A diverse workforce is necessary for an organization that seeks to expand its operations to different parts of the world. There are several benefits associated with workplace diversity. A company that has employees from diverse cultural, racial, and gender backgrounds is likely to register high-quality performance. A diverse workforce is helpful to a firm that intends to sell products in highly segmented markets with different types of consumers.
Diversity improves the quality of decisions made in a firm because employees are encouraged to share ideas on different projects. This makes a firm’s operations more innovative and leads to improvements in the quality of products released into the market. A diverse workforce encourages workers to be more creative at work (Welsch, 2004, p. 98). It makes an organization more vibrant and well equipped to deal with different trends in the industry.
There are some problems a firm is likely to experience as a result of employing workers from diverse cultural, racial, and gender backgrounds. Some employees may have very divergent views, which may make them resent their colleagues. Diverse employee views may result in slow decision making, and this leads to poor performance in the long term. This also results in bureaucracy, which affects crucial organizational processes from proceeding successfully.
Some diverse workforce programs are carried out to achieve affirmative action conditions as required by the law. Therefore, this may result in incompetent workers getting hired by a firm because they come from specific minority racial, cultural, or social groups. A business firm may also have to hire an expert to train its employees about the benefits of workplace diversity. Therefore, the firm may have to incur additional expenses to implement a successful diversity program (Knowles & Castillo, 2011, p. 89).
The firm needs to embrace workplace diversity because it will have employees from the U.S. Germany, and English as part of its workforce. This human resource diversity will help the firm to institute value based management approaches that take note of cultural, racial, and class differences. This will also allow the firm to encourage all employees to collaborate to make its internal work processes more innovative. The firm needs to improve its reputation by showing its clients it values workplace diversity. This will make it strengthen its brand in all countries it intends to operate in (Hisrich, 2010, p. 75).
References
Hisrich, R.D. (2010). International entrepreneurship: Starting, developing, and managing a global venture. London, UK: Sage Publications.
Knowles, R. A., & Castillo, C. (2011). Small business: An entrepreneur’s plan. Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.
Welsch, H., (2004). Entrepreneurship: The way ahead. New York, NY: Routledge.