Because of the challenges individuals sometimes have in incorporating diverse perspectives in group settings, managing diversity in the workplace is essential. A team or organization's diversity can include diversity across religion, sex, age, and race, but can also include diversity across work skills or personality types. All of these differences can affect team interactions and performance. Global businesses demand management that can work in a diverse environment.
Operating globally
Global business demands management that can work in a diverse environment.
Diversity is beneficial to both the organization and the members of the company or organization. Diversity brings substantial potential benefits, such as better decision making and improved problem solving; greater creativity and innovation, which leads to enhanced product development; and more successful marketing to different types of customers. Diversity provides organizations with the ability to compete in global markets.
A manager can help guide these differences to the benefit of innovation and inclusion in the organization. This includes not only hiring practices but also communication and career development practices over the course of an employee's career with a firm. Human Resources (HR) is often tasked with managing many aspects of diversity in organizations, including the attraction, selection, training, assessment, and reward of employees, but project managers and other managers with whom employees directly work or to whom they directly report can also guide inclusion practices. The process of inclusion engages each individual and makes people feeling important to the success of the organization.
For example, stereotypes may affect the performance of a team. A person may be misunderstood early in an interaction. Contributions may be limited and specific strengths or talents may be overlooked because they do not seem prominent in the given stereotypical category. On the other hand, poor performance can be overlooked in an individual because they belong to a stereotypically desirable group. Managers can combat this by mixing teams, creating smaller mixed teams for subtasks, monitoring all team members' progress, and allowing individuals to volunteer for roles rather than being cast into their default role, as defined by their stereotypical category.
Diversity training is another way that managers and other employees can manage diversity in the workplace. Diversity training is training for the purpose of increasing participants' cultural awareness, knowledge, and skills, which is based on the assumption that the training will benefit an organization by protecting against civil rights violations, increasing the inclusion of different identity groups, and promoting better teamwork.