Cultural diversity is obvious in our personal gatherings, professions and businesses. Just take a moment and observe your surroundings, you will realize how much diversity is around you.

I belong to 70’s generation and frankly speaking I didn’t think that one day diversity will take over everything. As a businesswoman, I already have people from different cultures working in my office. Moreover, I keep on meeting individuals from all over the world. So, I recognize the worth of cultural diversity at workplace.

Time to Redefine Diversity:

Diversity today is not just difference of skin color. Immigrants and cultural exposure are two key factors bringing diversity everywhere in the world.

It’s time to redefine diversity considering all its new but significant dimensions for new global workforce. The most recently detected diversity attributes are varied and numerous. Gardenswarz & Rowe suggest all important diversity attributes in their ‘Four-Layer Model of Diversity’. These are covered in four key dimensions including:

• Personality (native and immigrants’ social mixing effects it)
• Internal dimensions (race, sexual orientation, disability, age etc)
• Organizational dimensions (business unit, tenure, level, work location etc).
• External dimensions (geographical location, education, marital status, religion etc)

Cultural inclusion is Imperative but challenging:

Though its need of time to expand your business horizons and for this acceptance of cultural diversity is imperative. It’s not as easy as appears to be. You may encounter challenges such as communication barriers, employee resistance to change, implementation of diversity policies, and diversity management. To beat all these challenges, you must formulate a strong strategy and implement it by all means. In fact, you need to be more daring and proactive for cultural inclusion in your business arena.

Benefits of Cultural Diversity at workplace.

By encouraging diversity at workplace, employees will learn from each other that will enhance their skills. Eventually, your business will flourish more. When your business starts growing you will ultimately think about employee welfare. Giving them benefits they actually need will help you in earning their loyalty. What benefits you can enjoy through cultural diversity?

• Increased adaptability with value-added solutions to problems
• Services range expansion from native to global level
• Competitive environment leading to higher productivity and ROI
• Larger pool of expertise with variety of viewpoints
• It’s the best way to control talent crisis

How to do this all?

1. Involve everyone from senior management to lower staff when taking diversity initiative at workplace. This will make you survive from expected or unexpected resistance to your idea of cultural inclusion.
2. Promote openness in your company and encourage workers to share their ideas. Give equal respect to everyone’s opinions.
3. Use training tools to shape a great diversity policy and also to make your employees understand the perspectives and benefits of cultural inclusion.
4. Start from top and motivate diversity in leading positions like managers and team leads.
5. Launch a survey to know employee satisfaction quotient about cultural diversity. It will help you in building more improved diversity policies.

Diversity at workplace stands for diverse workforce. Access the best pools of expertise and boost up your business. In a nutshell, future of diversity is quite bright as businesses have started working on diversity charter.