No two people are similar; at a workplace, there will be employees who have different religious beliefs, hail from a different culture or race, come from a different social background, harbour diverse preferences, have diverse educational qualifications and harbour altogether different outlooks. In other words, you will find people who are poles apart and absolutely unalike. Managing a workforce like that is a skill and an inescapable quality of a leader.
Research and experience has shown that workplace diversity promotes better analysis and offers better solutions to intricate matters. To that extent, workplace diversity is by itself a great facilitator of better management in any successful establishment. If that be so, what should be the aim of workplace diversity? It ought to be to foster better allegiance amongst various social and ethnic groups and also promote ironing out of various social and ethnic differences on a common plane so as to bring them on a common platform. This will make any group an a homogenous and all-embracing one with a more potent discerning potential. In a larger context, this would imply presence of individuals irrespective of their upbringings, personal history and social class.
It should be remembered that it is the leaders and leadership in an organisation that goes in to make or mar it. If the leadership provided is healthy and unblemished, you will find that positive interfaces and collaborations across varied cultural assemblages coming into existence. The group per se, will be better equipped to make sound judgements and resolve crisis situations proficiently. Workplace diversity will, in the process, generate high quality creativity and innovation, leading to a tremendous boost in overall productivity.
The issue of workplace diversity thus brings to the fore the issue integrating people from different backgrounds. This can be rather intricate, because it has been seen that different groups and their dogmata tend to serve the authoritarian hierarchy of organisations. Considering the foregoing, the administrative machinery at all levels should exercise appropriate supervision and counselling of all employees. This leaves an organisation with no option but to formulate policies and procedures that acknowledges the views and sentiments of sidelined employees; and in the process promotes team spirit and camaraderie. Therefore, the significance of systematising and respecting workplace diversity needs no emphasis.
It also needs to be accepted that you will never be able to do away with differences totally. The best option is to accept them for what they are and delight in them. All efforts to buoy up and showcase workplace diversity will certainly offer rich benefits. Put differently, it implies that workplace diversity promotes employee value.
The issue of workplace diversity can be addressed well if the difference between impartial action and unvarying action. A common template for dealing every individual may not succeed and can lead to resentment, amongst other problems. It will be apt if every single employee is treated objectively by paying due regards to the differences that go in to make whosoever he or she actually is. Any insensitivity towards an individual or his beliefs, howsoever trivial it may be, is bound to give birth to some sort of an umbrage and generate sentiments of being isolated.
If any diversity linked issue comes to your knowledge, there is no harm in talking it straightforwardly with the employees. But that would need to be done in a non-argumentative, non-aggressive and non-provocative manner. Motivating employees to work with others hailing from different backgrounds or denominations and encouraging them to understand divergent viewpoints will go a long way in promoting an atmosphere of amity.
Management of workplace diversity is the responsibility of each and every individual. It ought to start from you. Special attention needs to be paid to ensure an unblemished conduct and disposition by everybody. In this context, your self-awareness is important. It is your self-awareness that will eventually bring about a working environment that will be safe and unprejudiced. And if there happens to be any individual who is not playing up for whatever reasons, there should be no reluctance in pulling him up. However, the bottom line of functioning should be to display no disregard to ideas and no discrimination in the allocation of tasks that may otherwise be seen as stemming up based on prevalent diversities. It should be remembered that the strength of any organisation lies in its differences and not in its similarities. And therefore, workplace diversity should be viewed as an asset rather than a liability.
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