Managing Equality And Diversity Business Essay
Brazzel defines Diversity in terms of human differences that play an important role in the culture and Operation of organizations. The culture of an organization includes the customs, assumptions, beliefs, values, rules, norms, practices, arts and skills
Diversity in the workplace is a universal truth and not only it has to be managed carefully but acknowledged & understand properly. The differences between the employees have to be enjoyed rather than exploited. Diversity in the workplace is actually a differences of individual in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, background, physical ability, religion, incomes, educational background work experience etc, and it has to be taken a s a tools of creating a culture and environment of inclusiveness where all the employees feel valued and important part of the organization. It is of paramount importance that Diversity has to be understood and acknowledge so that the organization reaps many benefits. The importance of understanding & embracing diversity includes.
According to Taylor Cox “The potential advantages of diversity are maximized while its potential disadvantages are minimized.”
Diversity facilitates flexibility and creativity which is vital key to meet customer needs.
Heterogeneity has always reflected better solution and a higher critical evaluation when the most an organization needs it in times of undergoing massive changes within the organization for better performances.
Managing diversity properly will give you edge over others as the employer of choice when the industry is going through shrinking labor pool.
Organization that recognizes diversity increases productivity and gains financially. The business as well gains advantage when a cordial relationship helps to learn from each other personal experiences, thus generating floods of ideas in the production places.
The company images are build as it gains reputation for being fair to minorities and everyone.
In a well balanced diverse environment the employees support their organization business plan, as they get a fair chance to use their skills and expertise.
Employees comes from diverse culture expectation and values but this differences must be acknowledge understood and integrated in order to gain maximum advantage and a successful work environment to achieve organization target.
http://www.ehow.com/info_8217942_importance-workplace-diversity-organization.html
http://www.workforcediversitynetwork.com/news_0806_impt.aspx
THE NEED TO RESPECT DIVERSITY
A culture that respect, promotes & embraces diversity, equality and inclusion gains the maximum advantages and remains into existence at professional and personal levels. There are various benefits of respecting and understand diversity are enumerate as below.
Social Benefits
It reduces social and economic barriers.
It generates a sense of strong universal equality and supports social cohesion and raises awareness against discrimination and inequality.
It encourages the minorities to gain social standard, equality and respect among the community.
It generates self awareness and a sense of sharing and helping tendency, which facilitates reducing conflicts and give birth to racial & communal harmony among employees through their experience in education.
It enables to learn such a huge and diversified culture, through the multicultural and cosmopolitan environment, and helps reducing racism and discrimination on the basis of gender, age, education. Ethnicity and so on.
Personal Benefits
Increases confidence and self esteem through understanding and respecting individual differences. And hence broadens the mind and the outlook towards the life.
It encourages the personal creativity and expertise by understanding the various skills and thus a personal development is developed by learning to respect every individual irrespective of caste, creed, culture, color or ethnicity etc.
It expands and broadens the perspective of how we look at other people and therefore we no longer remains ignorant.
http://www.huddnewcoll.ac.uk/uploads/equality/EandD.pdf
http://wch.uhs.wisc.edu/docs/PDF-Pubs/DiverseCultures-14.pdf
THE PROCESS OF INFORMING EMPLOYEE ABOUT THEIR RIGHTS.
It is one of the vital activities of the organization about providing individuals with the required information to the employees about exercising their rights. George Bernard Shaw once said “Making sure communication does take place is particularly challenging for diversity leaders because misconceptions, ambiguities, myths and simple misunderstandings often complicate the process of implementing diversity initiatives”. Therefore if you don’t define and inform your diversity to your employee they will define it for themselves.
Group Meeting – Organize group meetings for employees and persuade them to provide a feedback on the plan. Moreover hold composite dialogues session with employees to ensure that the plan is been communicated to them with ease and without complexities.
Acceptable messenger – The higher authority should always be a part of the communicating program, including the middle manager, group leader because they always makes a greater impact.
