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Leveraging Diversity at Work: How to Hire, Retain and Inspire a Diverse Workforce for Peak Performance and Profit
Beyond recruitment and hiring, many businesses fall short when it comes to retention and motivation of the diverse workforce they worked so hard to employ. For minority employees, the missing piece is often a strong sense of self and an appreciation for who they are and what they offer. Leveraging Diversity at Work goes beyond calling for diversity to give business leaders the knowledge and tools they need to profit from our differences. Minority workers will also find real-world inspiration for contributing to their company's vision, mission and success. You'll learn how *Get buy-in from everyone before imposing diversity initiatives *Reduce turnover by keeping people motivated to perform *Convert "equal opportunity" to an advantage at upper levels of management *Move beyond "valuing" diversity to leveraging its power *Ensure follow-through on training and program implementation Don't wait another day to make the most of your diverse workforce. Get started NOW!
208 pages, Paperback
First published June 27, 2006
2 people want to read
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June 5, 2015
In 2009, from where I sit, the American workforce has quietly undergone a tidal wave of change from within. I work for a very large global computer company, and my experiences, which I suspect are typical for a large percentage of the white-collar workforce, are:
--flexible hours and work location, made possible by cheaper and faster network technology (broadband and wireless in the home) have emptied out the traditional office. This reduces face to face interactions between teems, and is also made necessary by
--global work teams that span continents and time zones, so that someone is always working on the edges of the traditional workday, and these geographic distances and cultural and language differences mean that
--a vast majority of personal conversations and team meetings are done via email, instant message, and telephone conference.
By and large, these changes have been driven up from within, as conscious decisions to spur cultural diversity have been overtaken by the leading edge of the wave of global business integration which has made diversity a reality, not just a desirable goal in large corporations.
So, at the peak of the economic pyramid, events have largely overtaken Olver and Baugh's book, which seeks to explain what cultural diversity is, how to recognize myths, stereotypes, and prejudices that work against it, and how to encourage it in the workplace. Rising out of their business as diversity consultants, they have targeted the book toward the many of their clients and potential clients farther down in the food chain who are still wrestling with how to encourage and implement diversity.
Add to these factors the stress of the worldwide (and still deepening as I write on February 21, 2009) economic collapse, and the American workplace is a tough place be right now.
So Olver and Baugh's book is valuable as a beginning primer, and "beginning" it is. It is heavily descriptive, with 16 chapters of terminology and description written in very short, simple declarative sentences, leading up to three chapters of prescriptive advice on how to hire, retain, and inspire diversity. The writing style suggests to me that these were originally PowerPoint bullet points from their corporate workshops that were then copied into a Word document with transitions added to make it flow as a continuous text. Not a bad way to start, but without the verbal amplifications that go along with them in a stand-up presentation, PowerPoint declarative statements read like a very stilted, elemental language that is beneath the audience's comprehension level. The authors should revise the text to put more of their spoken presentation into the writing here.
So the book wasn't written at the level I needed to help to clarify my role as a technical professional working effectively with technical teams in China, India, Ireland, and other locations where culture, language, and communications technology have a daily impact (good and bad) on our effectiveness. I don't need to encourage diversity, I need to learn how to utilize it to help me on a daily basis! So some suggestions should Olver and Baugh decide to update this book:
1. Use the term "dominant" instead of "majority" culture. In the workplace, cultural changes have come on so fast in the three years since this book was written that the "white male" position of power may not be in place because it is in the majority, but because it is dominant. This is certainly true in my work team, where I am often the only American native English-speaking person in a meeting, but English is the corporately-required language because it is dominant! Similarly, meeting times, meeting styles, and communications methods may be chosen by the dominant culture, even if it isn't in the majority (and with the rapidity with which work has gone global in the last three years, the American English-speaking cultural is seldom in the majority even where it remains dominant).
2. Focus less on encouraging cultural diversity, more on integrating cultures into strong personal relationships,working relationships, and productive teams. Olver and Baugh talk about stereotypes as damaging, but there are real difference between cultures in personality, personal space, personal and social values, time and distance perecption, and so on. My corporation uses a "Culture Clash" website that describes many different cultures at a high level (necessarily based on "stereotypes") and lets users select different cultures and places them in various workplace case studies to show how they would interact. More of this kind of training would be helpful.
