The Importance of Managing Workforce Diversity - Case Study Example

? Managing Workforce Diversity Table of Contents The importance of managing workforce diversity 2 Analysis of different types of workforce diversity that exist in the organization 6 Analysis of the management strategies in the organization for managing workforce diversity 9 Conclusion 12 Recommendation 12 Reference 13 The importance of managing workforce diversity In today’s world, we can see there is a complex relation between the multitalented management and the diverse group of workforce. The difficulties faced by the management and the diverse work group is largely depended on the high amount of stress and mental anxiety, which arises due to interactive labor force of a gigantic company engaged in different sectors. Unless the present day HR is highly skilled, it will be impossible for him to manage the diverse workgroup in the workplace. Today organizations are emerging as diverse workforce in terms of gender race and civilization. Therefore, changes in the organization demographic condition and rapid advancement in technology lead to unresolved disputes in the workplace, which raises the issue of equal employment legislation. By definition, diversity refers to a variety of demographic features describing a company’s workforce, which comprises of race, sex, culture, religion etc. It signifies removing the difference among the people belonging to different cultures, gender, caste etc. In short, managing the diversity maximizes the diversities of company’s demographic characteristics and minimizing the potential barriers in the workforce, which can hamper the company’s growth and performance. By conducting diversity management programs in the organization, managers will be able to provide strong leadership in the diverse workgroup through which they can represent themselves as role models for exemplifying their pro diversity behaviors and helping each individual in the workgroup to overcome from the different circumstances. Therefore, good management practices will help the organization to attract the best talents from different sources and in this way, the company will be able to save his time and money in recruitment and turnover costs. Today managing the diversity has become a biggest challenge for the organization to manage the generation X, generation Y, and baby boomers. These three generations in the workforce include unique characteristics that make them different from the members of the other workgroup. Therefore, one should care about managing the diversity because it will help the managers to gain the commitment from the employees and developing a better working force. In other way, it will help the organization to create a pleasant and healthy environment in order to attract the new generations and gaining the reputation in the market. For example, Singapore’s workforce focuses on creating culture diversity in their workforce by engaging employees from different generations, nationalities, caste etc that develops a sweet and pleasant environment in an organization. Hence, it has proved that managing diversity in the workforce is important because it helps the organization to assess the performance of the employees. In contrast, if the HR is not able to manage the diversity present in teams, the teams overall performance will lead to employee dissatisfaction in the working environment. Therefore, diversity within a team may strengthen the team’s external communication and its ability to interact and coordinate with the other teams (Kepner, Wysocki, Lopez & Green, 2012). Now days, the managers need to understand that mostly women impel the diversity in the organizations. Recruiting single mothers and increasing the participation level of the women will help the organization in building a reputation in the market and improving the quality of working life. While managing the diversity in the workplace managers need to understand that diversity not only indicates employees’ belonging from different nationalities but it is the different individuals who carry with themselves the unique qualities. Therefore, managers need to understand the each unique qualities of the diverse workgroup. On the contrary, if the manager is not managing the diverse workgroup properly, the performance of the team will result to disruptive conflict and may even stimulate competitive behavior among the team members. To have a successful diverse workforce in future, managers need to handle the personal biases of the diverse workgroup and remove the culture biasness among the employees. In most of the organizations, the open door policy acts as an effective tool for the managers to deal with the employee disputes and the grievances and encouraging the employees to provide suggestions and ideas to help the organization to achieve its goals. Therefore, this policy will help to build the trust and develop a mutual respect between the employees. We all know that HRD management has now become a most challenging job in any large organization. The fact is that these organizations deploy normally fifty to eighty employees in different sectors of the country. Naturally, all these people come from different works of life. They are from different states, different religion, and different culture. Therefore, all these factors have to be coordinated by HRD by keeping his focus in motivation and innovation. By definition, innovation is something superior. The fact is that science is always changing. So diversity in the workforce have to be properly managed in order to excite the creativity and innovation in the diverse workgroup which will benefit the workplace by creating a safe and healthy working environment and yielding better maximization of output. Today most of MNCs have to establish their organization at different places of the world so, the system of remaining pattern of administration cannot be same and therefore in these MNCs the higher management class mostly learns to adapt with the change circumstances and periphery. Thus, the human resource management practices will be an effective tool for managers to manage the diversities in the work force. The workforce diversity is positively associated with the performance of the employees, which creates a unique advantage in a period when flexibility and creativity will help the organization to achieve greater market share and increasing its sales revenue. In practice, employers use various means to manage the diversity. For example, Baxter Healthcare adopted the policy of multiculturalism in his organization in order to create a diverse workforce in the era of globalization. Therefore, the managers need to deal with the people in the workforce belonging to different cultures. The diversity management involves creating supportive cultures, which needs the support of the top management in the workplace. Hence, workforce diversity in the areas of managing human resources will stimulate the managers to develop a better workforce and productive employees in the workplace (University of