5.2 Providing employee voice and influence  (Page 3/4)

In conclusion, there are many possible benefits to a firm associated with providing employees with voice and influence within the organization. However, in order for these benefits to be realized, management must not only provide employees with an outlet to speak, but must also take the information into consideration and follow up with visible action. In this way, an organization can attend to its most important stakeholders, the employees, and garner return on its investment in its human capital.

Managing differences in organizations

By Hanoi N Soto Garcia and Nora Martin

In today’s business environment, an increasing trend towards teamwork, a larger presence of women and ethnic minorities in the workplace, and a greater exposure to international businesses and cultures are constantly challenging employees from a variety of industries in all parts of the world. This posts a greater opportunity for people to learn from cultural and personal differences and create a more productive work environment. Thomas L Friedman, in The World is Flat , makes the following comment after one of his trips to Bangalore, India:

It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world

Organizations usually take one of two paths in managing diversity: (1) they encourage people of diverse backgrounds to blend in for the benefit of fairness and equality; or (2) they set them apart in jobs that relate specifically to their backgrounds, assigning them, for example, to areas that require them to interface with clients or customers of the same identity group. African American MBAs often find themselves marketing products to inner-city communities; Latino Americans are frequently positioned to market to Latinos or work for Latin American subsidiaries. In those kinds of cases, companies are operating on the assumption that the main virtue identity groups have to offer is knowledge of their own people. This assumption is limited and detrimental to diversity efforts. Diversity goes beyond increasing the number of different identity-group affiliations on the payroll. Such an effort is merely the first step in managing a diverse workforce for the organization’s utmost benefit. Diversity should be understood as the “varied perspectives approaches to work that members of different identity groups bring” (Thomas&Ely, 1996).

Leaders realize that increasing demographic variation does not in itself increase organizational effectiveness. They realize that it is how a company defines diversity and what it does with the experiences of being a diverse organization that delivers on the promise.