Source: Image of diverse crowd, nurse, pregnant woman, man in suit, images by Video Scribe, License held by Jeff Carroll.
Hi. I'm Jeff, and in this lesson we'll learn about workforce diversity and why a company should have an Affirmative Action Plan. So let's get started.
Before we discuss workforce diversity, it should be stressed that Human Resource Management, the area that often addresses diversity issues, is more than just hiring employees. HRM deals with many issues concerning employee benefits, employee morale, and working with contract and temporary employees. Across all of these issues, HRM must be concerned how they address diversity in the workplace.
Workforce diversity is employing people from a wide variety of backgrounds within an organization. Diversity can come from differences among employees such as backgrounds, gender, age, socioeconomic status, and race. Wide diversity in the workforce can provide a broad range of knowledge and experience. It offers a variety of opinions on projects and the recognition of those opinions by a company leads to better conflict resolution among employees.
Diversity will improve a business's reputation and that will encourage more people to apply for jobs with the organization. It also encourages companies to be more flexible with their employees, such as with religious holidays, which can also improve employee morale.
If a company is larger than 15 employees then it must be concerned with the Equal Employment Opportunity laws surrounding diversity. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the federal department that enforces these laws and deals with discrimination.
The EEOC will review company actions as they relate to hiring, firing, and harassment. The EEOC may also require a company to have an Affirmative Action Plan. This is a plan put in place by an organization to increase workplace diversity and decrease the likelihood of discrimination. Even if it is not required, a plan such as this will help an organization increase workplace diversity, so it is recommended.
An Affirmative Action Plan has three components to its development. An analysis which collects the data that will inform the details in the plan. An action plan, which describes exactly what the organization is going to do. And auditing, which is a review after the actions have been taken to evaluate how well the organization accomplished the plan.
OK, well done. In this lesson, we learned about the role of HRM as it relates to diversity. We also learned about workforce diversity and the benefits it offers an organization. We discussed Equal Employment Opportunity and we talked about how an Affirmative Action Plan helps an organization increase its diversity.
Thanks for your time and have a great day.