Simple – information loaded with complexities will invite problems, therefore keep it simple and in fragmented bits in a step by step process. This makes the information interesting and easy to digest and it will encourage employees to have composite dialogues at every stage of communication, leading to easier understanding and greater involvement.
Encourage Initiatives – It really helps as the invitation to involve the employee’s ideas in light of your company’s definition of diversity. The fundamental ideas in to involve employees to contribute their own experience and ideas in making your message conveyed properly. And it helps in exercising their right to the utmost.
2.1. INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR
“The attitude of the individual may influence organizational behavior, particularly in individuals that hold responsibility for creating the corporate culture, (Robbins & Judge, 2006). However, it is not only the employee’s own organizational citizenship that may suffer; bad attitudes have been shown to affect the organizational citizenship of other employees as well (Tepper, Hoobler, Duffy, & Ensley, 2004).
As we have earlier stated that individual behavior is the key element to an organizational success, vice versa it can create nuisance and will have a very unfavorable effect in the organization if not handled effectively and efficiently. Human behavior is a complicated subject, the challenge of an organized business entity is to handle and balance the accurate expertise with the right task. And moreover assemble the correct team so that they can complement each others skills thereby creating and effective workforce.
http://www.practical-management.com/Organization-Development/Individual-Behavior-in-Organization.html
The attitude of an employee is actually an opinion of an individual towards a particular given subject, and the difference of every individual’s feelings has a greater impact to the organization. The importance of individual behavior, accessibility, the presence of social pressures, and the individual direct experience must be handled carefully so as to derive the best of the results. In order to develop the integration between the employee behavior and the organizational goals all the employees need to utilize their diversity for the welfare of the organization. The individual should be influenced in order to have a positive impact by creating the personal interest and desired attitude leading to the growth of the professional attitude along with the company’s growth. Individual behavior also depends on three vital elements :
Job satisfaction – The attitude of the employee highly depends on the job satisfaction.
Job involvement – The employee will only be seriously involved in the job if they are satisfy with the various factor, including the personal behavior towards the jobs they are performing.
Organizational commitment – The behavior of the employee also depends on how an organization take care of their employees and commits it workforce by recognizing it potential and hard work by rewarding them at regular intervals in the forms of appraisals, promotions perks and incentives.
One of the most crucial factor characterizing the employees’ attitude and behavior is the experience they hold relations which leads to corresponding behaviors. A less experienced employee is likely to react in a negative attitude hence affecting the productivity of the organization similarly the individuals who is rich in experience knows how to behave and react confidently in any given circumstances. The social pressure also makes a lot of difference towards the attitude of an individual. But in this situations the organization needs to come ahead and convey the employee that their negative attitude is not misunderstood and the organization is working hard to consider the situation without the negative repercussions.
Communications with the employee at every level makes a lot of differences and it can change how the employee reacts in negative circumstance. If they are communicated well they are more likely to discuss their issue whether personal or professional. Thereby funding a solution to their problems and hence reducing the negative effect and increasing productivity.
http://www.infobarrel.com/Effects_of_Employee_Attitude_and_Behavior_Within_an_Organization#EEOQXB7tAhrr7lmD.99
2.2. ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR
“Organizational behaviour is the study and application at knowledge about the how people – as individuals and a groups – act within organization. It strives to identify ways in which people can act more effectively.” – Keith Davis
Organizational behavior is the study of how people act, think, and feel in organized settings. And how does it affect the employee morale and boost up confidence if it is properly implemented. Organizational behavior towards the employee is very pertinent factors of attaining corporate goals.
Identifying behavioral challenge
The cause of current behavior.
Setting strategy to attain desired behavioral goals.
Implementing the selected strategy.
Understanding the situation accurately.
The power to train & motivate lead the employee.
To understand flexibility and adaptability.
The ability to manage the diversity in an organization is considered as one of the most complex task today which is handle by the manager or the senior management. Business practices usually vary and at times dramatically depending on the nature of the business and location. All these factors contribute to the behavioral management and a test of Manager.
