Critical Understanding Of Emerging Themes In Relation With Diversity And Inclusion At Work

Findings and Analysis

Organizations across the globe are putting in strong efforts towards equality legislation and recognition for diversity and inclusion, however, inequality still exists at the workplace. The inequality is on various fronts such as pay gap, gender gap, lack of senior role model in females, lack of flexible working and many more. All these reasons in comprehensiveness lead to inequality in the business organization.  Although, the situation has seen a significant improvement over the last decade, however, there is still a scope for further improvement and bring equality in the business organization at all fronts. Diversity in the workforce has been on an increasing spree owing to Globalization and the advent of Internet, which makes it possible for a person from other nationality to work in a Multinational corporation (CIPD, 2018).

The above introduction serves as a preamble for the introduction to the essay report which will focus on the critical understanding of emerging themes in relation with diversity and inclusion at work. A critical analysis of the evolving trends in business management will help in providing robust strategic solution to business organizations. The area of focus for the critical discussion has to be evolved around various Political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors.

Findings and Analysis

This section will focus on critical understanding of the case study findings and analysis of the document “Diversity and Inclusion at Work”.

Case Study Findings

The report clearly highlights that the problem of inequality is of grave concern in the UK, despite the efforts of many organizations towards improving equality by imposing legislation in the business organization; the progress still seems to be painfully slow. The report also highlight the moral case of diversity and inclusion in the workplace where everyone should be treated equal and fair and with dignity by giving them a fair share of resources, equitable pay, equal opportunity to progress grow and reward people for their work in the business organization.

The business case for diversity and inclusion shows that diversity in the workplace and inclusion has a positive impact on the performance of the employees which in turn guarantee the achievement of the organizational goals and objectives.

Outcomes of Diversity

The outcomes of diversity within the purview of the report have been determined by plethora of literature review and conducting a longitudinal research in the country. The key findings of the research can be summarized as:

• Diversity has to be seen as a broad term as different aspects of diversity have different outcomes in the business organization. For instance, it has been observed that the tenure of the team is a factor of efficiency, whereas cultural diversity is a factor of creativity (Nishi, 2013).
• The effects of diversity on the performance are toned down by various aspects of the organizational context (Joshi & Roh, 2009).

Case Study Findings

It has been mentioned in the policy implementation in the UK that individuals have multiple identities and therefore it makes sense to consider diversity in a holistic scenario. The same has been mentioned by Parker that the recent emphasis on gender diversity has not benefitted women of colour to the same extent as to those women who do not belong to the ethnic minorities (Parker, 2016)

Implication of Diversity for People Professionals

• It has been cited in the report that if the focus of the team leader or the management is just on one group of people in a team, it will not benefit the organization. It is absolutely logical because the team work is best extracted when everyone in the team is paid equal attention.
• Another point is that diversity in the business organization has to be considered on a holistic ground, and it is extremely beneficial for the organization in the way that it contributes towards the enhanced employer brand, contribution to the society and corporate benefits whilst giving benefits to the employees at work.
• While considering the case of diversity, it is important for the people professionals to focus on the type of industry, for example a male dominated industry will have more males in comparison to the females, and however the right of all has to be the same.
• Factors of inequality at Work

Despite many equality legislation and repeated conversation on the diversity and inclusion issues, a lot of inequality still prevails in the business organization. Some of the main reasons or the factors behind the inequality can be seen are:

• Prejudice and biasedness still exists in the organization which is the main reason behind the discrimination of the employees which results in turnover and demotivation of the employees (Jones et. al., 2016).
• Multiple issues lead to the inequality, ranging from lack of women at the senior management roles and lack of disabled employees in the business organization.
• The factors behind the inequality start right from the first interaction of an employee with the organization, it start by recruitment bias, delay in receiving calls in the recruitment process and also while introducing the employee to the organization(Van Dijk et. al., 2012).
• One of the major biasedness is seen while performance evaluation of the groups, managers have a tendency of favouring one group over the another which causes inequality, moreover the managers who believe that diverse groups are not cohesive in nature, thus not good to the organization , rate them poorly.
• Factors supporting inclusion and diversity at the workplace

• Training on diversity will help the employees and the organization train the employees on how to deal with the issues of diversity and have a better understanding of diversity at the workplace (Bezrukova et. al., 2016).
• Another point which mellows down the impact of training is its short term impact on the organization, thus it can be said that training is not the comprehensive solution to the problem of inclusion and diversity at the workplace (Kalinoski et. al., 2013).
• The government provides lot of aide towards the development of the disabled person in the business organization, however lack of awareness of the employers contain them from taking benefit of the governmental and other aides(Clayton et. al., 2011).
• Future of Diversity and inclusion at Work

The need of the hour is to see diversity and inclusion at workplace as an improvement in the culture of the organization which reaps fruits of benefit both for the organization and the employees. Hence, the issue of diversity and inclusion has to be seen and analysed in the light of societal, community, individual and organizational development.

