Tag: Workforce Diversity BMS Notes

Diversity and ethics in the workplace strive to make people of all socio-economic background feel comfortable working within the organization. It further promotes equal opportunities among all employees or prospective employees to be hired and promoted based on merit not race, gender or creed. A small organization diversity program maintains non-discrimination standards and enforces penalties for non-compliance. Beyond the legal compliance issues explored in workplace diversity, organizations can benefit from encouraging more than just tolerance but also an embrace of differences. In doing so, new horizons can be opened with new customer demographics, business partners and internal performance methods. Even a small organization is exposed to many different cultures; ethnicity and education levels and can improve future organization opportunities by managing diversity and ethics in the workplace.

The main contribution to knowledge from this research will be the positioning of knowledge with regard to diversity and ethical issues within the organization as well as the behavior of the people. The framework will highlight strategies on how diversity and ethics are perceived at different levels in an organization and how employees and managers’ views differ. When societal diversity and ethics are unmanaged in an organization, there will be obstacle in achieving organizational predetermined goals which will lead to poor organizational performance.

An organization known for its ethics, fair employment practices and appreciation for diverse talent is better able to attract a wider pool of qualified applicants. Other advantages include loyalty from customers who choose to do business only with companies whose business practices are socially responsible.

Diversity is a set of conscious practices that involve:

• Understanding and appreciating interdependence of humanity, cultures, and the natural environment.
• Practicing mutual respect for qualities and experiences that are different from our own.
• Understanding that diversity includes not only ways of being but also ways of knowing.
• Recognizing that personal, cultural and institutionalized discrimination creates and sustains privileges for some while creating and sustaining disadvantages for others.
• Building alliances across differences so that we can work together to eradicate all forms of discrimination.

Discrimination and Harassment

Laws require organizations to be equal employment opportunity employers. Organizations must recruit a diverse workforce, enforce policies and training that support an equal opportunity program, and foster an environment that is respectful of all types of people.

Toxic Workplace Culture

Organizations helmed by unethical leadership are more often than not plagued by a toxic workplace culture. Leaders who think nothing of taking bribes, manipulating sales figures and data or pressuring employees or business associates for “favors” (whether they be personal or financial), will think nothing of disrespecting and bullying their employees. With the current emphasis in many organizations to hire for “cultural fit,” a toxic culture can be exacerbated by continually repopulating the company with like-minded personalities and toxic mentalities.

Unrealistic and Conflicting Goals

Your organization sets a goal it could be a monthly sales figure or product production number that seems unrealistic, even unattainable. While not unethical in and of itself (after all, having driven leadership with aggressive company goals is crucial to innovation and growth), it’s how employees, and even some leaders, go about reaching the goal that could raise an ethical red flag.

Diversity is quickly becoming a key practice among organizations looking to establish more ethical and all-inclusive working environments that more effectively represent modern time. While these diverse hiring methods allow for organizations to genuinely reflect their own respective values, developing a diverse workforce can also help businesses work towards continual success and longevity in over-competitive markets.

Innovation is about the execution of creative ideas that generate value to our customers’ business or life in a new, simple way. Diversity increases your chances to understand your customers and what value means for them.  At the same time, it provides different points of view to promote creative breakthroughs.

However, for all its advantages, its benefits are being overlooked. According to one recent survey, 35% of companies reported that ensuring workplace diversity was their top inclusion priority.

Not surprisingly, our workplaces tend to mirror the sociocultural dynamics at play in our lives outside work. Having built and scaled a multinational enterprise over nearly two decades, I’ve learned that diversity in the workplace is an asset for both businesses and their employees, in its capacity to foster innovation, creativity and empathy in ways that homogeneous environments seldom do. Yet it takes careful nurturing and conscious orchestration to unleash the true potential of this invaluable asset.

In this era of globalization, diversity in the business environment is about more than gender, race and ethnicity. It now includes employees with diverse religious and political beliefs, education, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientation, cultures and even disabilities. Companies are discovering that, by supporting and promoting a diverse and inclusive workplace, they are gaining benefits that go beyond the optics.

