Workforce Diversity a Diverse Workforce Thesis

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Our company has low turnover, so new positions are not that common. When they do arise, we like to hire the best people. There is a risk in enacting a mandatory policy of hiring minorities we lack that we may be taking on inferior candidates. They may allow us to reach some ethnic communities, but at the expense of overall efficiency and productivity (Pfeifer, 2009). There could also be a backlash amongst our current workers if they feel that we are no longer hiring on merit. The third drawback is that we may have difficulty finding the appropriate ethnic candidates in our home geographic area. We could significantly increase the cost of brining on new people if we begin offering relocation allowances to attract ethnic candidates from other towns and counties. Lastly, the existing sales force could feel slighted in that their talents as sales people may take a back seat to their ethnicity or gender. They may not see increased diversity as an enhancement but rather as a threat, since the sale depends on factors beyond their control.

These disadvantages hint at the number of different obstacles we might face in increasing diversity. Many members of the company may resent the idea because they do not see the benefits. The culture of the business may not be amenable to the type of rapid shift that will be seen if we increase diversity quickly, for example (European Commission, 2003). Moreover, identifying qualified prospects and accommodating different cultures could place too strong a burden on our human resources department.

That said, there are a number of advantages. The most obvious is that improving our cross-cultural knowledge will unlock new customers, an important consideration for a sales organization that is losing market share.

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The second is that the company as a whole can benefit from perspectives -- we may open up new product lines and new geographies if we can gain more knowledge about the customer base. This enhanced creativity in the workplace was cited as one of the most important benefits of diversity in a study by the European Union (European Commission, 2003).

The third advantage is that we may be able to gain competitive advantage over other firms by having strong cross-cultural sales knowledge. Lastly, increasing diversity will better position the company for the future. The market share declines were a long-term trend, in part because of the long-term demographic trends in the marketplace (Krotz, 2009). Increased diversity is not going away. As such, the sooner we embrace the trend the sooner we can reverse the negative market share trend.

The situation with the Arab store led us to a wholesale shift in our thinking. We realized that we were failing to capture entire segments of the market, simply because our competitors better understood how to sell to those markets. This occurred because we had ignored the value of diversity. The company ultimately made changes to its hiring practices in order to begin the slow process of increasing diversity. This was done after a careful study of the potential drawbacks, so that those problems could be addressed before they became unmanageable. The process is slow, given the low turnover, but hopefully the company has begun to see the benefits of increasing its diversity by reaching the full scope of its target market.

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