What Additional Competencies And Skills Required From An Hr Professional Managing A Company 's Diversity Portfolio?

Diversity is a wonderful asset to an organization and brings with it many benefits. Employees bring in their own personal experiences and knowledge to the team (Burns & Kerby, 2012). Having diverse teams allows for the possibility to fix a problem or perfect a process by using different employee’s experiences and past knowledge to find solutions. A diverse workforce can drive economic growth and capture a greater share of the consumer market (Burns & Kerby, 2012). With diversity as a core value, the recruitment pool is widened to find the most qualified candidate and reduces employee turnover as a result. An organization can be highly competitive with a diversity initiative by adapting to a changing environment (Burns & Kerby, 2012).

As Shen, Chanda, Netto, & Monga (2009) point out, "workforce diversity acknowledges the reality that people differ in many ways, visible or invisible, mainly age, gender, marital status, social status, disability, sexual orientation, religion, personality, ethnicity, and culture," (p. 235.). These differences will vary from place to place, and from organization to organization. Therefore, the human resources management must respond to the situational variables, not making generalizations about the needs of the organization to promote diversity and the strategies that can be implemented. The human resources manager risks wasting valuable resources on procedures, policies, and programs that are not fruitful in promoting genuine employee integration without understanding the specific variables impacting the organization at the moment. As the organization has already seen, hiring a diverse workforce is an insufficient action. Having an organizational culture that supports and promotes total team integration is a process requiring the support from every level of management. Management needs to play an active role in ensuring that diversity is represented in senior positions, if it hopes to see a productive and diverse workforce of subordinate personnel.

It have been proven effective in providing services to individuals from a wide spread of diverse backgrounds. Cultural competence is understanding a set of congruent behaviors, knowledge, attitudes and policies that enable effective work in cross-cultural situations (Bazron, Cross, Dennis, & Isaacs, 1989). This means that an individual trains to understand different cultural groups. Cultural competency training is beneficial to all human service organizations because it aims to increase the knowledge and skills to improve one’s ability to efficiently serve different cultural groups therefore eliminating biases and

Understand cultural competence and why is it important especially for that have a diverse workforce.

From my perspective, cultural competence goes beyond tolerance for differences like ethnicity, age, gender, religion or sexual orientation. It’s not just about understanding diversity; it’s about diversity and inclusion. It requires allowing your professional and personal selves to be put in situations that push you outside of your comfort zone.

It is very important for leaders and managers to embrace a diverse workforce. Because diversity could possibly add influence to the market share, and could widen the talent in the recruitment process for the organization. In addition, the organizations could benefit from the various perspectives and experiences; for example, different races, gender, and age groups within the workforce. However, a diverse workforce might also be challenging; for instance, leaders and managers may spend too much time in promoting

Competencies that are necessary when working in a cultural diverse environment are, value in diversity, self-awareness of cultural, understanding dynamics within cultural interaction, and the institutionalization of dynamics within cultural dynamics. When valuing diversity, the organization should be respectful and accepting of the various cultural upbringings, traditions, communication and beliefs of others, thus providing a nondiscriminatory outlook of the individual (Van Roekel, 2008) Self-awareness of culture requires an individual to have an understanding of their own culture which is shaped by their interests, knowledge, experience, values, background, skills and beliefs. This awareness helps the individual to have an understanding of who they are, how they interact with others, and where they fit in with society and family and environment (Van Roekel, 2008).

There has been a vast demographic change in the Canadian workforce particularly immigration that will shape the future economy. This will change how Human Resources operate. Organizations are trying to hire various people from diverse backgrounds since a long time but hindrance in this process is continuously effecting organization goals. What steps can HR take to hire, train, and retain diversity in the workplace for better progress? How will this impact DND business and future planning? There will be a need for integrating strategic HR processes to create a diverse workforce for the future success of businesses.

Today’s management in the workforce is composed of all types of people verses thirty years ago when white males held a majority of upper-management positions in companies. These positions are now held by a mixture of ethnic back grounds and women who hold just as many if not more management positions then men. Just by looking at the changes in management demographics shows how important it is for people to understand cultural competency in the workplace. Dr. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. (1999) stated, “Diversity is the collective mixture of whomever we have in our workforce characterized by their differences and similarities” (p.11). Managers and supervisors must understand the characteristics of a diversity mature individual; they also need to be

Then the CEO and managers need to advertise for diversity, meaning they need to seek people of all races, genders, creeds and etc. The CEO and managers should have a percentage of diversity goals to fulfil. While doing all of this they need to keep the benefits within focus.

In studying cultural competence, it is important to acknowledge the fact that people were differently born, raised and lived in social, organizations and educational cultures. Therefore, the culture we are brought up to form a foundation on how we make assumptions, values, beliefs, values and behaviors. When people in an organization get to interact, there are many difference and similarities as pertains to their cultural expectations, and it often make the interaction between the employees be either challenging or exciting. Therefore, organizations contain people of that setting, and thus it is important to observe diversity for common understanding of one another (Barrera, 2010).

Understand the diversity in organization in the United States and figure it out diversity‘s positive and negative effects to manager and organization.

Layer one is one’s personality. This represents “a stable set of characteristics that is responsible for a person’s identity”. (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2008:37) The next layer will be that of internal dimension or primary dimension as per the workinfo.com human resources website. This layer represents those attributes which we have no control over such as Age, Ethnicity, Colour or Race, Gender, physical ability and our sexual orientation. This layer also determines most of our life situations as it mainly dictate with who we interact with, where we want to stay or what we earn. The third layer of diversity is referred to as the secondary dimension or external dimension of diversity. It includes external factors which influence who we are. Examples of this will be income, geographic location (where you live or where you were born), parental status, marital status, political affiliation, believes and work experiences. Other factors will also be our appearances and our personal habits. This layer will be the one that influences your attitude and behaviour towards life and other people. Diversity training in most organisations takes place at this layer. Why? B Vaugh (2007) (as quoted by Wikipedia, 2009), defines diversity training as “training for the purpose of increasing participants’ cultural awareness, knowledge and skills,

Organizations have been becoming increasingly diverse in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality. This diversity brings substantial potential benefits such as better decision making, greater creativity and innovation, and more successful marketing to different types of customers. But, increasing cultural differences within a workforce also bring potential costs in higher turnovers, interpersonal conflicts, and communicational breakdowns. The utilities of diversity training and the essential managerial skills required for effectively managing diversity will also be discussed.

'Cross Cultural Competence ' is and should be the aim of all those dealing with multicultural clients, customers or colleagues. 'Competence ' is the final stage of cross cultural understanding and signifies the actor 's ability to work effectively across cultures. Cross cultural competency is beyond knowledge, awareness and sensitivity in that it is the digestion, integration and transformation of all the skills and information acquired through them, applied to create cultural synergy within the workplace.