Business has the transformative power to change and contribute to a more open, diverse and inclusive society. We can only accomplish this by starting from within our organizations. Many of us know intuitively that diversity is good for business. The case for establishing a truly diverse workforce, at all organizational levels, grows more compelling each year. The moral argument is weighty enough, but the financial impact as proven by multiple studies makes this a no-brainer.

Innovation

Most employers understand that diversity is good for promoting innovation in the workplace, but they don’t understand why. However, thanks to a recent Harvard-funded survey, the impact that diversity has on innovation in the workplace is now measurable.

The nationally representative survey helped to measure diversity’s impact on innovation by determining two types of diversity needed for success inherent and acquired. As established by the survey, inherent diversity includes traits individuals are inherently born with. For example, a person’s ethnicity and sexual orientation would be considered inherent diversity. Whereas, acquired diversity involves traits individuals gain from experience like living abroad, higher education, previous job occupations and so on.

 The study encourages companies to work towards establishing two-dimensional diversity, which can be done by creating leadership teams that demonstrate an even mixture of inherent and acquired diversity. Two-dimensional diversity encourages free-associative thinking, innovation and a safer workplace where differences are showcased and embraced. Companies exhibiting two-dimensional diversity are more likely to report market share growth than companies lacking diversity. These same companies are also better able to develop compelling and innovative ideas to serve underrepresented, and previously underserved, markets.

Disruption and innovation

The coming together of people of different ethnicities with different experiences in cities and societies is a key driver of innovation. The food that we eat every day is a result of this blending of cultures. The most successful musical genres, such as jazz, rock’n’roll or hip-hop, are the products of cultural amalgamation.

Diversity and Business performance

There is substantial research to show that diversity brings many advantages to an organization: increased profitability and creativity, stronger governance and better problem-solving abilities. Employees with diverse backgrounds bring to bear their own perspectives, ideas and experiences, helping to create organizations that are resilient and effective, and which outperform organisations that do not invest in diversity.

Ways to Use Diversity to Drive Innovation

You’ve developed a diverse workforce, and now you want to maximize your innovation. Here’s a four-step plan to help you do it.

Promote Inclusion

A diversity of ideas and viewpoints can lead to creative ideas to fuel innovation. Therefore, to take advantage of what diversity has to offer, minorities need to feel that they are heard and encourage to celebrate the differences, to feel that their opinions matter and therefore will bring their ideas to the table.

Provide a safe environment

Protect the budding innovation in your organization by focusing on promoting a safe environment to make decisions and make mistakes. There is no way to get to an innovative idea out without trying ideas that do not work. This is important regardless of the makeup of your workplace but much more important when you are in a diverse workforce where minorities already have the burden of thinking they have to be better than their white male counterparts. Be purposeful about providing permission to fail.

Encourage Decision-Making

When you have workers from many different training and cultural backgrounds, you’re naturally better-able to draw on different ideas and come up with unique solutions. Enhance this by using innovative techniques to brainstorm like diverge/converge techniques so the decision-making is as horizontal as possible. This process will promote independent thinking and encourage better decisions within your company. It’s also a great way to foster innovation faster.

Boosting your Culture

Workplace diversity has historically been a soft-sell, but now is the time to use it to promote higher returns on equity. When you onboard a diverse team that’s unified around sales goals, understands your customer and has a vibrant innovative environment is a good sell to your customers as much as to attract talent. Use it boost your company into the stratosphere.

Being diversity-friendly is not just about changing the processes and support systems in the workplace. It requires a deeper-level mindset change a move towards unbiased acceptance of diverse individuals as equals in the workplace. This means CHROs must look at every HR intervention with a new lens if diversity is to be adopted as a business priority.

Technology is making it easier than ever to improve diversity levels and reduce discrimination, through providing greater transparency and insight. When an organisation adopts innovative technology and practices at the forefront of the talent’s journey into an organisation, the first thing that happens is you get better insight. You are able to see what is happening at different stages of recruitment, from who the marketing attracts for which roles, to how candidates are reviewed by different departments and managers, and how those candidates progress through the recruitment process down to a granular level of detail. Recruitment technology can monitor job offer rates by specific interviewers for example, allowing you to uncover conscious and unconscious bias.  

