Employers must face up to the challenges of managing diversity

Citation

(2005), "Employers must face up to the challenges of managing diversity", Women in Management Review, Vol. 20 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/wimr.2005.05320gab.002

Employers must face up to the challenges of managing diversity

Ignoring diversity can reduce productivity and performance, but badly managed efforts to introduce diversity run the risk of creating conflict and doing just as much to undermine business performance. Managers need to work to ensure diversity drives inclusiveness and cooperation, and is about more than just box ticking and employment quotas, instead diversity focuses on changing working cultures and embracing difference, according to a new report from the UK's Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

Dianah Worman, CIPD Diversity Adviser, says, “A diverse workforce bringing different people together, with different views, ideas experiences and perspectives can bring real benefits for business performance. But managed badly, efforts to improve diversity can have the opposite effect – creating conflict and tension in the workplace.”

According to the report, Managing diversity: linking theory and practice to business performance, the benefits of a diverse workforce include:

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  Customer focus – matching internal employee diversity to population diversity can provide performance benefits which enhance awareness of consumer needs.

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  Business process – recruiting diverse talent will help inject new ideas and challenge the organisational mindsets and ways of doing things that can hinder change and organisational progress.

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  Innovation – the flexibility, creativity and ability to innovate are enhanced by the existence of dissimilar mindsets (constructive conflict supports “out of the box” thinking).

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  Learning – employers have more choice from a greater skills base, improved employee satisfaction, reduced internal disputes, greater workplace harmony, improved retention and more effective and fairer promotion of talent. Knowledge is retained in the business and shared more effectively.

Managing diversity is about achieving a balance between different forces and challenges therefore employers should also consider the areas that prevent diversity generating benefits to the organisation. These include the following:

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  ensure diversity is not blocked by rigid systems or regulations;

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  do not adopt the just in time approach – this will allow little opportunity to change team structures without opposing existing structures; and

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  ensure diversity talent is not cloned into the existing culture.

Debate continues over whether or not there is a business case for diversity despite the huge amounts of anecdotal evidence indicating the benefits. Measurement will enable employers to move forward and help them understand what characteristics their employees possess. The new CIPD report suggests using a diversity-balanced scorecard as one form of measurement – it looks at both the positive and negative impact of diversity, as a model for measuring the success of diversity within the workforce. CIPD research suggests that measuring the contribution employees make to a business significantly improves management decision-making.

Dianah Worman, CIPD Diversity Adviser, says, “Measuring diversity will help employers to gain a genuine understanding of their staff, enabling them to understand the problems diversity can trigger, and look at ways to prevent problems from occurring. Measurement will allow employers to make full use of their assets and motivating them to apply their abilities in the interest of the business.”