The Definition of Diversity in the Workforce

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Introduction

Today, the prevailing concern for human resource personnel is to have a varied workforce given the fact that diversity has a new dimension altogether. Each organization has its own way of defining diversity at the workplace; it has more than one established view of focusing on race or sex.

The varying marketplace and workers’ demographics are the main concerns in diversity staffing plans in nearly all the corporations. Thus, diversified staffing is seen like a deliberate reserve for competitive edge by the HRM.

Besides, diversity emerged as the issue concerning cultural minority groups, tribal marginal set, elder people, and populace with disabilities. It has further included females, those who exercise English as their subsequent tongue, individuals of non-customary sexual orientation as well as additional non-established grouping.

Alternatively, some practitioners claim that another element of diversity entails conditions that control one’s existence and value systems, such as education backdrop, belief, spare time behavior, earnings, parental and conjugal status, work skills, and people’s ecological locations. The staff members have recognized the increased benefit of diversified workers to their baseline.

Importance of Diversity Recruitment

In a corporation, for success to be realized, a diverse labor force is required at workplace to increase production, enhance problem solving abilities and maximize innovation purposes. There is need, therefore, to appoint personnel from any race given that the retail influence is bestowed in the hands of individuals and groups from diversified settings.

With respect to this, it has progressively become more imperative for corporations to replicate the frameworks of their consumers’ base via utilizing diverse personnel. Furthermore, to put up experienced staff that would limit demographic transformation upsetting the workforces and existing capacities, diversified employees must be recruited in the impending periods.

At present, within the international markets, customers have become more cautious and acknowledged the need for a diverse approach in providing services and goods. It is essential to accept diversity in a corporation to assemble superior personnel. This will enable change within the labor force and make the company remain competitive in the marketplace.

Strategies used by HR professionals to build and maintain diverse workforce

Both the public sector and the private corporations need effective and efficient recruitment programs to gain valuable competitive advantage. It is quite challenging to these sectors to compete for talented and skilled workforces. The trend is likely to continue challenging as labor force is changed by the demographic trends.

Due to the above reasons, the public sector human resource professionals have devised various strategies and assumed different steps to ensure that the typical diversity recruitment programs are turned into successful and effective ones. Strategies that human resource professional currently use to diversify the public sector workforce are discussed below.

Using referrals

To the human resource professionals found in the public sector, referrals have proved to be an influential diversity recruitment tool. In fact, the diversity referral program works very well if both the former and the current workforces can effectively promote the public sector corporations.

The workforce referral programs are normally used to measure the perception of employees. Thus, the ex- and the recent staffs are authorized with any reports required from them to confirm why individuals might desire to be employed in the corporation and the motives behind the decisions of those working there.

Despite being helpful, employees’ referral programs need significant reforms in order to improve their effectiveness. The four ways to make these changes include:

finding out what is being said by both the former and the current workers;
determining if the workforce demographic sets have any negative perception;
steadily pushing out accounts to workforces to offer compelling and unique grounds why diverse entities may aspire working in the public sector;
developing strategic methods for actively managing employees’ perceptions and communicating with them.

Offering rewards, recognition and incentives

Very few corporations tend to offer rewards to their managers in order to identify or hire diverse employees. In fact, workforce may be offered small rewards to assist with the identification of diversified candidates’ names. To some extent, human resource managers are rewarded purposely to recruit diversified workforces.

For instance, approximately five to ten percent of the total number of recruiting human resource executives’ salaries must be anchored on retention results and diversity recruiting. The diversity employment triumph in corporations can similarly be tied to the reimbursement given to the higher-ranking executives, the HRM, and the staffing administrators.

Besides, the public sector corporations make themselves more attractive to their diversified workers through increasing workforce satisfaction. Workplace and benefit programs including phased retirement, flexible work arrangements, and reward initiatives have become attractive to older employees.

According to the public corporations’ human resource professionals, these strategies seem to have been working quite well as they have ensured that the workforce was greatly diversified.

Establishing college and university relationships

The public sector corporations have realized the benefits of establishing close affiliations with universities and colleges in order to recruit diversified workforce. Most corporations develop intimate attachments with sections of apprentices who originate from institutions that have marginal experts.

To reach their aims, these corporations proffer scholarship or funding for the marginalized apprentices, such as the Organization for Nationalized Black Masters in Business Administration Students sections.

Sometimes, the companies are obliged to bring in students from minority colleges as interns. This method of creating workforce diversity has been a successful strategy since such students are eventually hired to take part in the management trainees programs.

Developing relationship with superficially varied societies, unions and specialists

With the exception of developing associations with professionals in the higher learning institutions, organizations should build relationships with other institutions dealing with minority groups.