California, n.d.). Today women and people of color still experience relatively less career progress in organization, which results to biasness among each individuals and more restrained barriers. Therefore, organizations need to provide more career opportunities for the women so that they take interest in developing their own career, and leading towards high performance in the workplace. Even today, many organization employers follow legal compulsory actions in order to reduce the employment discrimination in the workforce. In most of the organizations, there should be continuous rapport with the higher boss that means from flow level management to the top level, a continuous deliberation should take place daily in all matters of the companies from technical to nontechnical. In fact, the company should fix production achievement for different stages so that the employees are motivated towards achieving the production target. Therefore, the entire workforce should be so motivated that they are not lured by the lectures of other party. The management will have to consider production bonus, incentive bonus, leave travel concession, education facilities, and recreation facilities in such a way that they consider themselves as a part of the organization. Analysis of different types of workforce diversity that exist in the organization Today most of the organizations, have different kinds of workforce diversity that reflects the organizations diversity of population and different cultures and values, which creates a pleasant organizational climate. Among the different kinds of workforce diversity, demographic workforce diversity describe the three generations in the workforce. A diverse work group in demographic workforce will lead to increasing customers and removing the barriers in language, caste, ethnicity etc. Therefore, it benefits the organization employees to generate innovative ideas rather than sharing experiences, which helps the organization to shine over all others in the industry. In demographic workforce, the baby boomers are hard working and dedicated towards the work. On the contrary, generation X and Y are independent and technology oriented. If we compare these three generations in the workforce diversity, we will be able to find that recruiting the baby boomers will be benefit the organization and they are productive than generation X and Y and they always strive to win. If an organization is focusing on having long-term employees then the baby boomers will be the right choice. A diversified workforce will benefit the organization by providing better quality of goods and services to the organization and happy employees in the workplace will help the manager to generate more output. Demographic workforce in the organization creates an environment where the younger generation X and Y employees are found to take more challenging jobs and willing to take the risk associated with their performance in the work. Whereas having the older employees in the organization will generate more revenue than the younger employees. The only reason is they have a strong work ethic and willing to work at any time. Therefore, demographic workforce generates teamwork and provides the opportunity to each generation employees to share their ideas and experiences. A number of changes in the workforce demographics have raised the issues related to increase cost and time in retaining the younger generation, increasing number of women in the workforce, demand for family benefits and many others. Hence, today most the younger generation focus on family relationships rather than working for a longer period of time and willing to change jobs and go ahead which lead the organization to face the increase in employment turnover and increase in absenteeism (University of South Australia, n.d.). Experiential workforce diversity includes those people belonging from different sectors with varied work life experiences. For example, a retired military soldier will apply his work experiences in his personal life In order to maintain a discipline family life; a single mother managing his children will apply his home experiences in her working life. In addition experiential workforce diversity benefits the organization by sharing new ideas and experiences and also providing opportunities to interact with each other and building a strong relationship. Therefore, the experiential workforce diversity will remove the barriers among the minority of employees. On the contrary, experiential workforce diversity will often lead to conflict among the older and the younger generation of employees since most of the older generation people sticks to their old thoughts and naturally this leads to disputes between the both. The only reason behind the conflict in the workplace is that younger generation hates working under the supervision of the older generation because they prefer to work independently. Informational diversity is another type of workforce diversity in the organization. This diversity comprises of those individuals coming from different family background and difference in their knowledge base. For example, an employee from a MBA background will have more knowledge than an employee who is just a graduate. In information diversity, employees will gain knowledge from each other by sharing their own understanding and providing helping hand towards each other. It also has a negative impact in the organization where we can find issues related to individual knowledge base and different individual cultures lead to create an unpleasant working force in the organization. As a result, information diversity often leads to communication gap among the employees and other negative consequences. Fundamental diversity is another type of workforce diversity. It refers to differences in the essential values and individual objectives of life. The positive aspect in this diversity is that it helps the organization to build a strong relationship with the employees. Last but not the least there are some more types of workforce diversity in the organization, which contributes different types of conflict in the workplace. One of them is interpersonal conflict, which arises between the three generations. In addition, there are other types of conflict which raises the issues related to difference in knowledge, information base etc. Therefore, to overcome from the problems managers need to encourage teamwork and providing training to the generation Y since they shift jobs. Analysis of the management strategies in the organization for managing workforce diversity To manage the diversity in workforce managers need to ensure that each of his teams is belonging to different generations comprising of employees from different caste, gender, nationalities etc. Therefore, these diversified teams will help the organization to build up an inclusive culture and yielding greater productivity and competitive advantages. In addition, emphasizing on developing company culture and work culture will help the managers to deal with different generations in the