Equal Opportunities and Diversity Management
Equal Opportunities and Diversity Management at Workplace:
Malta’s membership to the European Union in 2004 has provided a new impetus to the field of equal opportunities. A new legal framework addressing equal treatment in advertising, recruitment, employee management, career progression and pay structures, has re-defined the industrial landscape.
Employees are becoming increasingly aware of their rights through contact with thier trade unions and free assistance from government agencies. Employers who have not recognised the challenge of addressing these new issues can seriously damage their operational effectiveness by becoming entangled in legal proceedings or industrial disputes and risk losing their reputation as good employers, thus further bearing the brunt of an already worrying labour skill shortage.
Equal opportunities law and policy are driven by our ever-changing workforce, which is the result of demographic shifts, globalisation, new economic pressures and other socio-economic factors. This results in a diverse workforce that can become complex to manage.
Diversity is defined as ‘any set of differences, similarities, and tensions in the midst of any collective mixture’ (Roosevelt Thomas, 2006).
These differences, similarities and tensions, need to be managed well and capitalized upon rather than remain unaddressed where they can pose a threat to organization.
According to the European Commission study entitled ‘The Costs and Benefits of Diversity – A Study on Methods and Indicators to Measure the Cost-Effectiveness of Diversity Policies in Enterprises’ (Directorate General for Employment, Industrial Relations and Social Affairs, 2003) organisations that implement workforce diversity policies identify important benefits that strengthen long-term competitiveness and also produce short and medium-term improvements in performance.
Therefore diversity adds value to companies by:
- ‘Strengthening long-term ‘value-drivers’, i.e. the tangible and intangible assets that allow companies to be competitive, to generate stable cash flows, and to satisfy their shareholders. These include building a differentiated reputation with key-stakeholders and customers, and improving the quality of human capital within a company.’
- Providing a ‘Return on Investment’ i.e. generating short and medium-term opportunities to increase cash flows. For example, by reducing costs, resolving labour shortages, opening up new markets, and improving performance in existing markets.
Organisations with active diversity policies reported gaining the following benefits through the implementation of diversity management:
- Improved global management capacity
- Avoided litigation costs
- Improved access to new market segments
- Lowered absenteeism rates
- Reduced labour turnover
- Help to overcome labour shortages
- Enhanced service levels and customer satisfaction
- Improved innovation and creativity amongst employees
- Improved motivation and efficiency of existing staff
- Attractivness to and retention of highly talented people
- Enhanced corporate reputation
- Strengthened cultural values within the organisation
Weave Consulting empowers organisations to manage organisational equal opportunity issues through its tailor-made services, individually designed to meet the needs of each organisation, no matter how large or small.
Through its diversity management services, Weave Consulting turns these new challenges into opportunities, by increasing the competitive advantage of an organisation through measures which will enhance human capital and boost productivity.