USING THE RESOURCE CENTER EFFECTIVELY

INTRODUCTION

The Resource Center can be used as a single set of resources for people to access as needed or as part of an entire diversity program that it supports and enriches. It is designed for maximum flexibility in how it is used and by whom. Some of the material is most relevant to diversity and human resource specialists, some for managers trying to promote diversity or looking for ways to understand cultural differences and resolve tensions around diversity issues, and other material for the general employee population in scheduling meetings, seeking awareness of different ethnic and religious practices, and trying to become informed in order to dispel their own or other's misconceptions about people with different ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. Much of the material will help anyone in the organization to become a more culturally competent person in an increasingly multicultural society and workforce.

Although the Center contains material for all levels of an organization, the primary responsibility for it becoming optimally effective lies with those responsible for human resource and diversity issues. For the Center to play its most effective role, those with diversity and human resource responsibilities (and ideally those from every other part of the organization) must make different parts of the organization aware of what is available in the Center and point out how the material can make their function in the organization more effective by embracing diversity initiatives. Some ideas along these lines can be found in the essay, “Power and Diversity”, and the “Gaining Competitive Advantage: the Case for Diversity” under the Diversity Awareness/Opinion Essays component of the Resource Center .

PROMOTING THE CENTER

The following are suggestions that various subscribers have offered to help get people to use the Center.

1. Use your organization's newsletter (and other communication methods) regularly to promote the Center. Place an article and/or announcement in the newsletter about the Resource Center and its various features. Demonstrate in each case the usefulness of that information for a particular function, for example, scheduling. Continually remind people of the Center's Web location. Remember repetition promotes “branding” and the Center should be part of your “branded” diversity site.

2. Send information about the Center to different functional groups pointing out how it could be helpful to their work. This is especially important for managers of various business lines to show them how diversity can improve their businesses. For example, for those involved in sales, point out up-coming festivals and holidays and how they are recognized and suggest that salespeople approach ethnic customers with an appropriate “greeting” or gift.

3. Send information to support staff about the way the Center could be helpful in scheduling meetings, work-plans, conferences, particularly if they involve locations in other countries. Point out the Calendar's special global and scheduling features such as the Table of Public Holidays by Country, the Subject Index to find holidays for particular groups, countries, religions, and note the sections on Recognizing Festivals and Holidays for the appropriate way to interact with people celebrating a festival.

4. Encourage managers to introduce the Center in regular meetings or discussion groups around any topic, not just diversity, and point out how the Center's information may provide support. The Icebreakers and other activities under the Diversity Training and Skill-building section should be a valuable source of material.

5. Make sure that those on the Diversity Council are fully aware of the Center and have the information they need to promote it in their various work units.

6. Link the Center to other relevant sites on your Web site.

7. Create a contest, quiz, cross word puzzle the answers to which can only be found in the Resource Center. Offer an attractive prize (a weekend in a nice hotel was one company's prize) to the winner.

8. Organize conference calls around a topic, such as Supplier Diversity. Use this to familiarize purchasers about the basics of supplier diversity as well as some of the specific issues involved.

USING THE CENTER

The following is organized according to the Center’s major components. Under each component, there are suggestions of ways that the material in the Center can be used to promote and/or address various diversity issues. The suggestions can be used as stated, incorporated into other uses, or become the subject of e-mails sent out to various people in the organization.

DIVERSITY CALENDAR

The Diversity Calendar has four levels of information . The first is a simple listing of the events occurring on a particular day. Each event is designated by a symbol that you can find in the Introduction on the Calendar's opening page. (Just put the cursor over Introduction and right click on it.) The symbol indicates whether the entry is a birthday, historical/cultural event, day of religious observance, or a day set aside officially for recognition.

The second level of information is found when you click on “details”. This will take you to the section providing an explanation of the entry as well as, in many cases, a guide to how to pronounce the name of the event. This is the place to go in order to move beyond knowing an event's occurrence and to begin to understand the historical, religious, or other meaning of the event.