It has also been observed that in order to focus on diversity and inclusion the pressure and the orders has to come from the leadership. As it is a known phenomenon that leadership is the practical skill encompassing the ability of the individual to lead, influence, motivate and inspire the individuals to achieve the goals of the organization. Thus, if the leaders become serious on the issues of diversity and inclusion, a significant amount of development can be seen in the diversity and inclusion in the business organization.

Thus extrapolating the situation and the scenario of the present times, it can be easily said that workforce diversity in the organization will be on an increased slope. It is arguably inevitable looking at the awareness of diversity and inclusion created in the business environment. Moreover, the leadership is becoming aware regarding the benefits of diversity and inclusion of workplace, the leaders have realized that higher workforce diversity leads to better and faster decision making besides reaping other benefits (CIPD, 2018).

Areas of focus for inclusion and diversity at the workplace

Some of the areas which need focus to assess the implication of diversity and inclusion issues in the business organization are political, technological, demographic changes, social trends and shifts, industry globalization, legal transformations and global economic issues.

Political Environment

The world has shrunk into a global village, thanks to globalization and Internet. Internet and Globalization has given opportunity to the 7 Billion populations to move across borders and work in a business organization. Political environment has played a contributing role in the development of globalization and making it easier for the workforce to migrate from one country to another. It is the increasing friendly ties between the nation and the growing influence. All these factors show that the workforce diversity in the organization will be increasing exponentially (Rogers, 2016).

Outcomes of Diversity

Political environment of the country has huge implication on the policies and procedures of the business environment. For instance the nation which promotes diversity and inclusion in their government, the same will have to be reflected in the business organization. Hence, political environment has a strong impact on the policies and procedures of the business organization, and as mentioned earlier that if the change is communicated from the top, it has a greater impact on the individuals. Moreover, the government can also give aide to the organization who is going forward with inclusion and diversity in the workforce, also giving aide to the organization for hiring disabled individuals.

Technological Advancements

Technology is one area which has evolved the maximum in the last 15-20 years, machine automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, internet marketing, are some of the examples of the evolution of technology.  Technology plays a very crucial role in the present business day scenario, which puts a lot of additional pressure on the employees to work on their skill development. The skill development has to be same and monitored across the employees and the department without any culture or any other bias (McLeskey, Rosenberg & Westling, 2017).

Organization while looking for candidates to enhance the skill of the employees has to focus on the capability of those employees and not on their diversity. This is the reason which would help in increasing diversity and inclusion in the workplace whilst improving the productivity of the organization. Disabled employees can also contribute to the increasing environment of technological advancement as they are gifted and have better skills and capabilities in comparison to other employees. Thus, technological advancements call for better diversity and inclusion at the workplace.

Demographic Changes

Demographics can be understood as the statistical study of the population, it gives a data on the male female ratio, data on the culture, language, religion, sex and more such factors. This information helps in understanding the true demographics of the nation, basis of which demographics in the business environment becomes easy to extrapolate. Penetration of education has increased which means equal opportunity of studies to all, which implies development opportunities to all the people despite any demographic differences (Wrench, 2016).

Business organization have to focus here on keeping the same demographic in the business organization, they can easily compare the male to female ratio in the nation and do a backward calculation on the number of males and females in the organization. This will help in maintaining a uniform diversity in the business organization which would further help in providing equal opportunities to all, irrespective of their demographics.

Implication of Diversity for People Professionals

Social Trends and Shifts

Social media and Internet has played a very strong role in changing the social patterns of the individual. People have become more aware of their rights and they also have a platform to forward their concern in the case of any grievances. Organizations too seem to have taken a shift due to the changing social trends, more and more women employees are being hired and efforts are being made to promote them to higher posts. In some organization, a fixed quota has been fixed for the women; this shows how serious the organization is becoming to the issues of diversity and inclusion (Boekhorst, 2015).

