Discuss about the Business Rational For Diversity Management: CERA.
The key role of human resource managers is to ensure that all the employees can work without any issues. There are number of steps that senior management and human resource managers should take to ensure the effective functioning of organization. One such step is the focus on diversity management (Bjerregaard & Lauring). With the focus on diversity management, organizations get the opportunity to hire the best talent from the market, irrespective of their caste, culture and background. The focus on the principles and guidelines of diversity management also helps the organizations to create a healthy culture in the organizations where team can perform with high level of productivity (Richard, Roh & Pieper, 2013). The case study of CERA reveals that the management has realized the importance of human resource management function and the case of diversity management. Mark French has a clear agenda to recruit the best talent from the market. He is also clear on his approach to focus on innovation. He even argued that a lot of companies talks about innovation in Australia, but only a few companies believe in that. The objective of this paper is to discuss the case of diversity management for CERA. A brief organizational background and the case of diversity management for CERA can be discussed as:
Civil Engineering & Research Associates (CERA) was established in 2007 with the vision of becoming the go-to consulting company in civil construction in Sydney. The company has high quality consultants and the organization has a culture where employees are expected to think out of the box and come up with innovative ideas for clients. CERA has an organizational culture where initiation is encouraged and excellence is rewarded. Mark French is the founding director of the company who has a say in the decision making of the organization. He realizes the importance of diversity management and strong organizational culture. Before making any decision, he should be convinced with the business rational of diversity management. This paper would analyse the business rational of diversity management for CERA with the objective to convince Mark French for increased focus on diversity management. The paper would discuss the arguments in favour of diversity management and it could be used as arguments to convince Mark French towards diversity management
Diversity means having a workforce consisting of many varied groups based on age, racial, ethnicity, gender, handicap, nationality, religious background to name a few. It is obvious that if the workforce is highly varied, this will going to create issues at the workplace due to differences and that is why diversity management has one of the most important goal of any organization as it offers large number of benefits (Klarsfeld, Ng & Tatli, 2012). The use of practices of diversity management would need initial investment from organization. There is always a possibility that the people from different cultural background would have conflicts among themselves as they are not well aware of the culture of other people.
Importance of Diversity Management for Organizations
The case study presents that CERA is a private entity that is in business to make profit. The top priority for Mark French is to create a sustainable profit growth for the organization. The human resource management function is an enabler for CERA to achieve its business objective. One of the key role of human resource management function for CER is diversity management. Simply defined, diversity management is the practice and culture to support multiple and varied lifestyles and behaviour of employees (Tatli & Ozbilgin, 2012).
Diversity also means celebrating the differences among the different groups. In order to do, organizations also has to design policies very carefully because there is always risk of leaving one group or offending one group and so on. For example, consider a strategy of a company where it decides to have common restroom for everyone like everyone has in their house to make the office more homely and accommodating towards the transgender community however the results were very different (Ozturk, & Tatli, 2016). There is huge protest and normal people were not supportive of this move. Thus, one of the most important step to mitigate the impact of such things is that management should be diverse so that whenever any particular community feel offended, it should not feel that it is discriminated because there is no representation of that community in the management (Richard, Roh & Pieper, 2013).
