Managing cultural and racial diversity at the workplace

Cultural and racial diversity is at the heart of American society. The workplace is where this is more vividly reflected than in most other places. Although historically the US has been a land of immigrants, a “nation of nations”, the ethnic mix has been more pronounced in the American workplace since about the end of World War II. This makes it all the more important for the American workplace to know how to accommodate cultural and racial diversity. American businesses and managements are well aware that for any organization to grow, it has to shed the parochial, racist attitude and move ahead by infusing ideas, which can never be the sole preserve of one race.

Carries many benefits,
Diversity at the workplacefar from being an obstacle, is actually a means to help a business do better. It carries the advantage of making employees more understanding and tolerant of other cultures. It greatly reduces narrow and confined thinking. Along with this, it also brings about a concrete benefit. Despite all the talk of a society without divisions; it is a fact that most people relate to their communities. Hence, a person of a certain ethnicity can help sell products or services better within her or his ethnic group.

HR’s role
With diversity at the workplace a reality of American life, what are the steps that HR can take to accommodate this?

Making the staff understand the importance of diversity: This is the first step that HR can take to make sure employees get to respect diversity at the workplace. Perhaps no workplace, small or big, is full of only one ethnicity. The American workplace is, after all, a microcosm of the society at large, as we have noted in the beginning.

Setting the example:
What can be a better way of driving home an idea than to practice it? If HR itself is free from racial and other prejudices, it will set a great practical step to making employees understand that for themselves. On the contrary, if HR is biased towards a person purely because of race, it will have no moral conviction to enforce a prejudice-free environment at office.

Training:
Perhaps the easiest, most powerful and most effective step HR can take to make sure the workplace respects cultural and racial diversity is to get people of different races and cultures to meet each other. If HR can facilitate open and frequent interaction between people of different ethnicities, it will have served its intention of managing cultural and racial diversity at the workplace best.