Diversity In The Workplace

Diversity is a wonderful asset to an organization and brings with it many benefits. Employees bring in their own personal experiences and knowledge to the team (Burns & Kerby, 2012). Having diverse teams allows for the possibility to fix a problem or perfect a process by using different employee’s experiences and past knowledge to find solutions. A diverse workforce can drive economic growth and capture a greater share of the consumer market (Burns & Kerby, 2012). With diversity as a core value, the recruitment pool is widened to find the most qualified candidate and reduces employee turnover as a result. An organization can be highly competitive with a diversity initiative by adapting to a changing environment (Burns & Kerby, 2012).

In recent years, diversity and inclusion have emerged as an essential business practice. Why are diversity and inclusion so critical to organizations nowadays? Do they really help organizations achieve better results? Why is it a unique issue in the 21st century workplace? To answer these questions, organizations should look into factors such as globalization. Globalization increases interactions around the world and diversifies the profile of the workforce, which also contributes to the changing composition of the current workforce. While globalization offers extensive opportunities for organizations, it also imposes many challenges that require new responses. Organizations are not only looking for ways to effectively manage a diverse workforce but also to leverage it to achieve better outcomes.

Organizations must stop visualizing diversity as an issue and start seeing it as a benefit for the organization. There are several reasons why a diverse workforce will add value to a company. Most businesses, either large or small, work on a global scale; the information age has brought the entire world a lot closer. Having associates that can deal with different cultures around the world is crucial to an expanding business. A diverse workforce will help to build more rounded individuals with experience they will gain from a mixed environment. Customers will benefit from the diverse workforce because a company that makes a choice to be open and flexible with its associates will more than likely be easy to work with in a business relationship. Probably the most important aspect of having a diverse workforce is the vast knowledge gained by pooling the different life lessons, cultures and experience together thereby allowing everyone the chance to learn new and different business practices (Sappal, Pepi, 2002).

The workforce in America today is enhanced with a significant mix of genders, race, religion, age and other background factors. For a business to be successful long term demands for a diverse range of talent that can bring perspective, fresh ideas and opinions to their work. The challenge of diversity is allowing managers to make the most out of different cultural backgrounds, lifestyles, plus different genders and ages to answer to different business opportunities more creatively and promptly. Diversity has changed in a way that the issue is no longer just male or female and black and white. It is greatly complex now. It is many things but it is greatly about the way we connect, emphasize and interact with different individuals. The advantages

Diversity and inclusion are hot topics in today’s business world. While treating individuals fairly and equally is a social imperative, it is also extremely important to the success of a business. With the changing demographics of society and its affect on the American workforce, organizations must truly embrace diversity and inclusion. “For companies to succeed in the global marketplace, they must make the most of the full range of their people. Companies must attract and retain the right skills, the best minds, all the required resources – and that means diversity” (Royal Bank of Canada, n.d.). There are a number of compelling reasons companies should adopt the core values of diversity and inclusion. This paper sets out to

The concept of diversity has broadened in scope in the recent past, evolving from the concept of mandated quotas and affirmative action, to the reality of a diverse workforce being capable of providing quantifiable business value. A variety of external factors have influenced the conceptual evolution of diversity within the workplace. For example, globalization of markets has provided the concept of diversity with an opportunity to demonstrate a clear competitive advantage. A native understanding of the cultural values, norms and business practices of a foreign market can give an organization a clear advantage over their competition. Another area where diversity offers advantages is in the

Diversity is what makes people different, not just culturally but in human differences. Having a multitude of differences in the workforce gives an organization the ability to use many ideas to reach a common goal. A person could say that a diverse group of people together in one room can accomplish greater achievements than a room filled with the same types of individuals. Managers understand the concept of diversity, and how important diversity is to the success of a company’s ability to implement programs that continue to develop a harmonious and diverse workplace. The recognition that diversity is a reality in the workforce has generated an enormous amount of activity over the years among leaders in business, government, and civil

In corporate life and elsewhere, there must be mutual trust and respect and that is the heart of having an effective diverse workforce. This is more relevant when the key players are from different countries and of different cultures.

Over the decades, diversity in the workplace has started to become a business necessity. But what does diversity actually mean? In broad terms, diversity encompasses a group of people with different biological characteristics such as age, race, gender, ethnicity disability and so on. However, the true definition of diversity in the workplace is about ensuring that every single person that goes to work everyday have the freedom to bring along their full self to work and it is not just about welcoming but it is about embracing and harnessing the diversity of thought, the diversity of background, the diversity of experience, the diversity in education, and not just the traditional aspects in diversity. Even so, one of the major challenges that

In the past, diversity was used as a tool or byproduct of being a good citizen, but that ship has sailed. In fact, the days of simply having a diversity statement, but not putting any real effort behind it has caused organizations to lose business (Rezvani, 2015). Truly, there are benefits to creating a diverse workforce, such as: variety of talent, variety of languages, and an expanded market (Brookins, 2016).

In the modern world, workforce diversity has developed to be among the most imperative elements. Many organizations including Apple Inc. and all over the world have employed diversity managers to help develop effective workforce diversification (Podsiadlowski et al., 2013). The increased interest in workforce diversity is not surprising. As organization move to develop organizational structures including teams and groups as well as multinational workforce, effective communication within diversified workforce becomes

The first thing to acknowledge about diversity is that it can be difficult. In the U.S., where the dialogue of inclusion is relatively advanced, even the mention of the word “diversity” can lead to anxiety and conflict. Supreme Court justices disagree on the virtues of diversity and the means for achieving it. Corporations spend billions of dollars to attract and manage diversity both internally and externally, yet they still face discrimination lawsuits, and the leadership ranks of the business world remain predominantly white and male.

Global and cultural diversity are the biggest and most important challenges that organizations face in nowadays. The diversity of the workforce means that organizations are becoming more heterogeneous in terms of age, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, ethnic origin, for health, occupation, etc. Diversity is an advantage in this global world, and it cannot be considered as a disadvantage in obtaining opportunities (McGuire & Mammed, 2010).

With market globalization and international competition, firms have come to realise that a diverse workplace is a strong competitive advantage in today’s markets. It helps to attract

In a world that has grown increasingly smaller due to mass media, world travel, and readily available information, the workplace has grown increasingly diverse in both gender and cultural aspects. Individuals no longer live and work within the confines of their geographic locations. At almost any position with any company the individual employee is a part of a larger world economy that harvests assets from the ends of the earth. Because of this, companies seek to capitalize on diversity to become more creative and flexible in their business models.