Why do we need to select a diverse workforce?
Workforce diversity is:
Similarities and differences in such characteristics as age, gender, race, ethnicity, physical ability, culture, sexual orientation, and other individual differences among the employees of an organization.
There are two dimensions of diversity, primary dimensions of inborn differences as age, race, gender, physical ability, and secondary dimensions like religion, family background, education, and beliefs.
The need for a diverse workforce:
1.Most of the service sectors including banking, tourism, healthcare need interaction with a lot of customers. Those customers prefer to deal with their people. To improve the customer service workforce diversity would be helpful.
2. To reach high productivity in an organization it’s essential to have a good team. A team with diverse employees will implement new business strategies.
3. To meet the global market needs there should be a good understanding of preferences, different nationalities, and their cultures. A local presence will get closer and will help increase sales revenue, more customers, and achieving a great market share.
4.Workforce diversity increases the group process and associates well with others business units. So it’s helpful for merging and alliances.
5.A lawsuit settlement can even break up a company. To understand applicable government and constitutional laws a diverse workforce would be pretty helpful.
6.To compete for global talent we need employees with high creativity and innovative skills. It’s easy to define talented people in a diverse workforce.
Although there are many advantages of workforce diversity, the same reasons can become a disadvantage as well. Different people come from different backgrounds. Maybe they are not speaking the same language, people may have different opinions, customs, thoughts. So there could be a conflict. Minority workgroup workers can be the targets of sexual harassment, cultural jokes, lack of insensitivity, and discrimination(Goyal, 2009). We need to manage diversity to build an inclusive work environment that allows anyone to reach their full potential. There are two major approaches, the individual approach of learning and empathy or the organizational approach of testing, training, or mentoring(Saha, 2007).
Global context:
Morieux (2021) shows finding a diverse team produced 19% more revenue
We can see the trend of many countries selecting a diverse workforce for their organizations. Most organizations in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand hire talented people around the world. They also allow them to receive permanent residence. There is a positive trend of people from non-English speaking backgrounds are becoming an increased percentage of the workforce. Also, we can see more women are working around the world. Some organizations have allowed people with disabilities. We can see single parents working and an increment of average age workers. There are some countries like Australia with national and state laws which cover equal employment opportunities and anti-discrimination in the workplace. (Bhadurya and Damarb, 1999). United Nations have implemented equal employment rights.
Some large online hiring services aim at a diversified workforce.
The Vice President of LinkedIn says their vision is to create global opportunities for every member of the global workforce.
However, some countries ignored workforce diversity. Middle eastern countries like Saudi Arabia hardly allow women to work. Some state jobs in India allow only a certain caste of people to apply. Italy let only Italians apply for all the professional jobs.
Srilankan context:
SriLanka had a male-dominated working culture in the past. Nowadays there’s an equal opportunity for both male and female candidates in both government and private sectors. But accessibility to the senior levels is not that impressive. Some organizations strictly hire employees from certain schools, certain ethnic groups, or religions. In both private and government sector jobs mention an age limit for recruitments. Sometimes it would be below 25 and most of the talented university graduates cannot apply. A UN survey shows a considerable rate of people who can’t work in Sri Lanka because they are old. There are around 1.7 million differently able people in Sri Lanka and only 1% of them are in the workforce.
SriLankan constitution state there cannot be discrimination on grounds of race, religion, birth, caste, or gender but there’s no specific provision or law to apply when there’s such discrimination occurs to an employee.
With globalization, Sri Lanka needs to concern more on selecting a diverse workforce and implementing such laws for employee discrimination.
Conclusion
A diverse force could be a reflection of an ever-changing world and marketplace. numerous workgroups bring high worth to organizations. Respecting individual variations can profit the work by making a competitive edge and increasing work productivity. Diversity management advantages associate with making a good and safe atmosphere wherever everybody has access to opportunities and challenges. Management tools in a very numerous force ought to be accustomed educate everybody regarding diversity and its problems, together with laws and rules. Most workplaces square measure created from numerous cultures, thus organizations got to find out how to adapt to achieve success.
References
Bhadurya, J., Damarb, H. (1999) 'Maximizing workforce diversity in project teams: a network flow approach, Omega, 28, pp.143-153.