There are various benefits of diversity management for CERA. It is important that organizations should do a cost benefit analysis of different benefits of diversity management, before making any decision. The key benefits of diversity management for organizations is improved productivity of employees, high retention, improved profit margins, etc.( Mahadeo, Soobaroyen & Hanuman, 2012). Though diversity management often involves large number of challenges, diversity at the workplace offers large number of benefits. There is a study in the US where the researchers studied the diversity climate at 654 retail stores of a single retailer and found that the store that are having pro diversity climate and promotes equal opportunity and inclusion performs betters in terms of sales, growth, management, conflicts as compared to the stores where the management is less willing to accommodate diverse culture (McKay, Avery, & Morris, 2009). Such stores often faces employee commitment issues and high attrition among the employees. The specific benefits of diversity management for CERA can be discussed as:
Benefits of Diversity Management for CERA
Globalization has become the buzz word in today’s era. Most of the big organizations sell their products across the globe. In such scenarios, organizations that have diverse background consists of different nationalities and ethnicities will help the companies to increase their business worldwide. For example, Consider if any organization fully employs only people from 1 country, it find difficult to sell their products in different countries but the organization employing people from different nations will find it easy to sell in different to countries because different nations will see that organization as a potential employer also (Ariss, Cascio, & Paauwe, 2014). Apart from this, each organization has to customize its strategy for each country considering its cultural nuances, differences and hence thus having a diverse workforce like more local in each country will help the organization to be able formulate its local strategy even better. There is also a case when Merck needed the Halal approval for one of its formulations, it seeks the help of its Muslim employees so that not only the approval process will be faster but also the Muslims will accept the product (Park, 2008). This is the benefit of having diverse workforce.
With the focus on diversity management, Mark French would be able to recruit the best talent across the globe as the door of the company would not be limited only to Australian market. It means that CERA would be able to get the talent in the construction industry from other markets like India, Europe, USA, etc. The acquisition of talented people would help CERA to improve profitability in long term as talented people would have better productivity of work.
Different groups, cultures will add more value to the discussion by bringing more ideas on to the table, adding fresh perspectives and also analysing the ideas from all possible angles. People will be more creative and innovative and will be constantly challenged to think fresh ideas and refine their ideas so as to defence it against the varied groups. If the group consisting of similar type of people, it is possible that the group approves the idea without analysing it deeply and it may fail at later stages leading to loss (Ozturk & Tatli, 2016).
With the focus on diversity management, Mark French would have the employees from different cultural backgrounds that would bring their own cultural values and best practices. It would eventually strengthen the values of CERA. It is important that Mark French must focus on cultural training for its employees. With cultural training, there would be very less chances of conflicts among employees. The management of CERA should realize that the benefits of diversity management would truly matter only when the conflicts among the employees is minimal. It is suggested that CERA should arrange for the external training of its employees (Bjerregaard & Lauring, 2013). The training from the external consultants would help CERA to provide external view about the issues and benefits of diversity management. With the use of innovation, CERA can use innovative ways to provide excellent service quality to consumers,
Challenges of Diversity Management
If any organization is open for all the different groups for employment, it definitely has more options and access to wider group of talents and thus can attract talent across the classes. Not only this, it will also make the organization as preferable place to work as people prefers to work in organizations that practice inclusion and accepts people from different backgrounds (Cascio, 2018). It also helps the organization to save the losses that occurs due to attrition.
With the focus on diversity management, the talent management team of CERA would have a wider pool of talent, across the globe, to look for. It is important that the management of CERA should use benchmarking as a tool to implement the best practices of diversity management. With benchmarking, CERA can learn from the success stories of other companies who have successfully implemented the policies around diversity management (Alharbi & Mamman, 2015). The key aspect is that Mark French should focus on various cases of diversity management in and around Australia. It is important that CERA should always have a fall back plan in place. The fall back plan would help Mark French to minimize the risks. With an increased and a better talent pool, the productivity of the company would be better the productivity of competitors and it means that the profitability of the company would be better than the profitability of other companies.
All the organizations seek to have the good community relations in different communities. If the company has a diverse workforce consisting of people from different communities, it will definitely have better relations with every community because company can always leverages the local person for the community related business. More differences also increases the conflicts during the meetings and sometimes, people take side of each other just based on similar community group without considering the point of debate. The output of such meetings is highly irrational because people were not debating on the pros and cons but supporting each other based on their caste or similarity factor (Alharbi, & Mamman, 2015). During such conflicts, generally community having majority wins and this really hurts the meeting output. It is important that meetings should be clearly presided by the chairperson having knowledge of such issues and ability to handle such things ((Sawyer, & Thoroughgood, 2017).
