Diversity – challenges and opportunities

Published On - April 11, 2020

Indrajit Chatterjee

In my career journey, I had a great opportunity to work across diverse industry sectors like Telecom, FMCG, Pharma, Chemicals, Automotive etc. and with various nationalities from different geographies in South Asia, South East Asia and Europe. In this process, I have always experienced personal challenges and dilemmas while working in diverse sectors and people from different cultures.

The imperativeness of the multicultural organization, with a diverse workforce, in the face of globalization is increasingly being emphasized. Organizations are now accepting and valuing a multicultural workforce comprising employees with diverse ethnic, racial, religious and gender backgrounds. Overall, statistics on diversity are nudging upwards globally, with a lot of large companies making dedicated efforts to enhance diversity. Some of the studies carried out on Diversity in Fortune 500 companies have clearly shown that Diversity has a positive effect on bottom-line and shareholder value. Enhanced business performance has been seen on various aspects like Higher Profitability, Customer experience, Return on Investment etc.

Our ability to understand, embrace and operate in a multicultural world — both in the marketplace and in the workplace — is critical to sustainability. However managing the diversity can be challenging and can keep Human Resource professionals on their toes, as here we are talking about sensitive and attitudinal aspect – Human emotions and feelings. It is the humane approach that plays an important role in the culture and operation of organizations. Let us look at some of the challenges that diversity poses.

‘Setting boundaries by Geographical and Locational difference’

Geographically spread, diverse teams come with different dynamics than homogeneous teams. These groups bring with itself both, an increased challenge and opportunity: diverse groups often experience miscommunication and disabling conflict. Different languages and various cultural backgrounds increase the difficulty of communication between employees in the workplaces.

‘Old versus New’

The first wave of baby boomers are retiring, while Generation X (“Gen X”) and Generation Y (“Gen Y”) are becoming the fastest growing age groups in the workforce and the next generation of leaders. Managing multi-generation workforce with clear understanding of the aspirations and motivation is extremely crucial for most of the corporates. This has got tremendous impact in terms developing HR policy, programs and initiatives which can address needs and requirements of various generations. This requires understanding and leveraging the differences between generational groups which when not addressed can seed in demotivation with a dis-engaged multi-generational workforce with suboptimal business performance.

Generational diversity when embraced with integration at all structural levels in the hierarchy, including management/executive positions; integration of in formal/social networks of the business; absence of prejudice and discrimination; and a mind set that not only accommodates diversity but also values that diversity can bring in cross mentoring culture which positively impacts the business.

Communication & collaboration

People with different cultural background can succumb to non-collaboration due to communication gap. There are difficulties to understand each other quickly and correctly. In addition, an intercultural communication may encounter more specific problems than a communication with one culture does. With different knowledge or experience, people in an intercultural communication have more difficulty to interpret others’ behavior, which increases their uncertainty of how other persons will respond to the communication or support their efforts and initiatives.

Industry familiarity

Whenever organisations try to widen their talent pool by hiring people from other industries or related industries to develop diversity of thinking and approach one key challenge emerges on inclusive approach. More often the new comer from other industry may find challenges of getting accepted if an inclusive approach is missing.

Gender challenges

I see a good progress has happened in India in terms of improving the gender ratio at workplace even in India companies other than the MNCs. However the issues relating to gender are not limited to a good “ratio”, it’s about equal and fair opportunity, acceptance and breaking the stereotypes on jobs and roles. Few industries like Banking and Financial services have really come with excellent women leaders in the their senior leadership team, which in a way a great motivation for young female employee to aspire for. However few questions in the whole process still remain – Are we hiring the right talent in the process? Are we creating a workplace where merit, fair play and respect are the foundation for building an institution ?.

We need to remember the key challenge of diversity lies in inclusivity and therefore more efforts in building inclusive culture and behaviour in the workplace must be a top priority for the organisation.

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