Article Review; Diversity in the Work Place
Introduction
Technological advancement especially in communication education and transportation has made it possible for people from different parts of the globe to work under one office. This makes the work place to have very distinct groups of people in terms of culture, talents, skills and specialization. For progress to be witnessed in the work place all of this distinct group need to know the goal of the organization set their personal and group objectives and work cooperatively to achieve the goal. Working together in a diverse group is not always easy mostly because what is best for one person can be detrimental to the other. For this reason it is important to have a list of work ethics and best practices which is fair and just for the entire workforce. This paper aims to review an article titled Best Practices in Achieving Workforce Diversity. The article acclaims that workplace diversity is important and that it should be embraced by leaders, managers and employees.
The article defines diversity as "Diversity includes all characteristics and experiences that define each of us as individuals” (U.S department of commerce, 2016). This definition is wholesome as it covers all types of diversity at individual level. The main focus of the study was the workplace and the study limited itself to seven critical factors for evaluation of the best practices. This includes the leadership and management commitment, employee involvement strategic planning, sustained investment, accountability measurement and evaluation and lastly the linkage to organizational goals and objectives. The seven scopes cover all the possible departments in the work place and the levels of hierarchy that could also exist. One assumption that the researchers of this article had is that diversity is good in organizations especially in realizing competitive advantage through productivity, effectiveness and sustained productivity.
The people responsible for ensuring diversity in the workplace and for the sustenance of a diverse work force are leaders and managers. They can do this through strategic planning and listening to the employees’ voice. When the workplace is diverse hen it is easy to not only increase work efficiency but also to retain customers by winning their loyalty. Organizations which are not diverse are likely to be viewed in the perspective of the employees that they employ hence attracting just a specific type of customers. The opposite is also true in that if the organization has diverse employees they will also have diverse customers.
The result from the study concluded that many people define diversity very narrowly in terms of ethnicity, gender or race. According to the article by Patricia (2007) the definition of diversity has been evolving with time and currently a broad definition is the most embraced. There is a need to recognize that there are so many things that make people diverse and when we understand this then it will be possible to see the full benefits of diversity. Both employees and their leaders should embrace diversity since in the end everyone benefits from diversity. Diversity is a necessity for civilization of any place.
Conclusion
Diversity is a major success factor for any organization both for the purpose of achieving competitive advantage and civilization. The article reviewed in this essay provides proof that the issue of diversity in the work place can no longer be ignored or put aside by a visionary organization.
References
Patricia A. Kreitz (2007).Best practices for managing organizational diversity: SLAC-PUB- 12499 Retrieved http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/getdoc/slac-pub-12499.pdf
U.S department of commerce and Vice President Al Gores (2016) Best practices in achieving workforce diversity. National Practices for inventing National Benchmarking Study. Retrieved http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/workforce-diversity.pdf