After the description of some of the events, there is a food icon (a sandwich, ice cream sundae, etc.) which, when you click on it, will take you to the third level of the calendar. This provides a discussion of the major foods used and other customs used to recognize the event.

In some of the food discussions, there will be a name of a particular food highlighted in red. Clicking on this name will take you to the fourth level which is the recipe for that food.

The Diversity Calendar provides additional features: on the opening page, there are sections on when holidays begin and end, what holidays affect work-schedules, a complete list of recipes, and a chart of what days are public holidays in over 90 different countries.

A useful feature of the Calendar also found on the opening page is an index that lists all the entries alphabetically . So, if you know the name of an entry, look for it in the index and click on the date given to take you to all the information provided about that entry. The subject index , which can be accessed from the calendar homepage or the bottom of the detail section for each month, serves as a search mechanism. If you know the religion or other subject heading the event falls under, going to the category will provide all the calendar entries for that subject and a link to them.

THE CASE FOR DIVERSITY

This component contains material dealing with Demographics; Employment, Occupations, and Income; Global Labor Markets; and Diversity Advantages , which compose the over-all “case for diversity”. This material covers many of the basic forces that drive the growing importance to your organization of diversity and multicultural issues. For example, there is material on a portrait of the US population and how it is changing, details about the characteristics of the Hispanic population, the changing character of the workforce both in the United States and other countries, and ways in which the global labor market is affecting domestic markets in the United States and elsewhere. This is the place to get the specific data to support an argument, strengthen a report, respond to questions , and/or influence strategic planning .

If you are asked to give a presentation or make an argument about why diversity is important to your organization, consult the essay, “Gaining Competitive Advantage: The Case for Diversity.”

DIVERSITY AWARENESS

Scheduling meetings, activities, or events has both a prevention and proactive dimension. The prevention side is to avoid scheduling important events at times that members of an ethnic or religious group that is well-represented in your organization could not attend. One example is that a number of companies have inadvertently scheduled high-level meetings or company-wide events on the evening of a Jewish holiday or the day of the holiday itself.

The more proactive side is to know the particular months and days that provide an opportunity to recognize the customs and contributions of different ethnic, racial, and/or religious groups to the over-all culture. It is important also to avoid failing to recognize specially designated months or days that honor people from particular ethnic, religious, or racial backgrounds. The food dimension of these events should also be addressed. Providing food for an event should take account of the dietary restrictions followed by many groups as well as periods when a group may be observing a fast.

The sub-sections on the U.S. as a Multicultural Country and Religion in the Workplace will provide critical information to help avoid inappropriate scheduling, but more importantly, to take into account when events recognizing specific cultures should be scheduled. This material provides guides on how to pronounce the names of holidays, proper greetings for the holiday, and food customs and restrictions.

There is also material that more generally addresses how to accommodate religious practices and beliefs in workplace settings. This should be used by HR staff and managers to decide how to address these concerns and in establishing organizational policy.

Organizations that have nursing or other medical staff available to employees will benefit from the material on Diversity and Wellness. A person’s cultural and religious beliefs have a strong influence on how they interact with health providers. The discussions and “tips” in this section will help to guide your health care professionals in addressing these culturally-based health beliefs and practices.

DIVERSITY AND WORK/LIFE

The varied ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds of all employees will affect how the workplace is organized and experienced. Interacting with people from different backgrounds can be both rewarding and stressful. Many topics about work/life are contained in the Diversity and Work/Life Toolkit that addresses both how to balance the demands of work and those of family and other responsibilities, but also the added dimension of how these issues are affected by different culturally and religious beliefs. For example, the Toolkit contains a straightforward set of tools for helping organize schedules for everyone in the family around both work and other demands. It also, under the “Approaches to Better Health” section of the Toolkit, looks at how different religions offer ways of coping with stress and enriching one's spiritual life.

Every workplace has people with different sexual orientations. This is one of the circumstances surrounded with a great deal of misinformation, awkwardness in knowing how to behave toward people, and having the skills to look beyond the person's sexual orientation and treat them as a valued colleagues and workers. The section on Sexual Orientation in the Workplace addresses a wide range of issues from factual, organizational, personal, and educational perspectives. It is valuable for HR professionals, managers, and all members of the organization.

