Workplace Action Plan Focusing on Diversity

Reflection on the Workplace Action Plan

The Workforce Action Plan at Mi-ORG focuses on employee retention, succession, and the development of strategic relationships. To reduce turnover, three key areas have been identified as important: improving diversity, enhancing morale, and ensuring proper compensation for work well-done. The succession plan focuses on identifying individuals with leadership potential and developing them from within the organization. The foundation for developing strategic relationships lies in the cultivation of an organizational that reflects the values and beliefs of both the organization and its employees so that there is total alignment.

A workplace action plan like the one at Mi-ORG is helpful for providing focused guidance on problem areas that can be improved to enhance the performance of the organization. “An Average Day at Mi-ORG” reveals some of the daily problems that a manager will face, typical of just about any organization: pressed for time, managers have to squeeze in individual meetings between larger group meetings; time is often budgeted poorly; managers can feel rushed, inadequately nourished, and stressed by the amount of meetings they have to be part of. Issues crop up, such as workplace drama, conflicts and advice-seeking; people have problems that need to be addressed, and the manager has to find a way to address those needs while also getting to his own work. Some do not take the meetings as seriously as others, come late, or spend the entire meeting on the phone without seeming to pay attention. This kind of inattentiveness can hurt morale—and a manager has to find a way to address these issues without causing resentment. Then there is the problem of the logistics of communication: with so many emails coming to an in-box, one has to parse through messages, some of them relevant but many of them not, and that eats up a good amount of time that could be better spent as well. Focusing one’s attention via a workplace action plan is a good way to deal with the issues that affect one’s daily habits, routine, and interactions in the workplace. At Mi-ORG, organization, morale, attentiveness, and culture are all important.

The Workplace Action Plan appears to understand these issues, but it focuses primarily on retention, succession and strategic relationships as a way of dealing with them. It rightly identifies organizational culture as the ultimate basis for forming strategic relationships, and really culture should be viewed as the basis of addressing turnover and leadership succession as well. Organizational culture is the fundamental building block: without it, there are going to be gaps and cracks throughout the organization, manifested in various problems—like turnover, or like a lack of leadership development. As “Learning Topic: Organizational Culture” points out, “organizational culture is the sum of the beliefs, values, and assumptions that represent shared meaning among members of an organization, guiding their behavior” (p. 1). This means that alignment has to exist between what the organization professes and what employees believe to be important and vital to their work and lives. It is the manager’s job to maintain a positive organizational culture. The Workplace Action Plan identifies some important steps toward doing so, such as increasing diversity and boosting morale. These are good—but some concrete steps that are measurable should be included in the plan. For instance, what can the workplace do to increase diversity? Targeted hiring could be one approach; identifying a quota that would signal a well-diversified workplace staff and making sure that quote is met quarterly would be another. But is this necessarily going to reduce the risk of turnover? There is also the risk that focusing on diversity could lead to the creation of subcultures and countercultures within the organization (Learning Topic: Organizational Subcultures, n.d.). An organization might tolerate subcultures so long as groups are performing well; but if resistance to an organizational aim is produced within a subculture, it becomes a problem. That is one issue to look out for.

Another question is how the manager can build morale? The Workplace Action Plan notes that workers should be fairly compensated for their labor, but this is largely an extrinsic form of motivation. What can the manager do to increase intrinsic motivation, which leads to self-actualization? If the organization wants to manage succession and leadership development well, it needs to focus on improving self-actualization and providing workers with opportunities to grow via intrinsic motivation.