workforce. Hence, developing diversity management strategy will help the managers to reduce the employee absenteeism and employee turnover rate. During recruitment process, most of the organization uses the panel interview format to recruit the older generation and therefore through panel interview, the organization will ensure the applicants that unintentional bias are not conducted in the organization. While recruiting the new talents the organization needs to ensure that suitable accommodations are provided to the disabled applicants. During selection, process managers need to focus on job requirements in the interview and evaluate the applicants based on their communication skills and transferable skills. In addition, the managers need to adopt different kinds of communication styles in different circumstances, since it has been seen that most of the people in the organization prefer to communicate with those who belong to their same position or same gender. A retention policy needs to be changed by the HR managers in order to retain the good employees, since in most of the organizations it became difficult to retain women and minority employees in the workplace. Compared to the other group of employees in the workplace the job satisfaction level of men and women is low. Therefore, ignoring the diversity in the workforce will lead to decrease in productivity, efficiency, inability to attract and retain the productive employees etc. Through employee engagement, survey the organization will be able to boost the employees towards increase in productivity, reducing the cost behind training and employment turnover, gaining the market share and increase sales revenue, innovation and creativity and many others. Managers need to develop a written employment policy so that the employees may feel that their firm provides an equal employment opportunity as well as a statement indicating an employer’s commitment towards the employees. Top management support is essential while managing the diversity in workforce (Williams, 2011). Management need to develop and implement specific programs in the workplace in order to provide the opportunities to the female and minority section. For this, the organization needs to establish internal and external audit system in order to monitor and review the progress of the entire human resource management system. Therefore, while managing the diversities in the workforce managers need to guide the employees towards the career growth and assuring the female and minority employees that, they will be receiving the equal respect and love which the other employees receive in the workplace. Hence, today most of the organizations need to break the behavioral style of interview since it acts as an ineffective tool for the older generation people. As a result, the diversity in workforce need to create a work life balance since most of the female employees faces the problems related to family life. In many organizations, most of the workers are concerned with belonging to the diverse workgroup rather than thinking about their supervisors valuing their ideas or not. Therefore, with practical training the employees will be able to resolve their differences. A balance workforce strategy will help the organization to cover all the diversity of population in the workplace. During layoffs, a balance workforce strategy will ensure that the other member of the group does not affect the members of one group. As a result, diverse strategic plans are developed, to respect each individual employee from different sectors and ensuring continuous improvement in the human resource management system. In addition, when an organization has to develop a diverse strategic plan, effective efforts are needed from the good leaders to implement the diverse strategic plans aligning with the organizations strategic goals. However, management strategies are designed to establish a link between the vision and implementing the actions required for success. In future, the managers need to respect and understand the different characteristics of the three generation in order to manage the diversity of workforce. In contrast, to retain the three generations managers need to have good leadership quality. However, most of the companies are looking different ways to integrate their unique characteristics and needs so that they can retain them in the organization. Last but not the least, management strategies aim towards creating a pleasant environment in the workplace and also ensure smooth communication process in the workplace. Training and empowerment activities will help the organization to promote the execution of diversity goals (Bunton, n.d., p. 7).Hence, management strategies are designed to value all the people in the workforce and encouraging each individual to enhance their skills. Conclusion Therefore from the above analysis, we can say that in order to manage the diversity in workforce, HR managers need to bring changes in the company policies so that the company overcomes from the problems of gender discrimination in the workplace, which is still a huge problem till now faced by most of the organization. A diverse workforce is the reflection of changing the workplace and the global competitive market. However, today organizations cannot afford to discriminate when it comes to hiring and promoting the new talents based on their high performance performed in the workplace. Recommendation As we, all know that large companies recruit different sectors of people, so in my opinion it should be the utmost duty of the HR managers of today to ensure that all working class are satisfied. In practice, the HR manger should have an impartial attitude towards all. In most of the organization, we can find now days there are interested groups or political influence, which plays a big role in the selection of higher category of employees and in the lower areas political influence prevail very much in the country. In my opinion, these sought of practices should be discarded. However, in the skilled and semi skilled areas, preference should be given to the sons of the soil. Apart from these, there should be continuous training policy in the organization so that a person with his achievement of technical quality can go up to the level of supervisor or controller. The management should be uniform in his judgment so that all employees feel that they belong to the same group of the family. Last but not the least there should be no dynastic control in the organization. Reference Bunton, W. No Date. Best Practices in Achieving Workforce Diversity. May 02, 2012. . Kepner, K., Wysocki, A., Lopez, M. and Green, K. A. 2012. Diversity in the Workplace: Benefits, Challenges, and the Required Managerial Tools. May 02, 2012. . University of California. No Date. Managing Diversity in the Workplace. May 02, 2012. . University of South Australia. 2011. Workforce Demographics. May 02, 2012. . Williams, H. 2011. Guidelines on workplace diversity. May 02, 2012. < http://www.apsc.gov.au/publications01/diversityguidelines.htm>. Read More