Once you have the visibility, the second major impact technology has is that it enables you to start making changes based on the data you see, and measure the impact of these changes. As you make changes, whether it is diversity awareness training for hiring managers or a different recruitment marketing strategy, you can see what happens, who you hire and where you can continue to make improvements. 

Special needs: One example of special needs is the fact that many women may need to take time off for maternity. Often, women are seen as the primary caregiver in the family and may need time off to care for an elderly person too. Having a non-discriminatory employment model that factors in such needs is important.

Compensation and benefits: Organizations’ compensation philosophy in terms of gender parity should be based on fairness, openness, and transparency.

Safety policies: Prevention of harassment at the workplace is one of the most important roles of HR. It is important to formulate policies keeping in mind the fact that the workplace of the future will be increasingly gender-diverse. Sexual, physical and emotional harassment policies should be clearly outlined and platforms provided for employees to safely report misconduct.

Training and development: Mentoring and coaching can help underrepresented minorities (including women) gain confidence and direction in the business world. Sensitization workshops can be conducted across the organization to help employees accept diverse working styles, expectations, and problem-solving approaches.

Technological benefit

Reduce unconscious bias

AI-powered recruiting solutions can be trained to perform objective assessments of skills, competencies, and talents, while ignoring demographic factors like gender, race, and age. Take, for example, bowmo an HR-based software as a service platform (SaaS) that helps eliminate the bias in database and resume searches. A pure skill-set-matching algorithm based on the Boyer-Moore string search algorithm makes this possible. The software is so designed that it does not use name, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or disability as screening parameters. It purely assesses the correct fit basis role, years of experience, technical skill/s, and sometimes education.

Removing Barriers

Beyond visibility and measurement, technology can increasingly help remove remaining visible and invisible barriers. Many businesses increasingly recognise the need to adapt recruitment process to avoid turning off certain groups of candidates, for instance those who require reading support or those whose first language is not English. One of the most dramatic technology-developments to combat discrimination in recent years is ‘talking technology’, making the online recruitment process more accessible to all.

Create job descriptions that appeal to diverse candidates

Job descriptions are usually an afterthought in recruiting. However, they are an important factor of an organization’s overall human capital strategy. In addition to setting candidate expectations, job descriptions are also an essential compliance checkpoint. Today, AI-powered analytics solutions can help employers identify bias in job descriptions, such as phrases that tend to be more masculine than feminine and recommend alternate phrases, words or sentences that help recruiters write more inclusive job descriptions. This can help reach out to the largely untapped diverse candidate pool out there.

Continual Improvement

Improving an organisational approach to diversity is a journey that never ends. We always need to analyse, review, and keep striving to improve. Many leading organisations are setting up dedicated community areas of careers websites for particular groups, which allow candidates to find out more specific and relevant information. Particular examples are disability pages on corporate career sites with functionality for candidates to engage in a conversation yet remain anonymous, providing them with an opportunity to explain any disabilities or unusual circumstances that might hinder their chances during the recruitment process prior to applying. Other recent smart approaches have been portals based at hiring specific groups such as women within technology. These portals highlight the successful careers that have already been forged, and have a warmer and more engaging language, in comparison to the often cold words of a job description, leading to higher levels of candidate engagement and ultimately greater number of applicants.

Highlight disparity in compensation

Embracing workforce analytics to address the diversity issue can help significantly. An analytics platform can comb through data from multiple sources and provide insights on the recruitment, compensation and benefits patterns of the organization, revealing pay gaps across the diverse workforce. A data-driven approach like this attaches real numbers to the diversity issue and can help CHROs create a strong business case to tackle the diversity and inclusion issue on priority.

Many people use the terms diversity and multiculturalism interchangeably, when in fact, there are major differences between the two. Diversity is defined as the differences between people. These differences can include race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, background, socioeconomic status, and much more. Diversity, when talking about it from the human resource management (HRM) perspective, tends to focus more on a set of policies to meet compliance standards.

