Managing relationships and leading changes within the heterogeneous workplace

 Article;

Khine Wamono, A. A. (2022). Managing relationships and leading changes within the heterogeneous workplace. Clinica Chimica Acta, 530, S454–S454. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cca.2022.04.763

Summary;

This article speaks about the forever changing workforce, and how workplace diversity is becoming more and more prominent in Canada. A workforce that is diverse in terms of age, gender, education, skills, employment status, social status, nationality, ethnic background, culture, religion, and race is a true advantage for the workforce, but brings a set of challenges as well. It can be a difficult challenge to manage diversity ensuring  every staff member maintains productive. The article focuses on two main approaches when trying to manage a diverse work force. The first approach being the diversity management approach and the second being the cross cultural approach.

Diversity Management;

The article touches on how to properly manage a diverse workplace. In short, diversity management focuses on ensuring that the similarities and differences among the varied workforce members are acknowledged and celebrated. Diversity management seeks to establish and preserve a good work environment where everyone can effectively contribute to the strategic objectives and goals of the business. Diversity management tends to focus on ensuring each race, culture, religion is valued and recognized within the organization. It is critical to ensure proper training, hiring and recruitment as well as proper procedures are put in place relating to efficient diversity management throughout the workplace.

Cross Cultural Collaboration;

  Cross cultural collaboration is the second approach most commonly used when managing a diverse workplace. This approach focuses primarily on creating an inclusive work environment. Including a variety of team based and group based work, this approach focuses on taking advantage of the many different ideas and perspectives that come from the diverse workplace. Cross Cultural Collaboration emphasizes that the many different perspectives and ideas should be seen as assets and should be used positively, rather than seen as negative liabilities. 

Personal Experience; 

Personally, I don't have any experience in management and especially no experience in managing a diverse workplace. However, I believe that these 2 approaches will be crucial for the success of a diverse workplace. I believe that a diverse workplaces positives aspects, greatly outweighs the negatives. The differences in opinions, beliefs, ideas and work styles is a huge advantage for the business as it allows for employees to learn and gain different insights from one another. Secondly, having the ability to work with people from different  races, cultures, ages, genders etc can help bring different perspectives and can lead to better collaboration among employees. In my opinion I think that both the diversity management and cross cultural collaboration approaches will be greatly beneficial in ensuring the workplace is properly managed. Having a diverse workplace can lead to some miscommunication throughout employees which may ultimately lead to some struggles among employees throughout the workplace. I believe that along with the 2 diversity management approaches, it will be critical for the management team to impose strict organizational behaviour techniques to ensure the workplace is ran as seamless as possible. I believe that as a part of creating strong organizational behaviour in a diverse workplace, the management team should focus on strong team building activities, performance management systems, leadership development opportunities as well as emphasize a strong work-life balance. I believe that these core organizational strategies along with the 2 management approaches will ensure a strong and effective team of employees throughout a diverse workplace.