Diversity 101

4.1: Diversity 101 

For the company owner of MGM Mirage’s hotel namely Brenda Thompson, it has been noted that how important it has been reflecting varied diversity through the workplace all across the world. Thus MGM owner has attempted making everyone’s involvement within the organization 100%. Such variant through the diversity has been found elsewhere too with managers focusing on more of the organizational development. Before that let’s learn what does this workplace diversity means?

What does workplace diversity means?

While going through your school scenario you might have seen people around speaking different languages, with different color, hair style, looks, and with varied features. Have you thought of this varied diversity in which you live? It has been a common fact, that people often live in such varied diversity. The same is true for workplace.

This topic of diversity is quite common for today’s world of business thus ranking with other disciplines including quality, ethics and leadership. Often this has turned out to be challenging these days. These days the term is associated with human resource department that usually is responsible for hiring processes, inequality and discrimination. The concept of diversity of workforce can easily be understood from Exhibit 4-1.

For instance, a number one insurance provider for auto in United States, the State Farm has been able to view the diversity as a collection of varied strength from skills, talents, experiences, cultures and varied perspective. As per dictionary the term describes multiformity, dissimilarities and differences. In fact sometime diversity is used for answering differences through religion, color, age, disability, origin and sex. Over the entire definitions one common one is the difference in between physical and culture variants.

Thus here the definition of the workplace diversities is defined as the people who within organization are either similar or variant from each other. These definitions are not made for justifying differences but they also are for showing similarities.

This Exhibit enforces the managers to keep in mind that all employees are from same quality and thus they should be looked equally. But this doesn’t tell you to ignore the differences completely in fact, as a manager your major focus should be upon the development of relationships.

In this definition of diversity one major focus would be on surface level of diversity signifying the demographic differences and secondly a deep level of diversity for the differences in personality, preference of work and values.

Why is it so important to manage workplace diversities?

After being ranked as number 2 that too upon Diversity Inc. the company AT&T has been able to recognize benefits of the diversities. As per the chief diversity official team it has been stated that dedication of people is the only reason for the success of the company AT&T. The British company has founded it beneficial when the women suppliers have served them with lowest prices. Besides these companies few more have experienced the similar benefits. For understanding the importance of diversity through workforce three major points plays a crucial role including people management, performance of organization and strategies. This is explicitly showed in Exhibit 4-2.

Managing People:

Diversity is incomplete without proper role played by people through an organizations development. These may include proper involvement of skills, ability, experiences of people in an organization as these keys are the only development reason. Positive traits might attract more talented people towards organizational workplace for more benefits.

Performance of organization:

The benefits which an organization enjoys are from workforces diversity is entirely with the help of improvements made from proper functioning of organization and the cost savings being made. If any of the organization reduces their workforces then simultaneously a cost savings might fall of. As per the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission it has been tracked in the year 2009 that 93,277 cases of workplace discrimination. In fact, it has been the largest track record being recorded in discrimination against workforces. Improving the problem solving ability and flexibility of the entire system will help to reduce the issues through diversity of workplaces in an organization.

Strategies:

Organizations are the best in terms of workforce diversity through strategically benefits. Managing the workforce has been the ultimate key for the diversity and also for beneficial of the organization. One of the finest benefits of these strategies is that of with varied workforce diversities organizations can respond widely towards change taking place through consumer needs. Many organizations have seen existence to their employees with sources of fertile benefits.

Diversity of workforce can also lead to competitive advantages as because of innovative thrive through the environment. As per a report being made by Ernst & Young, cultural diversity is great at offering the flexibility along with creativity that is required for better economy of the organization. Research shows that diversity is really important for powering innovations and thus helping the businesses get chances of generating huge products and also the services.

The workforce diversity with proper managing them is really important. In fact for managers this diversity should be viewed as the way for bringing voices of employees to the preferred table for building environment strongly.

Links of Previous Main Topic:-

• management and organizations a managers dilemma
• Understanding managements context constraints and challenges
• Managing in a global environment
• Managing diversity

Links of Next Fundamentals of Management Topics:-

• The changing workplace
• Types of workplace diversity
• Challenges in managing diversity
• Workplace diversity initiatives
• Preparing for the exams and quizzes
• Preparing for your career
• What is social responsibility
• Managing change and innovation
• Managers as decision makers
• Foundations of planning
• Strategic management