Multiculturalism goes deeper than diversity by focusing on inclusiveness, understanding, and respect, and also by looking at unequal power in society.

Establish a sense of belonging for everyone

For each individual to bring their best self forward, a sense of belonging must first be established. Having a connection to an organization or group of people that makes you feel you can be yourself not only results in greater engagement and creativity in the workplace, it’s a psychological need.

But these changes take time, and they aren’t always linear, Clark says. “A client once told me that you don’t just fast-forward to belonging. You have to go through the hard work of focusing on diversity and creating that inclusive culture so you can get to belonging,” she says.

Start at the Top

Just like a parent should set an example of desired behavior before expecting their children to follow, so should the leaders of your organization. A diverse management team shows that you’re committed to the cause from the bottom up and the top down. The top members of the organization should speak positively of diversity and communicate their commitment to this ideal situation. Be sure to include a business case for diversity that can be shared with your stakeholders and other interested parties.

The top leader in one of our partner organizations personally leads the diversity efforts. He holds town hall meetings and regularly goes to the employee cafeteria to listen and talk about diversity.

• A partner’s Chief Executive Officer requires the selection panel for key positions to identify at least six persons qualified for the position and has held up key selections because of the lack of diversity in applicant pools.
• The Chairman of the Board of one partner organization registered the corporation’s statement of commitment to diversity with an external regulatory body. Changes to this commitment do not go unnoticed. Create Organizational Diversity Goals
• Simply having the idea of “diversity” on the minds of hiring managers isn’t enough. The human resources staff, hiring managers, CEO and others must come together to create organizational goals around diversity. Perhaps this means adding a new manager with a different cultural background or considering the addition of staff with unusual experiences. Whatever the goals are, they need to be in writing and widely shared.

Enact Mentoring Programs

A work site mentoring program shows that you’re committed to helping diverse members of your staff achieve their personal and professional goals. Mentors can be within your organization or from partnerships you have within the community, such as at local colleges and universities. The mentoring program should include activities during the workday as well as optional events during evenings and weekends.

One partner builds its diversity strategic plan upon its core values:

(1) Respect for the dignity of the individual

(2) Integrity

(3) Trust

(4) Credibility

(5) Continuous improvement

(6) Personal renewal

Recruit Widely and Broadly

While every organization has their favorite recruitment events and locations, expanding beyond these can help you achieve your goals for a more diverse workplace. Look to partnering with community organizations in your city as well as those in nearby small towns and villages where recruitment events are rare. Take your show on the road to satellite campuses of large universities. Consider recruiting from vocational schools and community colleges where appropriate.

Maximize joy and connection, minimize fear

People are wired to react with fear and distrust when their beliefs are challenged. While fear can be a powerful motivator, it also encourages people to narrow their perspective the opposite desired effect for creating a more inclusive workplace. Finding ways to frame challenges through a lens of possibility and elevating the power of shared experiences and storytelling to do so creates greater potential for positive change.

Workforce Diversity is a term that refers to a situation where employers appreciate and value individual differences within the workplace, where heterogeneous workforce is established as well as allowed to perform to it potentials in an equitable work environment. Cascio (2010) refers to it as a pragmatic business strategy that focuses on maximizing the productivity, creativity, and commitment of the diverse workforce while meeting the needs of diverse consumer groups. However, the challenge of a diverse workforce to most 21st century organizations is on how to create a work setting in which each person can have an opportunity to perform to his or her full potential and therefore compete for promotion and other rewards on merit alone. Hence, the concept of workforce diversity has been the result of different forces from global business environment.

In the 21st century, workforce diversity has become a major competitive factor for many organizations that are to become global competitors than the others. Hence, carefully creating an environment that is inclusive of a diverse workforce, companies will be in a position to outperform their rival one. The contributions that a diverse workforce has to overall global organization’s growth in the 21st century is as discussed in details as follows:

It is notable according to Lieber (2010) that when companies discover that they can communicate better with their customers through employees who are similar to their customers, hence those companies realize that they have increased their internal diversity and as the result they are able to retain both employees and their consumers.

