Importance of Workplace Diversity

Diversity is the ability of an organization to support people from various race, nationality, gender, religion, ethnicity and culture in the work environment without any kind of discrimination on any basis. Diversity helps organizations by assimilating different ideas, viewpoints and opinions that increases the knowledge base of the company (Barak 2016). The companies acting at a multinational level needs to cater to different kind of population who are diverse by demographical standards. The inclusion of a diverse workforce in the management and work process helps the company understand the needs of the people from different culture back grounds. Management actually means managing people so that the total productivity of the company can be increased, a diverse work force and a management team with people from various cultural back grounds help in knowledge input, innovative contribution in problem solving methods, and understanding of the need of the market which constitutes of people from different cultural back grounds (Harvey and Allard 2015). In all these ways the policy of work force diversity will help the AXA in improving its business in a sustainable way and will help in expansion of its business globally.

Ans 2. The stakeholders of the company include the directors, the managers, the employees, the shareholders, the investors, the clients and everyone who is directly or indirectly involved with the process of the business. In this case the important stakeholders who can help in implementing and enforcing the policy throughout the organization are the human resource manager, the directors and the employees. The decision made by the directorial board to enforce the policy of work place diversity will ultimately be given to the human resource manager to be implemented on the ground level. The human resource department of the company comprising of the human resource manager and the human resource executives will take positive actions to increase the diversity of the company by appointing employees from culturally diverse background. The next step is to initiate awareness programs to educate the existing employees about the positive effects of work place diversity. “Communication campaign” and “executive level involvement” will be employed to increase the awareness of diversity among the people. Diversity in new recruitments and dispersing the diverse workforce throughout the organization in different departments. The whole process will be tracked by documenting the developments and the highest management will be monitoring the progress closely.

Ans 3. The process of implementation will be designed perfectly so that the workforce diversity policy can be implemented properly throughout the organization. First of all, the employees within the organization will be educated through awareness programs and different communication campaigns about the positive effects of workforce diversity (Patrick and Kumar 2012). In the next step the creation of a workplace that is integration friendly and that which allows and helps in better employee engagement will be built by enabling “diversity themes” in the processes. All these actions, their implementation and their progress will be documented. The recruitment process conducted by the HR department will focus on recruiting employees from diverse background from different cultures. Cultural diversity in the workforce also helps in exchanges of new ideas and better risk management because of innovative problem solving abilities of different people from different cultural backgrounds. Human Resource department and the Human Resource manager are most important in enabling and enforcing diversity in workforce because recruitment and retention are both functions of the HR department (Guillaume et al. 2017). The awareness program that will be taken up within the company will have seminars, sessions and campaigns that will highlight the importance of diversity of work force within an organization, and case studies will be analyzed of the existing famous companies that have implemented workforce diversity in their company and reaped its benefits.

Stakeholders Involved in Implementation

Ans 3. This policy is framed keeping in mind all the points but still it needed minor changes in it as, the policy framed does not clearly state that it encourages equality on the premises of the gender (Haile 2012), and in addition, it had also not mentioned any sought of discrimination or other type of act that needs any disciplinary action. The disciplinary actions should be more precisely mentioned.

This policy differs from the diversity policy of my previous workplace as the present policy has planned to promote awareness of diversity policy with the help of effective communication campaign which lacks in the previous one. The previous office only used to enforce the diversity in the recruitment process. However, the post the recruitment process it is required to ensure that the diverse workforce be made comfortable in their position and no discrimination is made on any grounds.
Part 2: Policy for Wesfarmers

Wesfarmers aims to create a diverse work environment by implementing an inclusive policy for people belonging to different gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, family responsibilities, cultural background and disability. It also has polices for including the indigenous people in their workforce. Diversity increases productivity of the organisation (Saxena 2014). 

Potential benefits of the diversity policy of Wesfarmers can be:

• Widening the experience and skills of the workforce pool, from where the company can employ the best resources to meet the organizational goals
• Provision of better alignment with the needs of the customers from different background
• Improvement in creativity, innovation and invention, and
• Creation of a model of corporate citizenship.

The major goals of the company are to ensure the delivery of satisfactory returns to the shareholders and stakeholders through financial gains and efficient management system. The diversity policies help to follow the core values, that is, integrity, accountability, boldness and openness. Through the implementation of the diversity policies, the company includes resources from different background that help to achieve them integration among different cultures, accountability of the talents to perform better, bringing boldness in the characters that helps in decision making and openness is achieved in welcoming people of different background, which ensures cultural bonding.