Goyal, S. (2009) 'Diversity at workplace', HRM Review, 05, pp 14-15.
Morieux, Y. (2021) Smart simplicity Approach: Consulting Strategy, Boston Consultant Group
Saha, A. (2007) 'Nurturing Cultural Diversities A Leadership Challenge', HRM Review, 21, pp.23-24
When we consider the Age, if majority is young in the workforce most of the higher senior age people also will come to the same umbrella and they do not think about their age. All will work as the same team and no age difference. In our organization most of the employees are between 25 to 40 age. For the executive level all are 30 to 40. I see most of the ideas and feelings are same in the organization. Others above this age limited and they do not work like their own. As an example, recently we have started new implementation of ERP and most of the young employees can easily learn the system but here no difference with senior age people also. They try their best without concerning their age. And do practice every time and come with the new face and all young employees are willing to help them.
ReplyDeleteI do not believe limitation of Age to recruitment is good. We may have to balance all the ages and give best practice with combination of all ages.
It’s quite interesting how you have explained about why do we need to select a diversity workplace. I have noticed that, candidates should be a citizen of Sri Lanka to apply for a job in the government sector organizations in Sri Lanka. Further, most of the Government sector organizations recruit candidates who are above the age of 35 for senior manager level positions. They do not think about skills and talents of younger generation other than experience of matured candidates. My opinion is Government sector organizations in Sri Lanka should focus on workplace diversity.
ReplyDeleteHaving a diverse and multicultural workplace brings several advantages. Since today’s world is increasingly more globalised and interconnected, workplaces should take advantage of the diverse range of skills individuals from different backgrounds and languages can bring. The top five benefits of workplace diversity include:
ReplyDeleteIncreased productivity: A diverse workplace allows for more ideas and processes. This diversity of talent means a broader range of skills among employees, as well as a diversity of experiences and perspectives which increases the potential for increased productivity
Increased creativity: As various cultures and backgrounds work together, the opportunity for increased creativity exists. This is because there are more people with differing perspectives and solutions to problems, allowing for a greater chance of a workable solution to a workplace problem.
HR needs to consider about the work force diversity in the organisation and includes hiring, promotion, compensation equality, Traning, Employee policies, Legal regulations and acessability to important documents and so on.
ReplyDeleteWhile diversity has clear benefits from an organizational perspective, an additional challenge with diversity comes from mismanagement. Due to the legal framework surrounding diversity in the workplace, there is a potential threat involving the neglect of relevant rules and regulations. Fair, ethical, and nondiscriminatory hiring practices and pay equity for all employees are absolutely essential for managers and human resource professionals to understand and uphold. The legal ramifications of missteps in this particular arena can have high fiscal, branding, and reputation costs too.
Even though the change to a diverse workplace can be tough, employers across the globe and the globe are making moves to diversify. They’re finding it’s worth the determination and the investment and that the results are both morally and financially rewarding.
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ReplyDeleteIn order to make work truly inclusive, should continuously work on managing diversity and always promote diversity efforts, both internally and externally. Therefore several ways have to promote workforce diversity at the workplace. Those are Be aware of unconscious bias, Communicate the importance of managing bias, Promote pay equity, Develop a strategic training program, Acknowledge holidays of all cultures, Make it easy for your people to participate in employee resource groups, Mix up your teams, Facilitate ongoing feedback, Assess company policies, Track progress over extended periods of time (https://www.ceridian.com/blog/support-diversity-and-inclusion-in-the-workplace).
As per my point of view, these days many companies practice blind hiring to include a wide range of employees from cultural backgrounds. Blind hiring helps to cut down the biases based on gender, age, race, religion and culture of the candidate. Many times these biases stop a recruiter from hiring the right people. When you fail to hire the candidate, you waste your resources.
ReplyDeleteAs the president of Pixar and Walt, Disney Animation Studios, Edwin Earl Catmull said-
“Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than the right idea.”
I agree with you Sudarshanie. Blind hiring is a process where all personally identifiable information is removed from a job seekers CV, such as address, name, education, length of time in each role and more. Blind recruitment has been designed to find the best person in the current market (top talent). This approach eventually creates a more diverse and a balance workforce which allows for different ideas from a host of backgrounds. So it leads to make an efficient recruitment strategy reducing discriminations and selecting the best candidate.
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