Question

What trends in workplace diversity should managers be aware of? How to think about diversity: Which differences are important?

Answer 1

Below are some of the important trends in workplace diversity managers should be aware of:

• Diversity of workforce and diversity of thought is an important ingredient for successful organization.
• Diverse workforce is more productive and innovative.
• Diversity helps meet client expectations and improve organizational performance.

Diversity is having people from different cultures, religion, ideas in a one group. Diversity offers organizations different opinions and lends a new prospective to the problem in hand. Diversity leads to better innovation. Diverse organization tend to create more innovative solution and products.

Diversity involves understanding of each individual as unique. This uniqueness can be from age, sex, religion, caste, language orientation, economic status etc.

Below are some of the other ways in which people can be diverse:

1. Personality: It is the unique characteristics associated with each individual. Some persons tend be work-alcoholic and some tends to be lethargic and avoiding work.
2. Ability and skills: Each individual has a different set of skills and learning level. It determines the person productivity, creativity and excellence at work.
3. Perception: These are the pre-composed thoughts someone has for a thing. It can be positive or negative perception about a thing. Our perception defines our team behavior and general group and individual dynamics at work.
4. Attitudes: It is defined as favorable or unfavorable expression towards a person or a thing. People with positive attitude tends to be more dynamic and high performers. People with negative attitude tends to be low performers.