Moreover, developing relationship with charitable organizations enables the company to attain its long-term goals geared towards diversity programs. Strategic programs aimed at recruiting diversified workforce from post high school teaching curriculums, community colleges and part time schools might aid in recruiting additional minority groups.

Recruitment campaign techniques used by HR professionals to reach the target audiences

Establishing clear goals

To successfully reach a target audience and recruit diversified workforce, the campaign strategies used by companies should have clear-cut goals. Corporations have competitive advantage and extra edge when they devise plans that could be used to build and maintain diverse workforce.

In order to attain its intended goals, the organization diversity programs should be based on the core values, aims and objectives of the organization. Once drafted and adopted by the management, the diversity recruitment program should then be communicated to all departments of the organization, and its employees should be conversant with the purpose of the program.

Every workforce level should have knowledge of the diversity recruitment program, its functions, and importance (Jackson, 1992). To accomplish this, corporations need to use training. If corporation reaches the internal goals, the external objectives can easily be achieved. Workers have the capacity to easily identify the major diversity candidates for the organization.

Developing the case for diversity

Purposeful and appropriate propositions must be made in order to influence the managers to adopt the diversity-recruitment program and achieve the intended rationale. More often, management will accept the diversity program based on economic or business propositions.

This will in turn help managers employ diversified workforce. Organizational diversity workforce programs should have the support of top management to avoid and shun the politic and the legal issues.

The corporate directors should be made conversant with the benefits of the diversity recruitment, material value of diversity recruitment to the organization as well as the cost of the exercise to the organization. The organizational leadership must be fully committed to strengthen the program, produce positive results and create an inclusive culture (Paludi, 2012).

Using market researches

In the public sector, the HR professionals need to draw on the latest research conducted on markets to improve and diagnose the prevailing campaigns on diversity recruitment. In fact, diversity staffing can take advantage of marketplace study in two critical manners. These include to classify the decisive factor for choosing occupation resolutions and to categorize the demographics for work applicants.

Building the message for diversity into the corporation service brand

A target audience can be reached through this approach. The minority groups should be shown that the corporation offers a good workplace. This could be done through using the organization recruitment website for posting the individual employee’s profile, the core values of the corporation, offering distinctive workplace benefits, sponsoring women or minority based events or even via the use of referral programs (Kossek & Lobel, 1997).

Steps enacted by human resource personnel both to recruit diverse employees and to keep hold of them in the organization

The personnel should not only successfully recruit, but also strive to maintain staff in their working positions within an organization. These criteria can be met when several adherence programs are put in place, such as creating the department of choice for people and reviewing the interdepartmental communication channels to reflect on the acknowledgment of employees.

Furthermore, promoting cultural esteem and understanding the need to guarantee the employees’ freedom to choose will be boosted once they commence their work at the department. This will in fact promote development opportunities for employees, aiming at channeling their capabilities into the right direction as well as enabling them to understand their self-identities.

According to Jackson (1992), personnel should institute a contact official position to endorse service programs and strategies to provide a single contact point within the department.

It is also clear that gender balance should be taken into consideration as well as employing the disabled individuals since this will ensure that outsourced staffing provider’s methods are available.

The human resource managers should also develop disability action preparation strategies to enlarge new approach and develop opportunities for persons with disabilities. The establishment of monitoring programs should be put in place to enable employee-counseling networks.

Disability consciousness trainings for managers and other individuals in recruitment chain should be provided as a precedence to produce a disability contact point. Resource personnel should ensure that the disabled use training and development options through accommodating them and offering rational workplace adjustments (Paludi, 2012).

This will help the managers inspect and use further options to provide realistic workplace adjustments and assistive expertise for the employees. Psychological health and welfare alertness program built through domestic policy and learning opportunities should be promoted to ensure employees are retained in an organization.

The provision of flexibility to assist employees to balance between job and life responsibilities is necessary as management tends to attract, hold, and engage workers.

This can be achieved if the department makes choices for both sexes in order to help employees to maintain their life, work balance and responsibilities while developing vocations. A keep-in-touch plan for employees on parental leave should be implemented so that employees’ commitments and everyday jobs would be known and supported.

The HR professionals should ensure that the office is a protected place where people can divulge their sexual direction or gender individuality without being repressed. This will ensure that employees are conscious of the available options to help them balance between personal and work responsibilities (Kossek & Lobel, 1997).

This will enable them to retain their work since it makes it easy for the managers to create loyal monitoring programs to develop guidance capabilities as well as access to networking and growth opportunities. Moreover, HRM should undertake a study to spot exceptional barriers and challenges faced at workplace and in the manual labor to make sure that they employ and keep diversified workforce.

Employees from linguistically and ethnically varied regions should also be retained at public workplaces since they augment the corporation’s productivity. To achieve this, the managers should set up an employee review program and maintain the departmental class employer of the people’s choice originating from racially and linguistically assorted backgrounds.

