1.0 INTRODUCTION
Cultural diversity in the workplace is becoming more and more prevalent. Corporations in all industries are encouraging minorities, women, elderly workers, people with disabilities as well as foreign workers to join white males in the workplace. The following analysis will focus on these groups and how companies are encouraging them to join an ever-expanding workplace. Even if affirmative action is dismantled, diversity of the workforce is clearly here to stay. Business owners and managers, experts say, will still need to maintain or step up efforts to recruit and advance ethnic minorities in the 21st century. That’s essentially because having a diverse work force and managing it effectively will simply be good business for various companies. This practice comes under Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), Affirmative Action (AA) and Diversity Management (DM).
1.1 WHAT IS DIVERSITY?
“Diversity exists in a group or organisation when its members differ from one another along one or more important dimensions” (Lewis, D. French, E. & Phetmany, T. 2000). Many different definitions exist for diversity in terms of race, ethnicity and gender, however, in broad terms; diversity can refer to any difference between two individuals.
2.0 DIVERSITY MANAGEMENT
One organisation that has successfully introduced DM practice is the British charity, Nacro. Nacro is involved in taking people from minority or disadvantaged groups and placing them in positions of employments that might help their rehabilitation or remove them from a cycle of previous criminal behaviour. The aim is to equip them with life skills and training that will benefit them as well as the community that they live in. This is an example whereby ...