In today’s increasingly changing business climate, many decision makers are formulating initiatives to incorporate diversity  into their organizations. However, it is one thing to say you support a diverse workforce and another thing to actually create, lead, and manage diversity initiatives. Whenever employees lose faith in the company’s diversity commitment, then they  lose faith in the organization.

When this occurs, companies lose productivity, they lose profits, and they lose employees.

This can happen by:

  • Promoting staff in name only, not wages or responsibilities
  • Not promoting employees for their efforts
  • Not respecting their contribution
  • Not implementing a mentoring program and ongoing training for new employees
  • Approaching diversity as a series of unlinked schemes. It requires cooperation from the entire organization, managers and staff to embrace and sustain a diverse workforce
  • Not treating employees equally

However, leaders can build and maintain faith by:

  • Making sure to design clear diversity initiatives and targets
  • Creating methods to monitor the changes and making improvements on a regular base
  • Improving cross cultural communication skills
  • Remove employment barriers
  • Design and implement a comprehensive communication plan. On many occasions, diversity is something that very few know about, except the people of colour. Get them involved early.
  • Creating a comprehensive and positive working environment policy and  that their involvement actually matters to the success of the company
  • Making diversity a  business strategy – connecting community, education, and community investment. Diversity should be viewed as achieving long-term business goals. It is important to think about productivity, safety, quality and employee fulfillment.
  • Creating long and short term goals – these plans must be updated on a regular basis