The organization behavior creates a great effect either positive or negative on the employee depending on the employee management strategy of the organization.
http://jethrolmi.com/admin/uploads/attachment-35-J-0031.pdf
The organizational behavior works as a powerful tool to effective employee management and increases productivity and getting the work done effectively.
It strengthens the relation between organization and its employees.
It offer job satisfaction to the employees and helps in developing work related behavior for the organization.
It develops motivating environment for the employee and generating cordial relationship between the management and the employee.
Organizational behavior helps in developing and implementing effective management for human resource.
It generates team building, managing creativity and innovations, direct communication through counseling mentoring, conflict resolution and so on.
http://www.indiastudychannel.com/resources/70114-Organisational-behavior-its-benefits.aspx
3.1. ABSENT OF DIVERSITY IN THE ORGANIZATION
As we know that diversity in the work place creates a lot of rooms for benefits and overall progress of the organization and its employee alike. Similarly its absence creates an overall adverse effect.
Differences in the nationality, ethnicity, culture, religion, education level, income parameter and so on and so forth creates a lot of gaps between the employees, thus absence of proper communication of diversity hampers the employee’s internal understanding.
Absent of diversity will have an adverse effect on the organization because pooling of several expertise and skills strengthens team productivity.
The concept of group and team work has a deeper practical significance when it comes to a production in large quantity. And in the absent of a team work it will pose as the biggest issue for any organization.
If equality and diversity is not followed the employees will feel less valued and discriminate and it will not reap a positive result for the organizational benefit.
Cohesions of workers is the biggest assets to any organization be it a manufacturing or service industry. Because in such a scenario the weaknesses of one employee is complemented by the strength of the other. In the absent of unity among the employee the organization will lack its focus leading to an overall poor performances. And when the organization does not grow the people in it will definitely lack promotion, finances, respect, social recognition etc.
In the absent of diversity employees will lack personal development because they will not be exposed to new ideas, and various culture, surroundings, and they will live with the barriers of xenophobia.
When there is no diversity and multicultural environment within the organization the workforce will be limited to small groups of the same kind, and hence when exposed to a bigger environment they will get cultural shock and lack of confidence in communication and thereby leading to a very negative effect for the employee in the long run.
Social and cultural integration has always proved to be the greatest assets for any individual, but in an organization where diversity and equality is not followed. The employee will find it hard to make a place for them if they get an opportunity elsewhere.
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-disadvantages-diversity-workplace-3041.html
3.2. PROMOTING EQUALITY & DIVERSITY
It is the responsibility of every individual to help others and provide opportunities to promote equality and value diversity for the overall development of the organization and its employee as a whole. There are certain elements of diversity and inclusions that if every employee follows them properly in their organization it will reap very good results for both the employer and employees. The ideas of promoting diversity in the workplace require chain system that has to be followed and an ongoing training and support to build in accountability. To create a genuinely diverse workplace everyone in the organization needs to work hard and behave this way most of the time and it will eventually become the company culture.
Treat everyone with respect and equality irrespective of their diversity in culture, age, race, gender, ability, religion and so on.
The higher management must have un-biased policies in dealing with conflict resolution and human resources.
Establishes consensus among cross- functional line so as to create a sense of unifying environment. It should also create ongoing, respectful and composite dialogues on diversity.
Create a common platform where each individual has all the right to give opinion, without any prejudice or a fear of being attack retribution or denigration.
A zero tolerance policy has to be followed for any behavior that tends to flavor discrimination.
A place where hard work are well paid and rewarded with appraisal, rewards, promotions, perks and incentives.
Create an pleasant environment where everyone communicates with each other with respect and dignity and listen to others point of view.
Offering a platform for ongoing training opportunities which focuses on diversity equality and inclusions
http://guyfarmer.com/blog/2011/05/16/10-tips-promote-workplace-diversity/
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