How Companies Benefit From Workplace Diversity Training
Workplace Diversity Training
By Clint Cora Clint Cora is a diversity speaker, author and martial arts karate world champion. His book, “The Life Champion In You”, is about how to overcome challenges and achieve life success. It is one man’s journey from personal tragedy to becoming a karate world champion. More information about his speaking programs, books, videos, articles on motivation and success can be found at http://www.clintcora.com Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Clint_Cora.
Without even needing to get into any statistics, we all know that our society here in North America is getting more and more diverse. Forward thinking companies should definitely learn to embrace diversity in the form of workplace diversity training and here are two major reasons
why.
1) Recruit and Manage The Best Talent
If you are a corporate leader, manager or business owner, you want the very best people on your team or company. Do you really care if they are white, black, yellow, brown, red, or purple or green for that matter? The best skilled talent for the workplace can come in the form of many different cultures and racial backgrounds these days. We even see this happening in professional sports as well. Pro basketball teams now have players from China, Africa and Europe.
Pro hockey teams have been drafting players from Europe for years and even major league baseball has a few players from Asia. This would have been unheard of twenty years ago. And you can bet that the coaches for these professional sports teams made sure that all players, no matter where they came from, are able to function well together to win games.
Today, smart organizations want the best people for the jobs on all levels, no matter what cultural backgrounds they come from. Once in place, a diverse workplace must be managed effectively so that everyone in the company works cohesively without cultural misunderstandings that can result in friction. Therefore, some form of diversity training should be implemented so that companies can also function well much like the pro sports teams. Corporate managers especially, need ethnic diversity education.
2) Target Affluent Markets
Perhaps one of the strongest reasons to embrace diversity is that there are some very affluent consumers among certain ethnic groups. Let’s take the Japanese for example. They love to travel. When I was in Egypt, I noticed that there were some Japanese tour groups with Japanese tour guides at the ancient Egyptian sites.
In eastern Canada, the leaves on trees turn red and orange during the autumn season. Japanese tourists come all the way to Canada to see this. I was staying at a hotel in downtown Toronto once and the hotel restaurant made sure that Japanese tour groups had Japanese breakfasts available. So instead of pancakes and cereal, they had noodles and dumplings. If you were a hotel and you had a chance to bring in several hundred Japanese tourists and send them out on bus tours each week during the fall season, do you think it would be worthwhile to set up a Japanese breakfast for them? Darn right it would be!
Banks in major cities like Toronto have literature in different languages now. But corporate initiatives are not just limited to ethnic diversity. Lifestyle diversity has been recognized as well. Many big corporations like banks and insurance companies, sponsor gay pride events. They realize that the gay community has some really good spenders.
For example, Whistler, the biggest ski resort in North America, has held a special gay Whistler week. Ski vacations at top-notch destinations like Whistler are not inexpensive. Skiing as a sport is not a cheap either. The fact that Whistler can fill an entire week of gay skiers really illustrates the benefit of targeting specific affluent niche groups. If you are a company doing business in a diverse market and if you don’t cater to these different markets, then guess what? Your competition most definitely will.
Old-fashioned businesses that ignore the need for both market and workplace diversity training will soon lose out in the modern business world of today. Forward thinking companies will recruit and retain the best overall talent since workplace diversity training has been implemented. These businesses will also be able to target diverse markets effectively.
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