Promoting Diversity at Workplaces Essay

Introduction

The success of contemporary business institutions lies on the capacity of the businesses to encourage and promote diversity.

Business institutions that embrace and emphasise on “…diversity in their working cultures can significantly benefit in a variety of ways, including indirectly improving their bottom line” (Agócs & Burr 2004, p. 33).

Moreover, organizations that encourage diversity benefit from a motivated workforce, improved productivity and reduced absenteeism. Diversity assists organizations to introduce novel ideas, which help them to identify and exploit emerging business opportunities.

Managers have the responsibility of promoting and nurturing diversity in an organization. This paper will discuss the role of managers in promoting diversity at workplaces. Besides, the paper will discuss how one may promote diversity at workplaces.

Role of managers

Managers have the role of assessing diversity at workplaces. Combs alleges, “Managers ought to guarantee that they assess and evaluate organizational diversity, as part of their management responsibilities” (2002, p. 8).

Managers are responsible for promoting and encouraging diversity at workplaces by coming up with employee satisfaction strategies that are tailored to the mission, vision and goals of the organization, and that of individual employees.

Managers need to identify all the challenges that discourage diversity at workplaces and come up with relevant policies to address the challenges. Besides, managers need to re-evaluate their organizations to confirm if the organization attains the intended diversity (Combs 2002).

Apart from assessing diversity, managers have the role of developing a workplace plan that encourages diversity. Human resource managers have the responsibility of coming up with a diversity workplace plan that is measurable, attainable and comprehensive (Goodman 2001).

Besides, the managers bear the responsibility of monitoring the diverse workforce to identify the required changes. A diverse workforce is susceptible to employee conflicts due to differing cultural practices.

Hence, organizational managers ought to monitor the workforce to identify the potential conflicts and come up with measures to counter the conflicts.

Organizational managers are responsible for implementing diversity as outline in the workplace plan. Organizations can hardly benefit from diversity without the managers’ commitment and devotion. Managers have the duty to integrate diversity guidelines into each feature of the business’s objective and function.

Stances towards diversity start off from the managers and filter downward to other employees (Hannagan 2005). Therefore, it is hard for an organization to embrace diversity if managers have negative stance towards it.

Managers’ participation and cooperation are critical to the establishment of a culture that embraces and promotes diversity. Employees can only uphold and support diversity if they are aware of its benefits.

Consequently, it is the role of the organizational managers to educate the workforce concerning the benefits of diversity.

This guarantees that every employee acknowledges the importance of diversity at workplaces. Besides, managers are responsible for “leading change, fostering desired behaviours, and ensuring that diversity principles are integrated into the operations of the organization” (Hannagan 2005, p. 27).

Implementing diversity

Employee recruitment process plays a critical role in promoting and encouraging diversity at workplaces. Prior to hiring employees, organizations ought to understand their target customers. This would help them to make sure that their workers resemble the target community (Kirton & Greene 2004).

For organizations to hire workforce that matches the target population, they have to come up with a recruitment strategy that caters for diversity. Managers may liaise with local institutions like cultural institutions, churches, and colleges.

These institutions can help an organization to reach job hunters from diverse backgrounds, thus helping in recruiting a diverse workforce. Additionally, an organization may request for referrals from its existing workforce.

At times, employees may be aware of qualified individuals who are in need of jobs (Thompson 2003). Hence, liaising with employees may help an organization to reach these individuals and enrich its diverse workforce.

Another approach that organizations can employ to establish diversity at workplaces is, “to develop and implement an equal opportunity employment policy” (Kossek, Markel & McHugh 2003, p. 331).

This would help an organization to “come up with a meritorious recruiting practice, which is gender, race, minority, and age neutral” (Kossek, Markel & McHugh 2003, p. 333).

Organizational managers may establish a committee to assist in the implementation of the policy and to identify the changes to make in order to promote and encourage diversity.

During the recruitment process, organizations ought to structure their job descriptions in ways that attract job hunters from diverse backgrounds.

Besides, organizational leaders ought to be culturally receptive when marketing their organizations (Kossek, Markel & McHugh 2003). This would help to source employees from varied cultural backgrounds, thus establishing a diverse workforce.

Offering diversity training at the workplace would go a long way towards establishing a diverse workforce in an organization. Business institutions have to ensure that all employees appreciate that the institution’s recruitment process aims at hiring the best employees (Lennie 2000).

In addition, the recruiting team need to be aware of the merits of hiring a diverse workforce. The recruitment process should be open and transparent. This would avoid chances of some employees being cynical. Cynicism at the workplace may discourage cooperation between employees with diverse cultural background.

A quota of the employees may deem others as inferior, thus treating them with contempt. Nevertheless, recruiting all staff in an open and transparent manner would lead to every employee appreciating the role of the other in helping the organization to achieve its goals.

Hence, it would promote cooperation among the employees regardless of their cultural background (Lewthwaite 2006).

Organizational managers need to give new recruits a reason to stay and devote their energy to the organization. Managers require devoting their energy in keeping new recruits.

It is the duty of the organizational managers to ensure that new employees are conversant with organizational culture and new jobs. Managers need to assure the employees that they made the right decision by opting to work with the organization through guaranteeing them of their future in the organization (Rosenzweig 2004).

They can achieve this by educating them about the possible ways of enhancing their skills and advancing. Moreover, organizations can establish mentorship programs to strengthen ties between employees and organizational leaders. This endeavour would help in retaining a diverse workforce.

Conclusion

Workforce diversity plays a significant role in enhancing organizational success. An organization that has a diverse workforce benefits from a motivated workforce, improved productivity and reduced absenteeism. Organizational managers have the duty to promote diversity at workplaces.

They have the role of assessing and implementing a workforce plan that promotes diversity. Organizations need to encourage diversity starting from the recruitment process.

They need to come up with recruitment policies that offer equal opportunities to all people regardless of their cultural affiliation. Besides, organizations ought to offer diversity training to employees and give them a reason to work and stay in the organization.

Reference List

Agócs, C & Burr, C 2004, ‘Employment equity, affirmative action and managing diversity: assessing the differences’, International Journal of Manpower, vol. 17 no. 5, pp.30 – 45.

Combs, G 2002, ‘Meeting the leadership challenge of a diverse and pluralistic workplace: Implications of self-efficacy for diversity training’, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, vol. 8 no. 4, pp. 1-16.

Goodman, D 2001, Promoting Diversity and Social Justice: Educating People from Privileged Groups, Sage Publications, Inc., California.

Hannagan, T 2005, Management: Concepts and Practices (4th ed.), Prentice Hall, Essex.

Kirton, G & Greene, A 2004, Dynamics of Managing Diversity (2nd ed.), Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford.

Kossek, E, Markel, K & McHugh, P 2003, ‘Increasing diversity as an HRM change strategy’, Journal of Organizational Change Management, vol. 16 no. 3, pp. 328 – 352.

Lennie, C 2000, ‘Valuing diversity, part 1: Making the most of cultural differences at the workplace’, Personnel, vol. 65 no. 6, pp. 52-60.

Lewthwaite, J 2006, Managing People for the First Time: Gaining Commitment and Improving Performance, Thorogood, London.

Rosenzweig, P 2004, ‘Managing the new global workforce: fostering diversity, forging consistency’, European Management Journal, vol. 16 no. 6, pp. 644-652.

Thompson, N 2003, Promoting Equality: Challenging discrimination and oppression (2nd ed.), Palgrave Macmillan, London.