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Introduction
Diversity is a common topic in business today, for a few different reasons. First, most workforces these days are diverse places, but even when they are not, people work with other offices in other countries, with suppliers around the world, and with customers wherever they are found. If business fifty years ago was largely a regional affair, it is fully global today, and that demands an entirely new skill set around understanding diversity and global issues, and working within those contexts to deliver exceptional business results.
Diversity
There are a few different ways to understand diversity. The first is to take sort of a “census” approach, breaking people out by easy-to-measure demographic categories. This is a fairly basic approach that leads one to recognize that there are different people in our communities and workforces, but does little to guide one’s thoughts and actions. Going a little bit deeper, one can see that groups of people are not at all homogenous. Generic categories like “White”, “Black” and “Asian” all come with many different subsets, and each subset has unique cultural characteristics. There are also national origin characteristics that go beyond race, especially for people from countries that have high levels of diversity of their own.
It is important to recognize diversity based on such demographic characteristics in business. Marketers need to know how best to target their audiences. Human resources departments need to avoid discrimination in the workplace, and managers need to be aware of how certain groups are discriminated against in their career development, and take steps to counter that sort of discrimination, such as providing mentorship opportunities. Lozano and Escrich (2017) note that it can be quite challenging to harmonize different cultures in the workplace, especially when those people have vastly different value systems. A stakeholder management approach is typically recommended to ensure such alignment (Maj, 2015).
But it is also important to realize that diversity goes beyond just demographic characteristics. This does not mean ignoring them – by no means – just recognizing that the sum total of diversity is not encapsulated by traits that are covered in the Civil Rights Act. There’s a lot of diversity of thought and ideas out there, and an organization should in a perfect world try to track that. The reason is because different people do tend to bring completely different skill sets to the workplace. If an organization can identify things like personality types or communication styles, for example, it can fit people into their roles better. In fact, understanding people on the level of what talents and knowledge they bring to the workplace will help to reduce discrimination based on physical traits – think of it as using facts to overcome unconscious biases that might exist.
Global Issues
Global issues are also relevant in the modern workplace. The diversity issue is obviously one of the reason why – when you are dealing with people who have roots all over the globe, understanding what is going on in the world can have significant relevance. This can influence human resources, but also it has an influence over the strategic decision-making that occurs. This is especially true of major global issues like climate change and sustainability, as these drive a lot of business decisions (Dyllick & Muff, 2015).
For example, identifying opportunities in foreign markets can be a benefit of being tuned into global issues. But so too can avoiding certain situations. If you identify particular issues that might affect your workforce, you can move proactively to address them. If you are in a position to leverage knowledge of global issues to adjust strategy can tactics, that can be a powerful benefit.
The nature of global issues is also that things move quickly. There are a lot of changes that occur in the external environment, and not all of them are obvious. For a manager or a leader, part of dealing with global issues is simply to be aware of them as best as possible, but be realistic that you cannot know everything, and that there will be things that were unanticipated. The overall effect of this should be to have a higher degree of awareness, and a lot of openness.
A good example would be the changes in the way that issues like race, class and gender are perceived today. It is not uncommon for people who are older to be inflexible – the world today might be different than the world they grew up in, and they have difficulty acknowledging that. All told, being able to adapt to changes is the best way to manage global issues, especially when dealing with a diverse workforce. Being open to people who have different gender expression, or identities with which one may be unfamiliar is certainly a possibility, but there’s really no reason why this needs to be a pain point for anybody.
Thus, global issues, and diversity, highlight the changing nature of the world, where we are becoming increasingly globalized, and where managers now need to remain open, flexible and adaptable to change in order to maintain relevance.
References
Dyllick, T. & Muff, K. (2015) Clarifying the meaning of sustainable business: Introducing a typology from business-as-usual to true business sustainability. Organization & Environment. Vol. 2015, 1-19.
Lozano, J. & Escrich, T. (2017) Cultural diversity in business: A critical reflection on the ideology of tolerance. Journal of Business Ethics. Vol. 142 (4) 679-696.
Maj, J. (2015) Diversity management’s stakeholders and stakeholders management. Proceedings of the 9th International Management Conference. Retrieved February 19, 2019 from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jolanta_Maj/publication/282848702_Diversity_management's_stakeholders_and_stakeholders_management/links/561e400f08ae50795afd9360/Diversity-managements-stakeholders-and-stakeholders-management.pdf