Diversity 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).

Diversity is vital in today's workplace. Having a diverse workforce opens up a wealth of possibilities and helps to encourage creativity and innovation.

Diversity is very important on a workplace because it create a respectful environment, reduce conflict, help business reputations, and avoid legal issues. This accepting and managing of these cultural differences has over the years become an important factor of organizational success.

The purpose of this paper is designed to introduce, educate, and promote diversity within your company. Your company will be shown the merits of diversity and how diversity within your organization can be a benefit. This paper will be broken down into three main areas: Benefits of Diversity, Challenges of Diversity, and Recommendations for an effective diversity within your organization..

Hiring a diverse workforce is valuable in enhancing effectiveness of any manager or leader for many reasons, as outlined by Kerby and Burns (2012): (1) a diverse workforce drives

Workplace diversity is when there is diverse culture of individuals in the workplace. It is when there is a value placed on the variety of ideas, race, ethnicities, religion, gender, sexuality and orientation, which is flourishing in an environment. Depending on your employer and workplace, workplace diversity can vary based off several different factors. Usually, there is a preferential standpoint taken on the matter and it can be either display a high or a low context culture of diversity. According to Mason (2013) Workforce diversity has been described as “a double-edged sword; it has the potential for positive and negative outcomes” (p.659). Workplace diversity is important in a business setting because it carries forward a combination of different types of people to work together in unity, encourages uniqueness, innovative, creative approaches, and supports interesting divergent ideas to accomplish tasks or goals.

Diversity within a team is beneficial as each person brings together their own unique views and ways of working. When managed effectively this can help bring together different ideas and build a strong team. By having a diverse team there is opportunity for views / ideas to be seen that could help make the business better. This is due to each person seeing the task/ result from a different light. By listening to all people you can gage a better understanding of the end result.

Diversity in the organization can affect the employees and their behavior in many ways. The effect can be positive and negative in the same time. The positive effect is, it will wider employee knowledge, skills, and attitude which will allow the organization to become more competitive globally. Higher diversity of employees mean higher diversity of knowledge, skills and abilities. Sharing experience inspires innovative thinking (Claudia Quaiser-Pohls, 2013, p. 41). Today in the modern workplace, most organizations will have

* Greater diversity leads to greater innovation and productivity which is crucial in being successful on the market. It encourages different perspectives and ideas whilst fostering innovation as well as ability to come up with wider range of solutions to a business problems and challenges. Available at: http://www.slideshare.net/fred.zimny/forbes-innovation-through-diversity?related=1 (Accessed:13th October 2015)

The role of diversity in any situation can only make the outcome better. The more perspective input that people put into something, the bigger the idea will grow and change. This fact has been proven from many fields. Sports have evolved from simple hand offs to passing and play action passes, music has expanded from bluegrass and country to rap and hip hop, rhythm and blues, pop, heavy metal, and instrumental. None of that would have been possible without the influence of different cultures and diversity.

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 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

Diversity is important to companies because with a diverse environment people can benefit and learn from others' ideas. Other reasons for the importance of diversity to many organizations are the recognition of differences as prerequisites for high performance and continuous improvement, enhancing the effectiveness and creativity of the organization, and valuing conflicts as opportunities for more effective decision-making and problem solving. Diversity has a major impact on our behaviors in the work place.

Businesses are recognizing the need and importance of investing in diversity and addition as part of their inclusive talent management practices and to frequently challenge their organizations to make the connection between those values and their group performance.. Diversity is especially fundamental in today’s global marketplace, as businesses cooperate with