Every serious company these days is committed to promote workforce diversity. Too bad not all of them know what to do with it once they have it…

Missing the whole point of workforce diversity

One day I bumped into an American manager  who was his corporation’s Chief Diversity Officer or some such title. My interest was immediately engaged… I’d never had occasion to chat with a CDO, and it sounded like a fascinating job that would allow one to initiate many worthwhile programs. We started talking, and he asked me what the Diversity situation in Israel was. I happily shared with him that ours is an immigrant-rich society with people from many very different parts of the world, bringing very diverse cultures with them; each with much to show, tell and learn. I was all about the exuberance of this human tapestry when the guy told me that this wasn’t his angle at all. What he wanted to hear was what minorities in Israel would sue his company if it didn’t hire more of them!

In this guy’s eyes, his main job was done once he hired the diverse folks and nobody sued anybody. To my mind, that’s when the action only begins!

Mind you, I wasn’t born yesterday – I know that a large company must avoid discrimination lawsuits; but to my thinking that’s a secondary aspect of diversity (if you act decently and don’t discriminate, you can let your lawyers handle the rest; while if you do discriminate then you have a bigger problem than the lawsuits). There’s so much good that can come out of having all these cultures on board – and I’d expect a CDO to think mostly about that!

The real magic in workforce diversity

So, litigation prevention aside, what good is diversity in the workplace?

A lot has been written about how having diverse people on board makes for more creative teams, better brainstorming, and more out of the box thinking because of all the different points of view. This is certainly true, but for it to work well you also need to overcome the barriers between the different cultures represented in those teams and in your workforce at large. You’d think this is covered by the practice of Inclusion, which is about ensuring everyone is valued and treated fairly – certainly a necessary condition to a fair and positive workplace, but not a sufficient one. What is needed is not just that people act tolerantly to each other; they need to know each other as human beings, and a key component of this is that they really understand each other’s cultural context, not merely tolerate it.

This is true magic. Once people share with each other their cultural essence, they become better people, better friends, and better team members; and the organization as a whole becomes more harmonious and functions better.  As a bonus, they also have more fun – when I worked at Intel I’ve always found this aspect of working in a global corporation to be a real perk: you get to travel and meet new and different people, visit their countries, get to know them in context. You don’t only have friends in all corners of the earth – you get to know the cultures, the way of life, in those remote corners. And it isn’t only about geographic variation; in each country these days there are coworkers from many backgrounds you can get to know. It’s wonderfully enriching.

How you can make diversity work its magic

To attain this state where diverse people share cultural context, you need your company to create a corporate culture that encourages such sharing. Without this, people may hesitate to share, or may assume they need to assimilate into the mainstream majority culture in the company. You want people to feel safe and happy to open up to their coworkers. Here are some ideas about how you might achieve this, for your consideration:

• Provide to employees a well-crafted series of enrichment lectures (complete with videos) about the different sites your company has a presence in. Your best bet is to have the lecture about each culture created by the employees in the relevant site.
• Have employees create traveling exhibits about their respective sites – actual physical exhibits with photos, artifacts, videos and texts, designed to be taken apart, shipped from site to site and reassembled. Put these in the lobbies, cafeterias or employee rest areas and have them rotate between sites.
• Set up a web exhibition on the company intranet where people can click a company site on a map of the earth and access information and media about that site’s culture.
• Make a policy of holding Face to Face team meetings in a different site each time, and include a tour of the local cultural attractions – guided by the local team member(s) – and some immersion in the local population, rather than staying insulated in a global-style hotel. Living as I do in a remote and fascinating land, I know how effective this has been for visitors to our site!
• Educate people – formally and by role modeling – to care about coworkers’ culture-specific essence (for example, make them mindful of the diversity in people’s names).

If you need some advice on how to tie this together into a coherent program, I may be able to help. It’s a subject I’m pretty passionate about!

Whatever you do, focus on the exuberance of the many human cultures, their inherent beauty and fascinating diversity – diversity as in “wonderful things that are different from what I’m used to”, not as in “OMG they’re going to slam us with a lawsuit”!

What are you doing about this?

I’m very interested to know whether there are companies out there applying these concepts, or better ones. Please share your experience from your company, or other companies you know of!

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