In fact, civilizing leadership aptitude promoting development opportunities and recognizing the worth of leveraging the assortment of personnel should be looked into (Albrecht, 2001). This will capitalize on the potential of employees, who value consumers, and ensure that the personnel practitioners communicate to the employees to recognize the rising desires.

Recognition and support for the wants of an inter-generational workforce also encourage the recruitment and retention of diversity employees in an organization. However, managers must promote extensive cultures that hold the capacity of an employee despite age.

This implies that personnel managers should make the department and employer of choice for mature-age recruits. Programs should be introduced to assist proficient maturity as well as distribution of information and uphold commercial data. Third, plans that promote retraining of seniors preventing age discrimination on organization management should be made available by the corporation management.

They should also try to discover the employees’ prerequisites through surveying taking into their age groups to make sure the department prefers to recruit younger employees (Kossek & Lobel, 1997).

Therefore, managers and all the employees should integrate and consider workplace diversity ideology in work practices each time to ensure they are entrenched in the departmental traditions. This ensures a workplace is free from aggravation and prejudice, but recognizes and integrates the corresponding differentiation between the staffs.

All industries and departmental workers should be responsible for the accomplishment and execution of this approach. Several campaigns should then be put in place including personnel and strategy section programs for coordinating the execution and progress of initiatives.

These should give yearly reports on employees’ performance. Another strategy is the service division and people strategy that is vital to sustain the discharge of the negotiated initiatives.

People and value committee uses a requisite strategy to maneuver leadership and education schedule in order to disseminate it across departmental sections (Albrecht, 2001). The support and help in the delivery of monitoring edification incentives call for a well-established learning and development branch.

Paludi (2012) claims that indigenous member of staff set-up continues to offer recommendations to every sector in regard to the achievement and unremitting improvements. These ensure that diversity employees are retained.

To guarantee that this strategy pushes on well, state directors and universal managers have been put in place to support the workforce to take part in a series of events and assist in the admittance to development opportunities for those who require them. Similarly, the minority campaigners have also been established to reduce the chances of recruiting senior management majorly consisting of the majority members.

Lastly, both the state corporate executives and the human resource managers implement recruitment policies within their various offices. Hence, the departments have been recognized with the initiatives so that the employees should seek for access to opportunities and services presented (Paludi, 2012).

All these will promote diversity recruitment and retention of employees in their services. In general, a workplace diversity strategy tends to assimilate and execute all the procedures to bring success to the corporation diversity staffing plan and retention of member of staffs in their service stations.

Barriers to success

Deficiency in understanding the need of having diverse employees within an organization is an important obstacle to the accomplishment of diversity recruitment.

Often, organizations see diversity as a reverse discrimination or an affirmative action in their labor force instead of viewing it as a way through which their sales and profits could be increased. In addition, diversity has been perceived as something that cannot work since it has never been applied (Albrecht, 2001). This myth is another barrier to success.

The campaign for diversified employee recruitment can also be undermined by the low educational achievement of the minority groups. Even if the highest levels are normally found in the minority groups, still their numbers are much less as compared to those of other demographic groups. However, recruiters normally experience difficulties in finding the right employees or defining their number to fill the vacant positions.

Geography plays an important role in the diverse recruitment process. It becomes a barrier when the needed demographics have migrated to other cities. For instance, most of the cultural groupings reside in the outskirts or some special places in the cities, such as Asians occupy most of the coastal cities. Employing Asians in other places other than the residential places would be difficult

Deficiency in well-formulated strategies and goals can also be a great barrier to the organization diversity success. Defining diversity is the first big step towards attaining the diverse workforce. Organizations should be clear stating their purposes and objectives for recruiting diverse employees. Clear goals and objectives will enable the firm to evaluate the effectiveness and success of the process.

Conclusion

There is no clear definition of diversity in the workforce. The reason is that organizations have different objectives and goals for diversifying their employees. As such, their definition of the workforce also varies.

Once the organization has made a decision on why it needs diversity, a program should then be created and the objectives of the program are to communicated to the whole organization.

It is important for the organization to understand that diversity is not just a legal requirement as it has a direct impact on the corporation profits. Organizations can apply metrics to track the progress and evaluate the success of their diversity staffing program.

References

Albrecht, M. H. (2001). International HRM: Managing diversity in the workplace. Boston, Oxford: Blackwell Business.

Jackson, S. (1992). Diversity in the workplace: Human resources initiatives. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Kossek, E. E. & Lobel, S. A. (1997). Managing diversity: Human resource strategies for transforming the workplace. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

Paludi, M. A. (2012). Managing diversity in today’s workplace: Strategies for employees and employers. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO.

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