With men and women working along side each other, on teams, and in situations of supervision, there are ample opportunities for inappropriate behavior. Sometimes this behavior is out of ignorance; other times it is willful. There are many guidelines for knowing what behavior is appropriate and what constitutes “harassment”. If managers or HR professionals need to provide this information, or if employees have questions about behavior they have engaged in or are thinking of engaging in, the section on Sexual Harassment can be very helpful in making it clear what is and is not appropriate.

DIVERSITY AND CONFLICT MANAGEMENT

All workplaces generate interpersonal conflict. Any such conflict is difficult to resolve in a way that the parties involved and those on the side-lines feel that is fair and just. Resolving conflicts in ways that generate a feeling of fairness and preserves the ability of people to work together often gets more complicated if differing cultural, religious, and ethnic backgrounds are involved. The various activities in this section can be used by HR staff as well as managers to develop their own skills and strategies for addressing such conflicts. The material not only identifies various types of conflicts, but also helps to identify the “style” which different people use to resolve such conflicts and the advantages and disadvantages of each style. It also explores various techniques from informal “talking it out” approaches to more formal mediation procedures and how these apply to different types of intercultural conflicts. Apart from specific conflict situations, Strategies for Making Diversity Work suggests some skills and tips for developing effective working relationships with people from different cultural, ethnic, and/or religious backgrounds than one's own.

DIVERSITY TRAINING AND SKILL-BUILDING

This component contains a variety of materials ranging from general “icebreakers” that can be used by managers at any meeting to keep reinforce diversity awareness, formal trainers to introduce training programs, or by HR staff to introduce diversity topics.

Diversity issues come up in a number of organizational functions one of the most important of which is sales and customer service. The activities presented in these sections will help managers train staff to be more effective in situations in which sales and/or customer service takes place in a multicultural context. In addition, teams are increasingly diverse and the activities in this section will provide skills for making such teams effective.

DIVERSITY RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION

It is often difficult to find sources of candidates from diverse backgrounds or to identify outlets for effective advertising of open positions to such groups. This component offers both specific strategies for improving recruitment and retention, and also suggests avenues to use for posting job notices. It also provides free job posting on Diversity.com. These recruitment strategies and materials might be coordinated by HR staff or used by hiring managers. It is important, however, that all recruitment efforts be coordinated to create a company “branding” as a diversity friendly place to work.

Hiring people with disabilities can often bring into the organization the specific talent needed in particular business areas. This section offers some detailed suggestions about how to conduct interviews with people with various disabilities.

ISSUES IN DOING BUSINESS GLOBALLY

This component can provide the beginnings for training people to work in a global business climate generally or in a particular country, provide awareness of the different styles for doing business in different countries, and how to address such global business issues as “Evaluating People in a Global Organization” and “Managing Global Leadership Development”. The section on Culture Profiles covers such topics as “Protocol”, “Management Styles”, “Negotiation and Conflict Resolution”. This component can be used by HR staff to provide formal training or orientations, line managers or individual staff with global responsibilities or for preparing for an overseas assignment.

ISSUES IN MULTICULTURAL MARKETING

The buying power of minority groups has increased substantially over the last ten years and with the projected increases in minority populations will become an even larger market for goods and services. However, the distribution of this buying power must be analyzed both across minority groups and across geographical regions and specific states. The Selig Center for Economic Growth had done an extensive and detailed analysis of minority buying power across these various dimensions. Both summaries and the raw data from this study are provided in this section and can be used by managers in developing strategic plans for where to concentrate marketing efforts.

RESOURCES AND REFERENCES

Although the Diversity and Work/Life Resource Center contains extensive material on a wide-range of diversity issues, it cannot incorporate all the significant sources of important diversity resources. This section contains what Diversity Resources, Inc. believes to be some of the best of such resources—Web sites, consultants, and the extensive holdings of the Smithsonian Museum.

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