Google: Managing Workforce Diversity

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Executive Summary

Globalizing organizations encounter enormous challenges in the quest to manage the diversities of their workforce. These diversities entail differences existing among people working in the organization with regard to parameters such as gender, race, community values, age, sexual affection, income levels, work experience, parental status, religious beliefs, ethnicity, religion, and physical abilities amongst others.

Apparently, this largely surfaces as the chief types of diversities that exist in the Google Company that serves as the case company in this paper.

A review of current literature to show the importance of managing workforce diversity for today’s managers reveals that managing diversities of an organizations workforce is a mandate that organizational managers cannot treat with minimal concern as it is of paramount importance, which includes improvement of workforce productivity, improvement of workforce engagement and reducing instances staff absenteeism among others.

In the analysis section, on the management strategies in place in Google company for managing workforce diversity, the papers find workforce diversity management as resting on the need to avail networks, which are ideally open to all interested workforce members.

Introduction

In the present time, globalizing organizations avail immense benefits to the population in the regions where they establish in terms of promotion of HR policies that are innovative in nature. However, such a corporate encounters mega challenges in managing the workforce diversity in every region.

For the purposes of discussions of this paper, the term diversity refer the myriads of differences existing among people working in an organization with regard to parameters such as gender, race, community values, age, sexual affection, income levels, work experience, parental status, religious beliefs, ethnicity, religion and physical abilities among others.

As a repercussion and in the context of this paper, workforce diversity management encompasses “a comprehensive managerial process for developing an environment that works for all employees” (Parvis 2003, p.37). Using Google as a case example of large nongovernmental organizations, the paper dedicates itself to review current literature to show the importance of managing workforce diversity for today’s managers.

It conducts an analysis of the types/kinds of workforce diversity that exist in the Google Company. It later sums up by analyzing the management strategies in place in the organization for managing workforce diversity.

Importance of managing workforce

As organizations diversify, the approaches deployed to address workforce management issues are critical in influencing the performance of an organization in the competitive market place. Dessler (2004) reckons, “the importance of diversity management has been communicated by academics and professionals alike, citing the many benefits of having a heterogeneous organization, as opposed to homogeneous organization” (p.43).

A homogenous organization is a non-diversified organization, while a heterogeneous is a diversified organization: it employs people of varying backgrounds in terms of race, age, physical abilities, and geographical regions, among others.

Cute management of workforce diversity has been acclaimed by many scholars as having the ability to improve workforce productivity, improvement of workforce engagement, foster staff absenteeism coupled with an increase of workforce turn over by about five folds (Dessler 2004, p.45).

For the Google Company, workforce diversity management is critical in the endeavor to increase the ability to address the various needs of more diverse Google customer base.

Particularly, Google gains from the valid viewpoints of its diverse workforce in effect that such a workforce provides increased problem-solving capacities coupled with enhanced creativity levels- something that is critical for the success of the organization in the future unknown dynamic business environment.

In this context, it is arguable that proper management of Google’s workforce makes the organization gain immensely in the sense that the organization ends up establishing a central position in the competitive market.

An increasing number of scholarly studies reveal that a direct correlation exists between employees, attendance, job performance, dedication and perception of being valuable resources of an organization. For instance, according to Pope “if management and team members fail to value women and minorities, company productivity will likely suffer as a consequence” (2004, p.63).

This infers that mismanagement of workforce diversity translates to affecting an organization’s costs. In this context, organizations, which do not support diversity existing in their workplaces, are likely to plunge into expensive lawsuits and out of court settlements case largely contributed by poor management of various talent tools: for instance, stereotypes propagation, discrimination and harassment among others.

Additionally, such organizations are susceptible to costs linked to replacement of employees (Jayne & Dipboye 2004, p.412).

In case an organization is constituted by people of varying ethnicities coupled with higher proportions of women as compared to the general industry on average, an interrogative arise seeking audience on how reconciliation of differences among employees can be achieved without causing undue friction during everyday interactions of the employees.

In this context, managing workforce diversity becomes a crucial endeavor since otherwise the performance of an organization gets negatively impaired and hence its productivity and profitability (Pless & Maak 2004, p.129: Alpert 1998, Para. 5).

Development of plausible knowledge by today’s management professionals is indeed crucial since many of the issues encountered in the work environment prompting intolerance for the differences characterizing differing workers can only be solved by use of cute approaches of workforce diversity management.

Most pressing stalemate issues pertaining to workforce diversity are more inclined on perspective of treatment of women (Ollapally & Bhatnagar 2009, p.461). In this context, the concepts of workforce diversity management are vital for adoption by today’s organizational managers since race and gender constitute the major issues and the key drivers of approaches for managing diversity.

Where minority groups largely perceive themselves as being more oppressed or discriminated, it is apparent that they would consider taking steps that are unhealthy to the performance of an organization.

This is perhaps widely probable based on the possession of intense awareness of the minority rights among such persons coupled with the existence of stricter organizations codes of conducts and regulations predominantly formulated to govern behaviors within workplaces.

