a single whole, Without constant nourishment,
vibrant and productive diversity will eventually fade into ineffective,
unfulfilling uniformity. Organizations with high levels of uniformity are
ineffective and stagnant -- ultimately producing inbred corporate cultures that
lack the new perspectives, pioneering capabilities and fresh ideas necessary to
survive. That is the curse of uniformity.
Organizations
and their management teams often define diversity too narrowly by tolerating,
rather than embracing, government guidelines about inclusion of gender, racial,
and sexual diversity in the workplace; focusing on the avoidance of legal
risks, rather than the benefits of diversity; and doing the minimum necessary,
rather than the maximum, to promote diversity. In the end, they promote
uniformity rather than diversity, and understand only those customers who are
most like their employees.