Organizations Must Embrace Diversity to Find Success

Using an example of an organisation, examine the business case and strategies for promoting diversity and an inclusive environment within the workplace, while also discussing the role of first-line management in embedding this approach.

“A firm’s success and competitiveness depends on its ability to embrace diversity and draw on the skills, understanding and experience of all its people” (CIPD, 2008).

In order for an organisation to become successful they need diversity throughout their company. Equal opportunities are very important in today’s society and people should not be treated differently due to their gender, race, ethnicity, age or sexual orientation. Many companies have released a Diversity Policy within their company to ensure they have a diverse workforce; an example of this is Group4Securicor (G4S) who are one of the largest employers worldwide. G4S are a very diverse profit-making organisation in what has historically been a very male dominated environment. “G4S is the world’s leading international security solution group” (G4S, 2014). G4S have stated that their main focus is the number of women that are represented in hierarchy jobs in the business. G4S introduced their diversity strategy in 2008, which has been put in place to ensure issues, like race discrimination, are addressed and tackled. The main focus of this essay will be how first-line management tackles the issue of discrimination and how their strategic plans have bettered the company.

Diversity, when concerned with a workplace, is about more than just equality, it’s about working and ensuring there’s variety of different people, cultures and practices for the advantage of the organisation (Learning At Work, 2011). As mentioned above there are diffe...

... middle of paper ...

...iously. Support of first line managers is assured as poor scoring in this anonymous survey will potentially impact on their pay rise or bonus (G4S, 2013).

G4S like many other companies have realised the importance of managing diversity and the policies that are now in place are designed to ensure that they are not only compliant with legislation but are maximising their recruitment and retention of the best staff. These policies are not only in place but are actively managed to support the vision and values of a modern thinking business. However, G4S only have two strategies in place and to maximise the possibility of eliminating discrimination they should bring in another strategy. The first-line managers play a massive part in promoting diversity in the workplace as it is up to them to ensure that the employees of the company know the policy and abide by it.