This argument makes more sense especially by consideration of Pope (2004) argument that “it is in the interest of the management of any firm to sensitize their workforce towards race and gender issues and ensure that the workplace is free of discrimination against minority groups, as well as women” (p.64).

From this dimension, managing workforce diversity has a chief contribution in aiding people working within Google Company to connect with one another in an attempt to further Google company goals, create changes within the corporate community, which are positive without negating promotion and strengthening the Google Company’s business partnerships.

From a different dimension, Kersten (2000) argues, “the impetus for diversity programs begins with desirable social and political goals while strategic commitment needed to make it part of the company’s business strategy come only from the highest level of an organization” (p.236).

Drawing from this argument, it is conspicuous that management has a proactive role to play in ensuring that workforce diversity is managed to avoid conflicts of interest among the minority and majority groups of workers.

An analysis of the types or kinds of workforce diversity that exist in Google Company

The clients of Google Company are diverse in many aspects, including gender, race or ethnicity, age, region and physical abilities, among other differences. To address the needs of these diverse clients, Google Company indeed employs a diverse workforce regionally, ethnically, based on gender and even on an age basis.

In fact, according to Saxena et al. (2012), Google Company “…represents 138, 000 queries every minute of every day in 90 different languages” (p.4). With this kind of immense capacity to handle internet traffic of queries every minute, it is plausible to argue out that Google is indeed the best world’s search engine.

For Google, then it implies that she has to employ an immense number of people coming from a variety of ethnic lines across the globe. The capacity to orient her diverse workforce to a common goal saw Google’s revenue escalate to 961.9 million dollars in 2003, a figure that has grown into multi-folds since then (Saxena et al. 2012).

This means that Google has acquired an immense competitive advantage in the operational environment in which it has managed to outdo companies like America on line (AOL), Amazon and eBay, which have been tightly competing with Google Company for revenue.

For Google Company, concepts of diversity do not lie on the traditional perception of what ideally constitutes the differences among the workers within organizations such differing religious and moral believes among others. Professional differences also accounts for the sphere of diversities at Google Company.

However, this is not an immense challenge since the Google Company products take into accounts all the professional qualifications of her entire workforce. Precisely speaking Google Company (2012) endeavors “to spread the love of Science, technology, engineering and Math (STEM)” (Para.5). Technology and Science makes use of diverse professional abilities and technical know-how.

Therefore, just as Google Company’s employees are diverse in respect to differences such as gender, ethnic origins and age, professional diversity is equally relevance for inclusion in the realm of workforce diversity management approaches at Google. Company Google (2012) reckons, “Google is the home for countless communities of unique people.

We offer hundreds of internal groups and clubs ranging from runners at Google theatre lovers and game developers” (Para. 2). This evidences that Google perceives differing professional abilities of her employees as part of her workforce diversity at her disposal, which, while well tapped and managed, may lead to increased productivity and consequently to escalation of profitability of the organization.

As argued before, diversity within any organization, including Google Company, is critical in terms of influencing an organization’s costs. The better its management, the better the organization becomes protected from unnecessary costs. This is a positive aspect of the deployment of credible workforce diversity management.

However, on a different dimension, embracing total consideration of every aspects of workforce diversity results to unnecessary costs and hence negative impact of workforce diversity management.

As a way of example, it is quite crucial in some organizations for workers not to take partisan positions, especially on matters involving making personal opinion or judgments of issues of national public interests that attracts heated debates as doing so may invoke violence among the target audience.

Amid this prerequisite, in such a situation, integration of utmost concepts of workforce diversity means that the managers also consider diversities in such opinions.

Giving room for people, for instance, working in media organization, considering the massive influence they have on the masses, to express their diversities opinions, may give loopholes for thriving of stereotyped society largely fueled by the promotion of unlimited workforce diversity within media houses.

An analysis of the management strategies in place in the organization for managing workforce diversity

Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google Company, is one of the companies classified as being most successful on start-up right from it growth from a research being a project to a search engine that has revolution the world. Google is guided by the organizational slogan: ‘never judge a search engine by its interface.

What this slogan means is that amid the simplicity of its interface, intrinsically within it, there rests the most sophisticated technological infrastructures of the world. Diverse people across the globe run and develop these infrastructures. The value of this diversity is indeed highly appreciated by the company’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, who posits, “at Google, we do not just accept differences-we thrive on it. We celebrate it.

And we support it, for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community” (Saxena et al. 2012, p.13). The diversity referred in here is the workforce differences in terms of gender, religious beliefs subscriptions, cultural beliefs and ethic differences among the Google workers coupled with other differences that define particular segregated groups of Google workers from the wider total workforce.

Google deploys numerous strategies to cope with the workforce diversities. Google (2012) informs, “Google offers hundreds of internal groups and clubs raging from runners at Google theatre lovers and game developers” (Para. 2). Many of these Groups and clubs are principally developed to facilitate and support ardently the Google’s diversity initiatives both within Google Company and within her communities.

In this end, the key management strategies at Google to enhance workforce management rest on the establishments of workers diversity management approaches inspired by network organizations.