In connection to that, the study by the society for Human Resource Management by Aghazadeh (2004) found that:

(a) 91% of employees reported that diversity initiatives helped their organizations compete in the marketplace.

(b) 79% believed that their diversity programs improved corporate culture.

(c) 77% said that diversity programs improved recruitment efforts.

(d) 52% indicated that diversity programs facilitated more effective client contact.

Enhance on organizational performance

The current literature reveals the fact that the relationship between diversity and organizational or group performance can be either positively correlated or negatively correlated. Diversity according to Gandossy et al. (2006) can be classified in two perspectives such as demographic and cognitive, and demographic diversity includes things like gender, age, race and ethnicity and on the other hand cognitive diversity includes knowledge, education, values, perception, affection and personality characteristics of an individual from a diverse work group.

Hence, the attributes, knowledge, education, perception as well as personality that an individual or group brings to the workplace if well managed, is considered to have positive contribution to the overall organization’s effectiveness and performance. That’s why Bergen (2005) noted that there have been many contemporary studies on demographic diversity and its effect on organization’s performance. It is notable according to Roberson and Parks (2006) that a diverse workforce results in higher perceived levels of overall company’s performance, profitability and return on equity. This is because diversity results in greater knowledge, creativity and innovation and thus, organizations tend to become more competitive than its competitor.

Moreover, organizations with the inclusion work environment tend to attract and retain the best talent available who are the key ingredient for generating creative ideas that in turn impact on organization’s performance. The fund so accrued due to lower turnover and fewer lawsuits as the result of retention through diversity inclusion programs enhances organization ability to increase more investments that in turn affect positively organization performance. This is because according to Deloitte (2011), an environment where employees feel valued and given freedom to pursue at their best tends to yield greater commitment as well as motivation to succeed and this means that fewer resources spend on grievances, turnover and the replacement costs that in turn re-invested to more projects.

For companies want to take role in global diversity, there are two possible approaches to take, which will depend on the organization’s structure and culture. One approach/role is a multicountry approach, where programs and initiatives are developed and implemented by people in various locales. This model is typically exercised by much decentralized companies, and can be beneficial because local leaders take ownership of the initiatives. And these leaders and councils look for detailed local knowledge of customs, laws and cultural issues that require to be addressed. Local commitment tends to be higher in experiencing this approach. On the contrary, however, the lack of overarching corporate guidance may mean unsuitable levels of work across regions. And typically, companies using this model do not have dedicated global diversity staff, but rather personnel that are working on diversity in their spare time. A second approach to global diversity that is more suitable for more centralized organizations is a topdown approach where diversity is hard-wired into all business units from the corporate level.

Companies experiencing this approach maybe sure about consistency in message and offer assistance with development and implementation of programs. However, care must be taken to ensure that local commitment is implemented.

Currently many companies with multinational operations have started to consider diversity as a global initiative, have developed a global business case, and have implemented some programs outside the US. They usually have a dedicated global diversity staff that provides assistance worldwide. But while there is clearly increased focus on diversity outside the US, for many companies it is less apparent how to approach the challenge, and many organizations struggle with how to expand their ongoing domestic efforts outside the US.

An evolving remote workforce 56% of the U.S. workforce can work from home and 25-30% of the workforce WILL work from home by the end of 2021. When working remotely, different employees have different living conditions. For instance:

• Working women are expected to balance home and work-life.
• There might be lack of a dedicated and quiet space for employees to focus on their work, and so on.

People in leadership will need to figure out ways to bridge the remote gaps, and minimize challenges if they allow remote work.

