Value of Diversity in the Workplace

Essay by reneehobgoodUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, August 2009

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The world's increasing globalization requires more interaction among people from diverse cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds than ever before (Green, Lopez, Wysocki, Kepner, 2009). Past businesses had a hard time with diversification in the workplace. Workplace diversity refers to the variety of differences between people in an organization (Greenberg, 2004). Diversity encounters race, education, ethnic groups and more. Capitalizing on diversity in the workplace has become an important issue for businesses today. For this reason the need for diversity is needed. Businesses that do not recognize the change of needing diversity in the workplace is setting themselves up for failure.

The Issue of Diversity and CommunicationDuring the 80's, the insurance industry were not as diversified as it should have been. There were many challenges before they recognized the need to diversify. The major changes in the insurance industry started in the 80's. The area I lived in had a migration of people from Mexico and Vietnam.

There were a need for insurance agents to work in those communities, but the insurance company I worked for only had English speaking people. As you can imagine, this created a major problem. Finally, the insurance industry realized that diversity in the workplace was a reality. Once Spanish and Vietnamese speaking employees were hire, there was issue of understanding cultures. Not understanding cultural differences can create more problems than you can imagine in the workplace. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Human Resources Division culture can get in the way of diversity when there is conflict between a person's individual culture, working environment, and their organization (n. d.). Many changes took place in the insurance company, before they were able to see a profit. It took approximately 2 years before they saw a profit, all because of the culture and communication issue. AValue...