This change in the social trends and a paradigm shift is beneficial both for the organization and the employees in the way that they have become more aware of the needs of diverse individuals. The organization have started understanding that people have become aware of their rights, the right to work with equal opportunity and many other rights. Thus, paradigm shift in the social trends has a good influence on the issues of diversity and inclusion.

Industry Globalization

Workforce diversity has become prevalent due to the advent of Industrial globalization. It has become easier for companies to set up their business operations in other countries which provide employment opportunities for the local inhabitant. Business organization also takes an advantage of such situation, as they employ majority of the people from the local population and send just a couple of bureaucrats to the company.  Thus, industry globalization has a significant impact on the workforce diversity and the issue of inclusion (Beck, 2018).

Industry globalization has made it easier for the business organization to save additional costs in transporting their employees to other countries. They take advantage of the local human resources with the aim of pushing them up the ladder to ensure sustainability in the business environment. They tend to overlook the workforce diversity issues and focus on the benefits they can reap from the diversity.

Global Economic Issues

At the very present, the global economy is not plagued by any major economic depression and most of the countries are flourishing and progressing. UK had to suffer a little due to the Brexit, however under the leadership of Theresa May, the country is flourishing and is set on the path of further economic development. The country has to ensure that it uses the combined physical and the human resources to stay put on the path of sustained development (Barak, 2016).

Areas of Focus for Inclusion and Diversity at the Workplace

The same has to be translated in the business environment, business organization has to focus on what’s good for them in the longer run and work accordingly. Hence, workforce diversity has to be increased; people with capabilities have to be promoted to senior roles despite some differences and so on. This would further help the economy, nation and the organization to stay aloof from any possible global economic crisis and at the same time result in enhanced productivity in the organization.

Thus it can be said that workforce diversity has the potential of both negative and positive impact on the business organization. The challenge here lies in mitigating the negatives and focussing on the positives to make out the most from workforce diversity and inclusion. Workforce diversity, inclusion and the concept of equal opportunity to all will help in raising the morale of the employees which would help them to work strongly towards the organizational goals.

Possible implication on operational and strategical decision making

As mentioned in the earlier sections that workforce diversity has both positive and negative impact on the organization. Negative impact is nothing but the perception of the managers who believe that workforce diversity and inclusion would result only in chaos; as such groups are not cohesive in nature. This, for obvious reasons holds untrue, as more workforce diversity simply implies diverse brains working in solving a common problem.

Organization has started recognizing workforce diversity as a positive to the business operations. However, there is definitely a scope of improvement, but the change is quite visible. It has been proven over and over that diversity in the workforce is one of the strongest contributors towards fast decision making. This is possible because when many people from diverse background come together, they ought to create synergies which lead to faster and quicker decisions.

As people from diverse backgrounds have different skill sets and capabilities which are striking different from the other group, which helps to bridge the gap in thinking and understating of the collective group. Thus, it is also easier to say that workforce diversity also helps in taking better and faster decisions which helps the organization to make a right strategic move towards the goal of sustained development (Barak, FIndler & Wind, 2016).

Diversity in workforce also leads to better input in the brainstorming activities in the business organization, which in turn results in better output from the exercise. The individual and the organization both benefit from such diverse workforce as people bring on their diverse experience, values, culture and belief in the discussion which results in positive output (Sabharwal, 2014).

Political Environment

At the very same time, when the people are employed on the basis of their skills and capabilities and not just on the criteria of their background, language, religion, caste, colour and creed, the employees tend to do justice to their jobs. This results in better operation in the business organization which directly points towards the growth of the organization. Thus, it can be concluded by saying that workforce diversity and inclusion has significant positive impact on the operational and strategic capabilities of the organization (Peretz, Levi & Fried, 2015).

Recommendation to Harbour Diversity and Inclusion

A set of recommendation are suggested which would help the organization to foster and nurture diversity in the workforce and inclusion in business organization resulting in benefit both for the organization and the individuals. The recommendations are:

Leadership involvement and impetus towards diversity and inclusion

As cited in the case study report, leadership has an important role to play in the inclusion of diversity in the workplace. The decision to increase the diversity and give equal rights and opportunity to all if comes from the leadership, will make it official for all the employees to follow it strictly. Leadership has to then ensure that as practice diversity and inclusion is practiced in the organization and the team. A joint meeting with the entire organization will also motivate the diverse employees and they would start contributing with enhanced productivity towards the goals of the organization. Hence, it is very much required that the decision to focus on diversity and inclusion comes from the leadership (Downey et. al., 2015).