• Enabling diverse gender identity and gender expression raises issues on access to gender-neutral restrooms, adopting employee health benefits for transitioning individuals, and creating awareness around using inclusive language for gender non-binary and transgender employees. It’s a different mindset and we must be sensitive to it.
• Re-engineering employee experience: COVID-19 brought all four characteristics of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) to life, as the world felt the devastating impact of the pandemic on the health of people and businesses. There are countless examples of leaders and organizations anchoring their business aspirations and focusing on humanity being there for their people. Along with providing COVID-19 care and coverage for employees and families, many organizations set-up special trainings to help leaders lead remote teams, upskilling programs for employees to help them stay relevant in a dynamic post-COVID world, and EAP sessions on mental and physical well-being to help employees stay positive during this trying time. The concept of ‘equity’ is about understanding individual needs and tailoring policies that fit different needs, experiences, and opportunities. Organizations will need to focus on building virtual communities and providing avenues for pride and camaraderie.
• Multigenerational workforce: The current workforce includes up to five different generations and they each have unique workplace expectations and bring in different life experiences, voices and skill sets. It is important for leaders to be aware of the differences and use different strategies to, celebrate employees of every generation.
• Eliminating unconscious bias in the workplace: Unconscious bias is how we process information and make decisions based on our unconscious or inherent biases and prejudices toward others at home and work. Leaders must be aware of this and ensure that these biases are checked and minimized consistently. There are some good classes on Linkedin Learning if you need a resource to get you started.
• Adoption of HR Technology: Biases are human, and AI and Talent Analytics tools can be leveraged to reduce preconceived notions and promote a more inclusive workplace. HR Tech tools allow organizations to source potential candidates and shortlist the best talent based on key skills required for the job. These tools help check prejudices that edge into the recruitment process and may overlook a potential high-performing candidate. HR Technology can hold people accountable to an organization’s diversity goals. For example: capturing feedback from employees regularly via employee surveys or after townhalls can help the organization better understand how an initiative is being perceived and what can be improved.
• Gearing up for systemic changes: 2020 highlighted systemic injustices and flaws across our nation with the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many innocent people of color. It exposed the grim reality of a racist and unjust society. It uncovered the dire for organizations to gear up and make some radical and much-needed changes that will impact the functioning of our cultures. Leaders should do their best to combat any discrimination against underrepresented groups in their company and policies should be put in place to ensure that the workplace is a safe place for ALL employees.
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Equity in the workplace refers to fair and impartial processes and outcomes for each person in the company. To it, leaders and employers need to be mindful of the challenges, barriers, and advantages at play for everyone at any given point in time. Equity is the reminder that not everyone starts at the same level playing field, and swift and vigilant action is important in building a fair workplace.
• Hiring diversity professionals: Companies are now hiring diversity professionals who are committed to the vision and mission of creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. The job is a mix of HR, recruitment, and leadership roles and responsibilities. Diversity professionals carry on a number of tasks such as holding and organizing educative sessions on diversity and inclusion, creating an inclusive culture in the workplace, introducing new ideas to improve D&I in the workplace, rooting and pushing for the use of an inclusive language, managing complaints on harassment and workplace discrimination, etc. As the role of diversity professionals have become increasingly popular, the trend of hiring them is only predicted to grow this year.
• Increased transparency in goals: We know that more diversity in a company does not necessarily equal more equity and inclusion. While efforts at diversity may increase, the same is not always the case for efforts at inclusivity. A growing diversity and inclusion trend in 2021 will be for companies to set transparent targets, goals, and D&I initiatives. Doing so will increase accountability of people in leadership positions, encourage honest conversations between employees and their bosses, and inspire them to share ideas and solutions.
• Supporting employees’ mental health: The pandemic created a blow to the mental health of many employees and professionals because of businesses shutting down, people losing jobs, adjusting to the new normal of working from home, and the constant health scare of getting the coronavirus. Even though the conversation around the mental health and wellbeing of employees was already gaining traction in the past couple of years, 2020 witnessed it take a whole new turn. A relevant diversity and inclusion trend in 2021 will be for organizations to put effective policies in place on how supervisors, managers, and coworkers talk, behave, and empathize with each other.
• Looking beyond tokenism: Diversity and inclusion is much more than hiring a person of color or including one woman in a panel full of men. Diversity just for the sake of diversity, or political correctness, will not make the cut anymore. It is a time to be more mindful, and intentional about diversity and inclusion goals and strategies.