With the focus on diversity management, Mark French would be able to contribute towards community development through Corporate Social Responsibility. It is also important that Mark French should have both short term and long term plans for diversity management. In the short term, the focus should be on implementing the policies around diversity management and in long term, the objective should be to optimize the existing process of diversity management (Klarsfeld, Ng & Tatli, 2012). The support from various stakeholders would be needed to successfully implement the policies of diversity management and communication is the key to get the required support (Al Ariss, Cascio & Paauwe, 2014). It is suggested that Mark French should keep the communication channels open and transparent with all the employees in the organization.
Strategies to Mitigate Challenges of Diversity Management
Conclusion
The above paper discusses the case of diversity management for CERA. After making the literature review on concept and importance of diversity management, it is vital to gain knowledge about process of diversity management. The process of diversity management follows three vital steps to take the complete benefits of diversity management. All the stages are important to represent the progress of the business. The good indicators help to represent the actual progress of the business throughout the innovation. It is important that the process of diversity management should start with an initial assessment. In the initial assessment, Mark French should discuss the case with different internal stakeholders. The next step would be framework development phase. In the framework development phase, Mark French should establish the guidelines and best practices for the implementation of diversity management in the organization. The paper also discusses the key recommendations and suggestions for CERA. The support from different stakeholders is definitely a focus area for organization. The paper highlights that the key benefits of diversity management for CERA is the opportunity to get best talent from the market. The case study suggests that CERA wants to focus on innovation among employees and the steps towards the policies and procedures of diversity management is a right step in the direction. Going forward, Mark French and other key stakeholders of the company should review the performance of the company at regular time interval to ensure that the real benefits of diversity management are realized. The key quantitative benefits of diversity management for CERA would be sustainable business growth, improved profitability and better customer service through improved product and service.
References
Al Ariss, A., Cascio, W. F., & Paauwe, J. (2014). Talent management: Current theories and future research directions. Journal of World Business, 49(2), 173-179.
Alharbi, A., & Mamman, A. (2015). Diverse Human Resource And Organizational Productivity: Towards An Analytical Framework. International Journal of Human Resource Studies, 5(4), 50-78.
Bjerregaard, T. & Lauring, J. (2013), ‘Managing Contradictions of Corporate Social Responsibility: The Sustainability of Diversity in a Frontrunner Firm. Business Ethics: A European Review, 22 (2), 131–42.
Klarsfeld, A., Ng, E. & Tatli, A. (2012), ‘Social Regulation and Diversity Management: A Comparative Study of France, Canada and the UK’, European Journal of Industrial Relations, 18 (4), 309–27.
Mahadeo, J.D., Soobaroyen T. & Hanuman, V.O. (2012), ‘Board Composition and Financial Performance: Uncovering the Effects of Diversity in an Emerging Economy, Journal of Business Ethics, (105), 375–88.
McKay, P. F., Avery, D. R., & Morris, M. A. (2009). A tale of two climates: diversity climate from subordinates’and managers’perspectives and their role in store unit sales performance. Personnel Psychology, 62(4), 767-791.
Ozturk, M. B., & Tatli, A. (2016). Gender identity inclusion in the workplace: broadening diversity management research and practice through the case of transgender employees in the UK. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 27(8), 781-802.
Park, A. (2008). Making diversity a business advantage. Harvard Management Update, 13(4), 1-3.
Sawyer, K., & Thoroughgood, C. (2017). Gender non-conformity and the modern workplace. Organizational Dynamics, 1(46), 1-8.
Richard, O. C., Roh, H., & Pieper, J. R. (2013). The link between diversity and equality management practice bundles and racial diversity in the managerial ranks: Does firm size matter?. Human Resource Management, 52(2), 215-242.
Tatli, A. & Ozbilgin, M.F. (2012), ‘An Emic Approach to Intersectional Study of Diversity at Work: A Bourdieuan Framing’, International Journal of Management Reviews, 14 (2), 180–200.
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