Moore (1999) reckon that people who “are different from each other in terms of their gender, physical ability, socioeconomic background and so on, are more likely to have at least some stereotypes about each other, and it is these stereotypical attitudes and view that many diversity training programs aim to address” (p. 208).

Consistent with this light, at Google the main strategy for managing workforce diversity rest on the need to avail networks that are ideally open to all interested workforce members.

Through the networks, employees take part in activities such as professional development, mentoring, community service and even education outreach, among other activities that the company deems essential in fostering tolerance of differences existing among her workforce.

This strategy is widely conforming to Anand (2004) insight that “effectively integrating diversity requires education, training and communication” (p.307). Communication across the networks is enhanced by the fact that while such networks are available across the world, the members normally comes together during annual general summit on leadership.

Arguably holding such a summit goes far in breaching the regional differences among Google Company workers as the members are given subtle platforms to express their concerns ardently.

Communication across all the global networks in Google Company is, in fact, essential since, as Parvis (2003) argues, “communication plays an important role in the diverse workforce environment” (p.37). Without communication is impossible for articulation of the various differences existing among organizational workers with the business missions and goals.

The various network groups that Google deploys to spread the concerns of the need to promote workforce diversities are formed on the basis of diversifies such as gender, race and or professionalism diversities, among others.

With reference to Google (2012), such networks include- Asian Google Network (AGN), which was formed in 2007 essentially to “support employee retention and career advancement, educate Google employees concerning Asian American culture and perform community outreach” (Para. 3).

Others include GWE (Google Women Engineers), BGN (Black Googler Network) HGN (Hispanic Googler Network), AAGN (Asian American Google Network), Google Capability Council and GAIN (Google American Indian Network). The focus of these networks in promoting workforce diversities is perhaps brought out more conspicuously by consideration of the concerns of each of the networks.

For instance, according to Google (2012), BGN (Black Googler Network is indebted to “attract, recruit, retain and develop Black talent at Google” (Para. 10). Since when it was established, BGN has actively supported diversity at Google and within the communities in which Google conducts her business.

Conclusion

The paper has argued that the workforce within an organization is diverse in many respects. The term diversity has been used to refer to myriads of differences existing among people working in an organization with regard to parameters such as gender, race, community values, age, sexual affection, income levels, work experience, parental status, religious beliefs, ethnicity, religion and physical abilities among others.

In the example case of a large organization that is privately owned, the paper has used Google Company in the analysis section of the kinds or types of workforce diversities in it: gender and ethnicity.

Google Company management strategies to deal with workforce diversities consequently have been confirmed as being established to address and promote the tolerance of the differences in the Google workforce inspired by these two types of diversities.

Recommendations

The paper recommends that organizations deserve to understand the benefits of adopting multicultural environment that is tolerant to workforce diversities. By doing this, organizations would gain immensely in form increase in the productivity of the diverse workforce and hence boosting the profitability of the organization in question.

In this end, the paper proposes that ‘buy-in’ of the entire organization is one of the plausible ways of ensuring the existence of a multicultural organization. This calls for all management staff, right from top to down, to understand the relevance of workforce diversity from moral perspectives and business perspectives.

The paper goes on to recommend that in order to achieve this, the organizations essentially deserve to alter their values to orient them to commitment for promotion of workforce diversity within the work environment, as evidenced by the case for Google Company.

References

Alpert, T. 1998, Gaining Competitive Advantage: The Case for Diversity. Web.

Anand, R. 2004, ‘Make diversity part of the business plan’, Restaurants & Institutions, vol. 114 no. 22, pp. 307-311.

Dessler, G. 2004, Management principles and practices for tomorrow’s leaders, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River.

Google 2012, Diversity in Our Workforce. Web.

Jayne, A. & Dipboye, L. 2004, ‘Leveraging Diversity to Improve Business Performance: Research Findings & Recommendations For Organizations’, Human Resource Management, vol. 43 no. 4, pp. 409-424.

Kersten, A. 2000, ‘Diversity management dialogue, dialectics and diversion’, Journal of organizational change management, vol. 13 no. 3, pp. 235-48.

Moore, S. 1999, ‘Understanding and managing diversity among groups at work: key issues for organizational training and development’, Journal of European Industrial Training, vol. 2 no. 3, pp. 208-217.

Ollapally, A. & Bhatnagar, J. 2009, ‘The Holistic Approach to Diversity Management: HR Implications’, The Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 44 no. 3, pp. 454-472.

Parvis, L. 2003, ‘Diversity and effective leadership in multicultural workplaces’, Journal of Environmental Health, vol. 65 no. 4, pp. 37-38.

Pless, M. & Maak, T. 2004, ‘Building an Inclusive Diversity Culture: Principles, Process, and Practice’, Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 54 no. 2, pp.129-147.

Pope, A. 2004, ‘Diversity is the key in strategic planning’, American Water Works Association Journal, vol. 96 no. 7, pp. 63-64.

Saxena, et al 2012, Case Study on Google. Web.

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