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The Role of Human Resources in the Efforts to Prevent Discrimination and to Increase Diversity

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The Role of Human Resources in the Efforts to Prevent Discrimination and to Increase Diversity
Nuttha Udhayanang
PA 741, Spring 2015
West Virginia University

We are proceeding toward a world in which barriers of countries and cultures are shrinking due to globalizes in economics and advances in technology. This phenomenon creates an even more competitive world. Capital and physical resources alone could no longer improve efficiency of organizations. Together with the current demographic trend within the United States, I believe that employing diversified workforce is a very essence for every organization. The organizations that employ quality and competitive workforce regardless of their age, attitude, language, and religion can become competitive in the current situation. Human Resource is an important asset in increasing and managing diversity, and preventing discrimination among workforce of any organization.
Workforce diversity can be defined as “similarities and difference among employees in terms of age, culture background, physical abilities and disabilities, race religion, gender, and sexual orientation” (Saxena, 2014). It cannot be denied that diversity makes the workforce heterogeneous and is beneficial to any organizations. It can increase workers retention and productivity, as diversity improves interpersonal relationship within the organizations. It can also enhance the organizations’ responsiveness to an increasingly diverse world of customers, improving relations with the surrounding community, increase the organizations ability to cope with change, and expand the creativity of the organizations.
Human resource management is concerned with managing “human aspect” of the organization in such a way that organizational objectives along with employee development and satisfaction (Saxena, 2014). Diverse workforce is one of the biggest management challenges. It is not only simply acknowledging differences in people, but also involves recognizing the value of difference, combating discrimination, and promoting inclusiveness.
With the diversification workforce, the organizations are being challenged with losses in personnel and work productivity due to prejudice and discrimination, and complaints and legal actions against them. In employment discrimination lawsuits, the organizations will lose almost all the time. Negative attitudes and behaviors within the organization toward diversity are surely play the big part in discrimination problem, and can be barriers to organizational diversity. Therefore, an effective management of human resources is an essential role in preventing discrimination and increasing diversity within the organizations.
There are three most important key points in making the efforts to prevent discrimination and to increase diversity within the organizations. First administrators must understand discrimination and its consequences. Second, HR administrators must recognize their own cultural biases and prejudices. Finally, the organizations must be willing to change if necessary. With these concepts in mind, there are suggestions and tools that could lead the organizations toward the effective management of workforce diversification.
The most basic tool in dealing with this management challenge is communication within the organizations. This can be done in both formal and informal methods. For example, the organizations should establish policies in writing that explicitly forbid prejudice and discriminatory behaviors. These policies should be included in employee manuals, mission statements, and other written communications.
HR can also train the managers in the implementation of these policies. The managers should acknowledge that it is their responsibility to prevent such problem and create a work environment and culture that employment discrimination will not occur. Such training should allow managers to recognize signs and symptoms that discrimination is occurring and know how to address these actions.
The organizations (their HR) should actively seek input from minority groups. Soliciting the opinions and involvement of minority group on important work committees is beneficial not only to their productivity, but also their self-esteem and harmonious working environment. This will also increases their feelings of belonging to the organizations.
The role of HR in the efforts to prevent discrimination and to increase diversity is not limited to training and establishing policies. HR could create and promote social events among staffs within the organizations. This organization-sponsored social events can be very useful in getting members of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds together and providing them with opportunities to learn about one another.
Work environment within the organizations is not limited to the physical environment, but also includes the way of approaching the problems, decision-making manners, and workplace interaction. Promoting a flexible work environment could be “beneficial to people from nontraditional cultural backgrounds because their approaches to problems are more likely to be different from past norms” (Cox, 1991).
Furthermore, HR could educate (e.g., organizational seminars, train executive staffs and manager) staffs to not assume and generalized values and opinions. According to Konrad (2006), in the absence of reliable information, individuals tend to assume that others are similar to them. This is very likely to be an inappropriate assumption. Therefore, it is crucial for the organizations to encourage their staffs to learn about others or at least do not make any assumption with the lack of information. This method will not only create a favorable working environment with diversification workforce, but also will shape the way they work (e.g., making decision bases on reliable information).
Finally, it is recommend that the organizations establish and maintain systems or programs that can continually monitor the organizations’ policies and practices. The organizations must ensure that those policies and practices continue to serve their purpose and make any changes that necessary, which can be done by conducting survey or researches.

References
Cox, T. (1991). The multicultural organization. Executive, 5(2), 34-47. doi:10.5465/AME.1991.4274675.
Konrad, A. M., Prasad, P., & Pringle, J. K. (2006). Human Resource Strategies to Manage Workforce Diversity. In The handbook of workplace diversity (pp. 53-74). London: Sage Publications.
Saxena, A. (2014). Workforce Diversity: A Key to Improve Productivity. Procedia Economics and Finance, 11, 76-85.

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