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Managing Advantages and Dis-Advantages of a Diverse Workforce
The most obvious benefit of a diverse workforce is that it represents a local face to the customer.
Operating successfully in a national market calls for a workforce that speaks the local language, understands traditions and rules of behaviour, and interact effectively with customers, public officials and other stakeholders.
Let’s look at some of these points:
• Cultural diversity is not something that is going away tomorrow, enabling us to plan our strategies on the assumption of mutual understanding.
• People of different cultures share basic concepts but view them from different angles and perspectives.
• It can lead them to behave in a manner which we may consider irrational or even in direct contradiction of what we hold sacred.
• Other benefits of a diverse workforce are internal to the firm and concern the best use of talent and creativity.
They include:
• Improved knowledge sharing and creativity
A diverse workforce includes people with different worldviews and experience.
Making the most of diversity, means forging a working environment that facilitates the sharing of ideas and the exchange of insights, inspiring novel solutions to problems. This working environment must include the customer or customers who are involved in this project.
• Fully developing and promoting talent
A diverse workforce offers a broader pool for the scarcest of all resources - talented managers.
Providing developmental opportunities for all employees is, in turn, an advantage when attracting new employees. Offering local employment is very intense. Simply offering a higher salary is not a good long-term solution; they will soon leave for more money.
Providing opportunities for development and career advancement is often a better bet to attract the best new talent.
The Challenge of Diversity
A multinational project confronts diversity in a number of dimensions. For a start, they content with differences in language, and communication at its most basic level among employees may be problematic.
They also face differences in culture, manifested in styles of management as we have mentioned earlier.
Moreover, employees in different countries may operate in markedly different economic, legal and educational systems and Labour markets.
These many dimensions present the multinational partners with a bewildering problem. So, is diversity on all of these dimensions expected to be a source of advantage?
Can we really imagine that more diversity on all these dimensions will be helpful? Or might the differences on some dimensions be a source of fragmentation and conflict?
Of the dimension we can identify, which are the worthiest of attention - language, culture, education, race, gender, age, religion or some others?
Faced with this complexity, it is hardly surprising that many firms make broad pronouncements about the benefits of diversity, but do not take real steps, since action demands judgement about which dimensions are most important.
To be continued...
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