3. Focus on language as both a carrier and a barrier to integrating culture. As I said earlier, English is the required language of corporate communications even in the large global corporation where I work. This has a huge bundle of implications for both effective communications (a large and often majority proportion of the workforce is forced to work in a second language) and effective team relationships and cultural integration. I would like to hear more about how to manage language to yield both more effective work teams and more fulfilling personal relationships with my teammates from around the globe.
Still, Olver and Baugh do provide beginning value, because in the day to day of many workplaces even in 2009, as much as I hate to accept it, barriers of race, gender, religion and other cultural distinctions remain very real.
--flexible hours and work location, made possible by cheaper and faster network technology (broadband and wireless in the home) have emptied out the traditional office. This reduces face to face interactions between teems, and is also made necessary by
--global work teams that span continents and time zones, so that someone is always working on the edges of the traditional workday, and these geographic distances and cultural and language differences mean that
--a vast majority of personal conversations and team meetings are done via email, instant message, and telephone conference.
By and large, these changes have been driven up from within, as conscious decisions to spur cultural diversity have been overtaken by the leading edge of the wave of global business integration which has made diversity a reality, not just a desirable goal in large corporations.
So, at the peak of the economic pyramid, events have largely overtaken Olver and Baugh's book, which seeks to explain what cultural diversity is, how to recognize myths, stereotypes, and prejudices that work against it, and how to encourage it in the workplace. Rising out of their business as diversity consultants, they have targeted the book toward the many of their clients and potential clients farther down in the food chain who are still wrestling with how to encourage and implement diversity.
Add to these factors the stress of the worldwide (and still deepening as I write on February 21, 2009) economic collapse, and the American workplace is a tough place be right now.
So Olver and Baugh's book is valuable as a beginning primer, and "beginning" it is. It is heavily descriptive, with 16 chapters of terminology and description written in very short, simple declarative sentences, leading up to three chapters of prescriptive advice on how to hire, retain, and inspire diversity. The writing style suggests to me that these were originally PowerPoint bullet points from their corporate workshops that were then copied into a Word document with transitions added to make it flow as a continuous text. Not a bad way to start, but without the verbal amplifications that go along with them in a stand-up presentation, PowerPoint declarative statements read like a very stilted, elemental language that is beneath the audience's comprehension level. The authors should revise the text to put more of their spoken presentation into the writing here.
So the book wasn't written at the level I needed to help to clarify my role as a technical professional working effectively with technical teams in China, India, Ireland, and other locations where culture, language, and communications technology have a daily impact (good and bad) on our effectiveness. I don't need to encourage diversity, I need to learn how to utilize it to help me on a daily basis! So some suggestions should Olver and Baugh decide to update this book:
1. Use the term "dominant" instead of "majority" culture. In the workplace, cultural changes have come on so fast in the three years since this book was written that the "white male" position of power may not be in place because it is in the majority, but because it is dominant. This is certainly true in my work team, where I am often the only American native English-speaking person in a meeting, but English is the corporately-required language because it is dominant! Similarly, meeting times, meeting styles, and communications methods may be chosen by the dominant culture, even if it isn't in the majority (and with the rapidity with which work has gone global in the last three years, the American English-speaking cultural is seldom in the majority even where it remains dominant).
2. Focus less on encouraging cultural diversity, more on integrating cultures into strong personal relationships,working relationships, and productive teams. Olver and Baugh talk about stereotypes as damaging, but there are real difference between cultures in personality, personal space, personal and social values, time and distance perecption, and so on. My corporation uses a "Culture Clash" website that describes many different cultures at a high level (necessarily based on "stereotypes") and lets users select different cultures and places them in various workplace case studies to show how they would interact. More of this kind of training would be helpful.
3. Focus on language as both a carrier and a barrier to integrating culture. As I said earlier, English is the required language of corporate communications even in the large global corporation where I work. This has a huge bundle of implications for both effective communications (a large and often majority proportion of the workforce is forced to work in a second language) and effective team relationships and cultural integration. I would like to hear more about how to manage language to yield both more effective work teams and more fulfilling personal relationships with my teammates from around the globe.
Still, Olver and Baugh do provide beginning value, because in the day to day of many workplaces even in 2009, as much as I hate to accept it, barriers of race, gender, religion and other cultural distinctions remain very real.
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