Cultural Change

Culture can be seen as the set of values beliefs, opinion and attitude which an individual carry with him which is due to his surrounding and the environment. Similar to individuals, culture plays a very important role in business organization. Employees pick up the values, beliefs, attitude directly from the culture, thus if the culture of the organization is to disrespect disabled people, or people speaking different language, the same will be followed by each and every employee. Thus, in order to promote diversity and inclusion in the work place, it is very much required that the organization sets a culture which promotes diversity and inclusion in the workplace (MorBarak, 2015).

References

Barak, M.E.M., 2016. Managing diversity: Toward a globally inclusive workplace. Sage Publications.

Barak, M.E.M., Findler, L. and Wind, L.H., 2016. Diversity, inclusion, and commitment in organizations: International empirical explorations. Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management, 2(2), p.813.

Technological Advancements

Beck, U., 2018. What is globalization?. John Wiley & Sons.

BEZRUKOVA, K., SPELL, C.S., PERRY, J.L. et al. (2016) A meta-analytical integration of over 40 years of research on diversity training evaluation. Psychological Bulletin. Vol 142, No 11. pp1227–74

Boekhorst, J.A., 2015. The role of authentic leadership in fostering workplace inclusion: A social information processing perspective. Human Resource Management, 54(2), pp.241-264.

CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF PERSONNEL AND DEVELOPMENT. (2017) Creating and capturing value at work: who benefits? Part 1 [online]. London: CIPD. 

CLAYTON, S., BARR, B., NYLEN, L. et al. (2011) Effectiveness of return-to-work interventions for disabled people: a systematic review of government initiatives focused on changing the behaviour of employers. European Journal of Public Health. Vol 22, No 3. pp434–39.

Downey, S.N., van der Werff, L., Thomas, K.M. and Plaut, V.C., 2015. The role of diversity practices and inclusion in promoting trust and employee engagement. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 45(1), pp.35-44.

JONES, K.P., PEDDIE, C.I., GILRANE, V.L. et al. (2016) Not so subtle: a meta-analytic investigation of the correlates of subtle and overt discrimination. Journal of Management. Vol 42, No 6. pp1588–1613

JOSHI, A. and ROH, H. (2009) The role of context in work team diversity research: a metaanalytic review. Academy of Management Journal. Vol 52, No 3. pp599–627

KALINOSKI, Z.T., STEELE?JOHNSON, D., PEYTON, E.J. et al. (2013) A meta?analytic evaluation of diversity training outcomes. Journal of Organizational Behavior. Vol 34, No 8. pp1076–1104.

McLeskey, J.L., Rosenberg, M.S. and Westling, D.L., 2017. Inclusion: Effective practices for all students. Pearson.

Mor Barak, M.E., 2015. Inclusion is the key to diversity management, but what is inclusion?. Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance, 39(2), pp.83-88.

NISHII, L.H. (2013) The benefits of climate for inclusion for gender-diverse groups. Academy of Management Journal. Vol 56, No 6. pp1754–74.

PARKER, SIR JOHN. (2016) A report into the ethnic diversity of UK boards [Parker Review Committee] [online]. Available at: www.gov.uk/government/publications/ethnic-diversityof-uk-boards-the-parker-review [Accessed 14 July 2018].

Peretz, H., Levi, A. and Fried, Y., 2015. Organizational diversity programs across cultures: effects on absenteeism, turnover, performance and innovation. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 26(6), pp.875-903.

Rogers, A.T., 2016. Human Behavior in the Social Environment: Mezzo and Macro Contexts. Routledge.

Sabharwal, M., 2014. Is diversity management sufficient? Organizational inclusion to further performance. Public Personnel Management, 43(2), pp.197-217.

VAN DIJK, H., VAN ENGEN, M.L. and VAN KNIPPENBERG, D. (2012) Defying conventional wisdom: a meta-analytical examination of the differences between demographic and jobrelated diversity relationships with performance. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Vol 119, No 1. pp38–53.

Wrench, J., 2016. Diversity management and discrimination: Immigrants and ethnic minorities in the EU. Routledge.