In my last Insight, I talked about diversity awareness and how it’s evolving.
There are a couple mistakes employers make when it comes to diversity awareness:
- Having Biases—Everyone has their biases, and it’s really hard to let them go sometimes, but understand that, by letting go, it can help move you in the direction of diversity awareness.
- With Differences, There Are Conflicts—You need to be prepared to deal with any conflicts that might come up related to employee biases. Are these conflicts related to biases/ diversity/differences?
You also need to educate your employees around how to deal with biases and conflicts related to those biases, whether it’s re-training or doing team-building, because one of the things I often see is, when a business doesn’t train employees to deal with biases and related conflicts, the company could face a discrimination lawsuit.
That can zap a company’s time and financial resources.
When it comes to diversity awareness, education is key.
As I mentioned in my last Insight, for the first time ever, there are four distinct generations in the workplace. Training needs to be delivered around this.
I think it’s important to understand because people are born in different time periods, sometimes that shapes how they look at things, or their view is shaped by what they’ve experienced and things that occurred while they were growing up.
So each generation is shaped by different events, and by understanding the differences, you can better understand how someone else functions. Or you can at least learn what’s important to people, how they want to be treated, how they learn best, etc.
As a result of this knowledge, you can create a work environment that supports trust and respect for all employees.
An Example
My daughter, who is a Gen Xer, just said something funny to me the other day. She told me, “Mom, I just don’t understand these younger people who are coming into the workplace.” And here I am thinking, “They’re closer to your age than mine!”
So even people who are close in age don’t always understand the differences each generation presents.
A couple of months ago, I was doing some training on performance appraisals and employee coaching, and there was a question that came up about younger employees, so I had to go into a discussion about the different generations and different ways of thinking. And people just didn’t want to hear it.
They didn’t want to hear that people are different.
I think part of it was they thought I was trying to give the younger generation a free pass for poor performance and that’s not what I was saying at all.
I was trying to explain that each person thinks differently and they perform work in ways that make sense to them, and that doesn’t necessarily mean the person is a poor performer.
Sometimes employers need to sit down and listen to what employees have to say. Both the employer and the employee may be looking at the same situation from different perspectives and that’s why listening is important.
Positive changes can come from listening to each other.
You never know where your next great business idea is going to come from. It could come from somebody that you’d least expect it to. But it could also come from a collaboration of two people who are listening to each other.