Suppose, you are a manager at an organization that has decided it needs a more diverse workforce. What steps or techniques will you use to accomplish this goal? What steps will you take to retain diverse employees once you have successfully recruited them?
Diversifying Workforce
The author is a manager at an organization that has decided it needs a more diverse workforce. He/she would use the following steps to accomplish this goal:
1. First step would be to encourage diverse workforce among the individuals who are currently working through mentoring, which enhances cross-cultural relationship.
2. The author would also follow “rotating approach” by changing the positions of the different employees so that employees could identify and explore the knowledge about the diverse workplace.
3. The author would introduce “gender quota approach” to break up discrimination and to help in creating a more diverse management structure in the organization.
4. The author would conduct training programs which would allow the organization to create awareness about the incorrect assumptions and biases over discrimination.
5. Also, advertising job positions in locations and forums where there is a widely diverse audience would help the organization to make the workforce more diverse.
Once the diverse employees are recruited, it is a great challenge to retain them in the organization. The following processes and programs could help the company to retain its diverse employees:
1. Mentoring program would help retain the minorities and P, an auditing MNC, is currently using this program to teach the protégé about diversity in organization by the mentors who are different in culture and gender.
2. Creating processes such as advertising in diversity, which P is doing already to either attract the new applicants or to promote the existing employees to retain.
3. The company could use diversity initiative - “Employment resources groups” to involve the group of employees to some common dimension of diversity.
4. Communication of management with the current employees through survey and interviews is necessary to determine their needs, in order to create the strategic plan for retention.
5. By conducting exit interviews with the leaving employees and change the current structure and strategies of the organization accordingly would help retain the currently working diverse employees.