http://www.sooperarticles.com/business-articles/human-resource-articles/cultural-diversity-workplace-2517.html
This article talks about diversity as a whole in the workplace and how it affects employees and management. It goes over the difference from simply hiring a diverse group of employees from things like affirmative action and actually managing that group after they are hired, which is extremely different. I totally agree with the problems of affirmative action that the article states. One of the problems with affirmative action is that it began to be perceived as public relation scheme more concerned about quota than about individuals." This, to me, is a huge downside to specifically going out and forcing diversity among the workplace. Diversity has huge benefits and is extremely important, but the way in which you create diversity can not be simply a numbers game. It has to be about the individual and then secondly the diversity of the group as a whole. I think that at this time we need to cut back on things like affirmative action because we clearly are all ready making up for the issue... "America's workforce is changing- and changing rapidly. "By the end of year 2000, it's expected that only one in seven new employee will be white male." We need to focus on things like managing the diversity that we already have in place and making sure all employees are comfortable with diversity. I think in general this article is helpful to see the key points of where we are going with diversity and where we have been in the past. The old ways of diversity was to simply assimilate everyone (of all backgrounds) to the company's culture. But now we see what great advantages it is to gather a group of individuals who embrace their difference backgrounds to come together and look at things in a new light and who see things differently.
Posted by Alec
I work at State Farm currently and I definitely feel that they frequently hire people that are minorities in attempt to fill quotas, and not because they are necessarily the most qualified candidate. State Farm definitely pushes what they call "diversity and inclusion", which is this idea of treating all types of people with equality and fairness. However, for all their talk about that, all the IT people at State Farm are from India and 90% of the grounds and maintenance employees are either black or hispanic. So I feel like they are not practicing affirmative action very well since they seem to hire so much based on stereotype. Having seen the negative impacts of poor attempts at diversity, I can understand the frustrations of affirmative action taken too far.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I can also see the advantages of hiring a diverse team of employees, because, as you stated, this brings multiple viewpoints and unique approaches on how to handle situations. This really increases a workforce's creativity and improves their ability to problem solve.
Josh Throop