The company has a diversified business portfolio and it has been successful to develop a highly focused, disciplined and unique business culture. The stakeholders want to have a diversity policy for including more disable people in the workforce, irrespective of their culture or background for making their lives better. These are valid points that can enhance the diversity policies if implemented.

Action plan for policy implementation

To get the feedback from others regarding this draft policy and action plan, these are sent via email and the concerned persons were asked to reply what they think about the policy. From the feedback it is found that, people have welcomed the policy and they are willing to cooperate with Wesfarmers Management to incorporate more disabled persons among themselves and provide the necessary support to them. Regarding the action plan, people from the Wesfarmers Board have asked to lower the scale of the budget as that will put pressure on the budget for other departments for the current financial year.

Implementation Process for Workforce Diversity Policy

Disabled workforce diversity policy 2018 is an extended part of the diversity policy of Wesfarmers. Till now, they have focused on gender diversity and increasing employment of indigenous people. From July 1, 2018, Wesfarmers will start implementing the policy for increasing the workforce diversity by increasing the number of disabled people in the human resources. In addition measure to stop any discrimination or bullying to them would be enforced (Leng and Yazdanifard 2014)

As per the feedback from the Wesfarmers Board, the budget for the all the actions are reduced. The orientation budget will be AU $500, cost of training to the supervisors will be AU $2000, recruitment cost will be AU $35000, and cost of training to the new joinees will be AU $3000.

We are glad to inform you that, Wesfarmers has decided to implement a new diversity policy following launch of the Disability Employment Services Reform 2018, by the Australian government. As suggested by you all in the last meeting, we are going to introduce Disabled Workforce Diversity Policy 2018. This policy will not only benefit the community by improving their lives, but will also benefit the company through the contribution of their special skills in various departments. The policy will be implemented from July 31, 2018. We hope to inform you about the positive effects of the policy once the new plan rolls out.

The unintended impact of the policy implementation would be a cut down in the budget for other departments in Wesfarmers for the present financial year. To adjust to the fall in budget, these departments should cut the costs, which might lead to reducing the number of existing employees.

There are several types of tools and indicators that can be used for planning, and measuring the impact of the policy implementation. For the policy planning, various communication tools, such as, positioning mapping, and policy influence tools, like, 4 P’s of influence, networking, public participation etc. can be used. For this policy, the economic and socio cultural indicators are more suitable for measuring the impact. Costs of operation, maintenance, capital and user cost are economic indicators that will measure the economic feasibility of the policy. Public acceptance, participation and stimulation of sustainable behavior are socio-cultural indicators that measure the impact on the workforce of the company (Adler and Seligman 2016).

To monitor the implementation of the new policy in Wesfarmers, the performances of the new as well as experienced employees will be monitored and measured by using KPI and other monitoring tools and models, such as, real time business monitoring, metrics etc. (Grindle 2017).

The new diversity policy will be reviewed after one year from its implementation in Wesfarmers. Measuring the performances of the employees and reviewing that whether the policy has been successful in achieving the goals of the company in the past one year. Feedbacks will be collected from the new and old employees and also from the Board members by using a survey to know about the positive and negative aspects of the policy and whether it has been fruitful. Based on the feedback, the policy amendment can be done. It would be seen whether anyone within the organization is opposed to such diversity or not (Thomas 2012 ).

References

Adler, A. and Seligman, M.E., 2016. Using wellbeing for public policy: Theory, measurement, and recommendations. International Journal of Wellbeing, 6(1).

Barak, M.E.M., 2016. Managing diversity: Toward a globally inclusive workplace. Sage Publications.

Grindle, M.S., 2017. Politics and policy implementation in the Third World. Princeton University Press.

Guillaume, Y.R., Dawson, J.F., Otaye?Ebede, L., Woods, S.A. and West, M.A., 2017. Harnessing demographic differences in organizations: What moderates the effects of workplace diversity?. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38(2), pp.276-303.

Haile, G.A., 2012. Unhappy working with men? Workplace gender diversity and job-related well-being in Britain. Labour Economics, 19(3), pp.329-350

Harvey, C.P. and Allard, M., 2015. Understanding and managing diversity: Readings, cases, and exercises. Pearson.

Leng, C.Z. and Yazdanifard, R., 2014. The relationship between cultural diversity and workplace bullying in multinational enterprises. Global Journal of Management And Business Research.

Patrick, H.A. and Kumar, V.R., 2012. Managing workplace diversity: Issues and challenges. Sage Open, 2(2), p.2158244012444615.

Saxena, A., 2014. Workforce diversity: A key to improve productivity. Procedia Economics and Finance, 11, pp.76-85.

Thomas, K.M. ed., 2012. Diversity resistance in organizations. Psychology Press.