Help Clients Manage Diversity

Can you cut the tension with a knife? Perhaps you can offer your clients lessons on how to manage diversity. Even though maximizing a diverse employee pool can increase organizational performance, many managers gloss over this opportunity.

Creating an Inclusionary Environment

Managing diversity can be seen as a chance to facilitate an inclusionary environment. This is an environment where diverse employees have healthy interpersonal and intercultural relationships and often results in increased innovation. Conversely, poor intercultural functioning has been shown to result in lost revenue, as well as reduced opportunities and good will within the organization.

It is critical that managers and employees have the self-awareness to understand their individual responses to diversity. This is known as an awareness of “otherness.” Otherness refers to the differences among people in their race, gender, culture, ethnicity, physicality, educational level, age, geographic origin, lifestyle and religion or spirituality.

Signs of Diversity Issues

Organizations that suffer from diversity issues may experience tension and fighting among diverse employees. This can actually hurt an organization, by manifesting as problems in delivering the company’s products or services. It can also compromise the quality of the product or service. Organizations that ineffectively manage cultural diversity can experience the following problems:

1) Increased absenteeism
2) Increased spending on recruiting and training new employees due to high turnover
3) Sabotage of socially marginalized employees who are “different”
4) Increased discrimination reports

Diversity is Here to Stay

Because we live in an interconnected and global society, the workplace will continue to become more diverse. The key to helping an organization benefit from diversity is to perceive it as an asset rather than a problem. Diversity only becomes a problem when the attitudes of employees arise from ignorance and fear of otherness. It occurs when employees are scared to interact with people who look, dress or speak differently than the majority of employees.

In general, individuals who have unfavorable attitudes toward a culture or ethnic group often form stereotypes about people who are different, demonstrating prejudicial and discriminatory behaviors. Being successful at diversity management starts with understanding and exploring these basic concepts⎯prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination.

• Prejudice is a preconceived bias that originates from a variety of sources, such as interactions with our family and friends and through the media. Although all human beings have biases, we are often unaware of them in our daily life. Behaviors that are considered prejudicial may be driven by a person’s ethnocentric attitude. This is one in which an individual feels culturally and personally superior to another culture or ethnic group.

• When people over-generalize about a culture or ethnic group, it is referred to as stereotyping. Stereotyping is often a result of having a limited experience with a member of a particular culture or group and transferring this to the entire population of the group. Stereotyping can result from of a lack of knowledge about an ethnic group or culture and from making unsupported assumptions about people.

• Discrimination refers to the unequal treatment of individuals, resulting in a negative outcome.

7 Strategies for Managing Diversity in the Workplace

One effective strategy for facilitating a successfully diverse work environment is to acknowledge the diversity present in each of us. By acknowledging that we each possess multiple identities, it becomes easier to observe the multiple identities in others. Additional strategies that management can ask employees to adopt are:

1. Become more observant of changes in the workplace environment and try to accommodate and adapt to these changes.
2. Make a conscious effort to recognize, accept and respect individuals who look, dress and behave differently.
3. Realize that tolerance gives others permission to be who they are without penalizing them in an unfavorable way.
4. Remember to always think before speaking.
5. Become more aware of counterproductive biases and how they may affect your interactions with others. This means that even though you may not agree with everyone, you demonstrate respect and fairness.
6. Become an active listener who wishes to develop trust and confidence in the person speaking. Know that you can increase the other person’s level of cooperation when you are less defensive.
7. Allow yourself time to learn about other cultures by visiting cultural centers and educating yourself about the values of different cultures.

How Do You Know if a Client is Effective at Managing Diversity?

Organizations that are successful at managing diversity will have many of the following signs:

• Employee turnover is proportionate among all diverse groups
• Employees from all cultural and ethnic groups are willing to provide feedback to management
• Cooperation is evident in work teams composed of diverse individuals
  There is evidence of high performance among diverse work teams
• There are fair and equitable policies regarding vacation, leave and absenteeism for all employees
• Diversity in staff composition can be seen at all levels
• There are friendships among employees who have diverse backgrounds