Diversity as organizational culture

A major challenge for organizations is managing diversity, understanding the value of each collaborator, ensuring that the talent feel involved as there is recognition of their ideas, knowledge, contributions and perspectives, leading to greater participation and commitment, a better work environment, and increased motivation and responsibility.

Without a doubt, employees are an organization’s most valuable asset and talent drain can be quite costly. That is why, in recent years, there has been a growing need to focus on establishing formulas to improve commitment. Manage the commitment of your employees in 5 steps.

Fostering commitment is a simple way of saying that diversity management can address the different dimensions of an organization’s culture: team values and beliefs. In this process it is important to take both the organization’s roadmap and its members’ career plans into account.

Understanding our organizational culture

If we want to understand our organization’s culture, we can describe the following elements (Johnson and Scholes model), which are interrelated:

• Stories: things of the past that employees speak about both in and outside of the organization. People and stories that become immortalized say a great deal about what is valued at that organization and is considered a great example.

• Rituals and routines: daily behaviours and actions that indicate what behaviours are acceptable and determine how people are expected to behave and what leaders value.

• Symbols: anything representing the organization, from office to logos, style of dress, etc.

• Organizational structure: both the organizational chart as well as formal and informal authority can be indicators of what types of contributions are valued.

• Control systems: financial, quality and compensation systems.

• Power structure: either real, informal or formal power, as these leaders influence decisions, operations and strategic direction.

At PDA International we aim at implementing successful and dynamic consulting programs capable of generating greater business impact, growing the customer portfolio as part of the solutions for Consulting Firms, always using our behavioural assessment as a guiding basis.

Place value on your employees’ differences!