Benefiting From Diversity and Working Across Cultures

Successfully combining different people and ideas

Successful businesses reach out to customers and employees, ensuring maximum productivity and innovation. By going beyond matters of compliance, diversity can be a valuable differentiator, enabling organizations to attract and retain the best people and helping them achieve their full potential.

Building a diverse organization means developing:

• An inclusive, meritocratic workplace where people from all cultures and walks of life can succeed
• A workforce that reflects, and is therefore better able to serve, the diverse communities in which the business operates
• The best possible service for customers by embracing differences and getting the best from people

Developing a diverse team or approach means encouraging collaboration between people, irrespective of their culture or walk of life. Diversity is enhanced by increasing exposure to other perspectives and ways of working, in order to stimulate new ideas and spark innovation and creativity. This can be accomplished by ensuring access, via recruitment, to diverse groups of potential employees (and thereby customers) and training all employees to be sensitive to the spoken and unspoken communications of people from different backgrounds.

This toolkit explains how to do business and work across cultures and boundaries in a way that integrates the strength of one group or culture with that of another.

Length: 20 pages

Contents:

The Benefits

Getting Started: Understanding and Valuing Difference

Action Checklist: Developing Diversity

• Understand different norms and values
• Work with cultural differences 
• Implement new initiatives
• Demonstrate your personal commitment to diversity
• Research attitudes to diversity
• Challenge assumptions and develop opportunities
• Accept personal responsibility 
• Increase self-awareness 
• Develop personal flexibility and resilience
• Build a diverse network of relationships

Key Questions: Networking

Action Checklist: Preparing to Work across Cultures

• Broaden and develop your perspective
• Be patient
• Don’t deny difference
• Take care when making jokes

Action Checklist: Implementing a Diversity Strategy

• Understanding your workforce
• Employee surveys
• Customer surveys

Action Checklist: Implementing a Diversity Strategy

• Developing a diversity action plan
• Establishing a diversity committee
• Diversity planning
• Enhancing communication 
• Delivering diversity awareness training
• Creating a diverse leadership culture
• Recruitment and selection
• Flexible working
• Monitoring 

Things You Can Do

• Understand each individual
• Eliminate prejudice
• Apply the eight preconditions for diversity
• Understand difference
• Inspire trust
• Resolve issues collaboratively
• Manage tensions
• Improve listening and empathy
• Use different perspectives

Avoiding Problems

Dos and Don’ts

Key Questions

Further Action

Further Information

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