Effective Diversity Management: The 7 Steps

Introduction

What is diversity management? Workplace diversity and diversity management creates an environment wherein all the individuals’ share and respect each other’s talent diversity, background, cultural experiences, and more. A person’s viewpoint depends on a number of factors like race, age, gender, language, disability, religion, intersex status, identification of origin, education, sexual preferences and life phases, etc. Diversity management or managing diversity in the workplace is thus the designed and structured work-plan to compensate, hire, encourage, and maintain a workforce that caters to inclusivity and blends in all individuals’ cultural traits to obtain diversity for the betterment of all. 

The HR Department is at the foremost of diversity policy implementation. Right from the time of finding the right talent to nurturing various employees’ talent, the human resource department is vital to helping implement such policies so that the employee’s abilities are the sole criteria for remuneration and appointment. Also, promoting the concepts of diversity helps the company goals succeed and improves revenue generation through quicker and more diverse solutions to all issues in the workplace. Thus diversity management should be implemented in close communication and alignment with company goals and top-management professionals.

The key benefits of diversity management are 

• It leads to better employee-employer relationships.
• Creates positive connections with a wide segment of consumers.
• Aids company-functioning.
• Diversity management models promote dual-sided economic benefits and balanced corporate growth.

List of steps to effective diversity management

1. Effective Communication
2. Employee Equality
3. Diverse Teams Encouragement
4. Maintain Transparent Policies
5. Sensitivity Training
6. Leadership
7. Hiring

1. Effective Communication

This is a critical factor in diversity management and keeps all diverse workforce members engaged and coordinated. HENCE, the HR management emphasizes the need for feedback, effective communications, disseminating information on security, best practices, overcoming linguistic and cultural disabilities, etc. Often signs are placed for cultural diversity in management and inclusivity creation, so all employees understand diversity management and the creation of an inclusive environment.

2. Employee Equality

Each and every member needs to be treated with respect and equality to make diversity management succeed. A diverse environment has no place for personal considerations, biases, cultural assumptions, prejudices, work stereotypes and more. Thus, every individual needs to treat the other as a unique and contributing individual with company policies reinforcing the laws and creating various types of diversity management.

3. Diverse Teams Encouragement

 Making people work in diverse teams helps them understand each other better, with mutual respect and teamwork being strengthened in scenarios beneficial to diversity management. Thus, a diverse team’s shared abilities bring diverse skills, personalities, and abilities to the drawing board when looking for innovative solutions and product development.

4. Maintain Transparent Policies

Staff policies should include transparency in diversity management, equality documentation, payment, hiring, promotions etc. It is also important that the employee manual should include the following to encourage diversity.

• Non-discriminatory communication policy and the communication strategy.
• The diversity agenda of the company.
• Guidelines on what is allowed and what is not in the non-discrimination policy.
• Behavioural grounds can lead to cessation and termination of services.
• Incentives and wages policy.

5. Sensitivity Training

When workplace diversity is new to employees, the older employees will need this kind of importance of diversity management training to develop a homogeneous culture, equality and respectful culture at the workplace. Companies need to focus on how to react when people are offensive, respect different opinions and be open-ended to adapt and accept other people’s beliefs that are bound to be different from their own. Sensitivity training is also an important part of diversity management and is critical to put all employees on the same page as far as diversity policies are concerned.

6. Leadership

This is a critical factor to allow workplace diversity to succeed. The company’s leadership needs to assume responsibility for diversity management strategies, formulating diversity goals, measures, policies etc. and implementing them. When such leadership is absent, workplace diversity and its management cannot thrive.

 7. Hiring

Glassdoor reports that approximately two-thirds of job seekers feel workplace diversity is an important factor before accepting employment offers. Further, 57 per cent of the employees also felt that employers need to do more to be diverse in their approaches to diversity management. Note that a variable and diverse workforce enables the company’s growth. Thus if the talent is to be attracted, a diverse workplace is a must, and employees should be judged solely on their performance and the skills they bring to the table.

Conclusion

Most companies use the concept of management of diversity among employees, which is a tricky process to manage with the several challenges of diversity management. We’ve seen the benefits and value of organizational diversity, which reflects the features of diversity management in the style of management. It is crucial that HR Management focuses on inclusivity and cultural diversity at the workplace through strategies and policies to make the concept succeed rather than treat it as a shallow trend.

Are you interested in learning more about Analytics in Workforce Management? Take a look at our People Analytics and Digital HR program, in collaboration with IIM Indore. This is a 3-month long program with instructor-led sessions by IIM-I faculty.

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