Managing Diversity in South Africa

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).

The World is a diverse place; changing demographics, globalization and generational gaps. Diversity is the mix of people who make your organization. The workforce, including leadership should represent and look like the community in which business is conducted. Work place diversity is the key to survival and growth and is an essential business tool. Diversity promotes inclusion within and across business units and help all employees understand and respect individual differences and the value of everyone’s unique talents. Different types of people bring different talents and competencies to the table. Inclusion allows people to be themselves at work and letting them know they are valued regardless of their age, gender,

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..

First off, the population of the world isn’t just one type of people therefore having a diverse work group will allow for business to be conducted with a wider segment of the population. Being able to provide a goods or a service to a wider segment of the population directly impacts sales and company profits especially when starting to cut out its own niche’ in a new market. Having a diverse group of people working for you translates into a larger customer base and a larger language ability as well as knowing customs and traditions of other groups of people. Repeat business will increase as ones customer base increases. Being a diverse company is simply good

The impact of diversity is a successful learning experience for companies, and is equally as important to a company as its mission statement because of the educational and work ethics of its employees. Awareness and knowledge of diversity in addition to the similarities that humans possess can build relationships between employees and employers. Diversity helps employees and employers to be well educated and informed as to what forms a person’s values, attitudes, and behaviors.

Diversity today is seen not only as the aftermath of the globalization process but also as the driving force of progress and an integral part of success of modern organizations. Ethnic, racial, gender, and religious diversity makes each one of us a unique citizen of this globalized world. An organization that brings together employees with such different backgrounds, benefits from the vibrancy of thoughts and varied viewpoints, brought to the company by multiple cultures and unique experiences of its employees. Distinctive capabilities of such workers and their individual skill sets and talents allow them to come up with creative solutions, new ideas and proposals, which increase efficiency of a team. While working together employees of such

GIVES GOOD CORPORATE REPUTATION and this helps to attract talent. Organizations with high level of diverse workforce are valued by many people e.g. large supermarkets by having a diverse workforce on the shop floor help international customers to communicate with staff in their own languages.

The general line of reasoning is that if we learn to incorporate each other’s diverse traits and characteristics in the workplace, we can then use these differences to foster an innovative environment, which will give the company a competitive advantage over the competitors that do not accept workforce diversity. According to the Allied Academies International Conference, “Diversity is rapidly becoming a common practice among companies due to the increasing number of minorities entering the job market today. As these groups become more prevalent throughout companies, upper-level employees are facing numerous challenges when determining what changes must take place to create a positive working environment for everyone. Management is responsible for the development and implementation of effective policies directly relating to diversity to ensure the acceptance of minorities into the workplace and to aid in minorities’ success through equal opportunities and treatment.” (Marcia L. James, 2001, Academy for Studies in International Business Proceedings)

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.

Nowadays, diversity is not just defined differently by culture, race, and religion and so on, but is becoming a more and more important factor to most companies, due to the advantages it could bring. I think the success and competitiveness of an organization depends on its capacity to involve diversity and be aware of its importance and superiority. A diversity workforce is able to offer a better variety of solutions for problems, and employees from diverse backgrounds bring their individual experiences and talents in advising thoughts, so company can satisfy the demand of customers more effectively. And in my opinion, creativity and innovation now are the two keys for

Organization: Diversity brings substantial potential benefits, such as better decision making and improved problem solving. A greater variety, of creativity and innovation, could lead to enhanced product development and marketing to an expanded target group providing organizations with the ability to compete in the global markets (Murmu, 2014).

Diversity in the workplace can be beneficial for an organization if the team is managed properly. However, many challenges can be presented such as communication issues, discrimination complaints and resistance to change. Managers are prepared to monitor performance and provide proper training when applicable; managers are not prepared to work with the differences that can be presented between employees. A manager should always be prepared to handle employees with different cultures, religions, ages and sexual orientations. The discrimination complaints against managers and/or other coworkers have increased significantly during the past years. Managers can avoid discrimination complaints when managing a diverse team. Managers should evaluate and assigned tasks to teammates individually or should the tasks be assigned in a group setting. The management team needs to identify what management style is more effective while managing a diverse team. Manager need to understand how to address a situation when two employees are using racial comments against each other. Every Human Resource department for these companies has to provide the proper training and monitor managers according to diversity of the team. The Human Resource department of these companies has to be ready to handle these complaints. Must companies are affected and face monetary losses due to discrimination complaints and lawsuits. All this can be avoided and/or minimized because managers have the ability to make a

To gain insight into equal opportunities and diversity management we will define them. We will then look at the differences between the two statements. By gaining knowledge around the differences we will investigate what affect it has on organisations in their efforts of improving diversity. It will be looked at in the South African context. The next step will be to look at cornerstones reach by organisations this far. As a conclusion we will look at the implications this has on management and the skills they will need to affectively manage diversity.

Organizations have been becoming increasingly diverse in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. This diversity brings substantial potential benefits such as better decision making, greater creativity and innovation, and more successful marketing to different types of customers. But, increasing cultural differences within a workforce also bring potential costs in higher turnovers, interpersonal conflicts, and communicational breakdowns. The utilities of diversity training and the essential managerial skills required for effectively managing diversity will also be discussed.

In response to the growing diversity in the workforce around the world, many companies have instituted specific policies and programs to enhance recruitment, inclusion, promotion, and retention of employees who are different from the privileged echelons of society. The privileged groups may vary from one country to the next. The workforce of the world is a dynamic environment, and in order for this dynamism to be put to use for the benefit of organizations, they must develop an effective strategy for managing diversity. Global Diversity Management refers to the voluntary organizational actions that are designed to create greater inclusion of employees from various backgrounds into the formal and informal organizational