Diversity in the Workplace - Implications for Human Resource Development

Diversity in the Workplace: Implications for Human Resource Development

Daireesa Davis

BSHS/425

December 21, 2015

Harold Dobbins

Diversity in the Workplace

Agencies in the human service fields believe it is important to have diversity in the workplace for many reasons such as understanding the view point of others, gaining new ideas, making sure the clients have someone they may feel more comfortable talking to and just different people of different backgrounds coming together and helping like humans should do for one another. Diversity in the workplace and its implications for human resource development will be discussed in the essay.

Diversity and Implications for human resource development

Diversity can mean a couple different things, but it’s the state of being diverse or having variety of something. Agencies all over are increasing there diversity in the workplace because this is a way that will help the agencies learn different ideas and people with different cultures can exchange information on one another for better understand. This helps with having an open mind and even not judging a person by their background, race, sex or anything else. When clients see there is a more diverse setting within the agency it helps them to feel comfortable about explaining the reason for them coming to the agency for assistances. The diversity is a positive when it comes to assisting the many different clients of the community with their issues.

Implication in diversity for human services is the end result of something or action involved in something. Many human service managers try to work at accomplishing a more diverse workforce and also respect the equal opportunity and affirmative action. When making decisions on hiring employees the person in charge of this should always consider the laws and policies along with the diversity of the agency. Having diversity is an important aspect but it has to go hand at hand with other policies to be fair because everyone should have equal opportunity to help make the agency effective and a success.

Experience of organization discrimination

The personal experience I have encountered with discrimination in the workplace was about 8 years ago. I worked at a telecommunication call center and the call center had two sides one side was for customer service inbound calls and the other sales and outbound calls. The employees were divided up into teams so each manager had a certain amount of employees. The side with inbound calls was mainly women that worked in customer service. The inbound side was a mixture of men and women but more men. It was well known that the owner only wanted men to work on sales side because he felt the men do better than the women. When the owner would come into the office the women could not work on the sales side. Many women complained but nothing ever changed so they would quit or just continue working on the inbound side. We all knew about the employment policies but it just seemed like no one wanted to lose a job so they accepted the terms of the owner. The owner’s rule about only men can work on the sales side was not discussed when employees were hired because management would let women work in sales except when the owner was in office. As far as the human resource the people in the office were against the owner but they were never allowed to change that policy but they would try to put women in other types of sales positions on the inbound side, this helped employees when they wanted to make commission on the sales calls. The company mainly listens to what the owner wanted and that hurt the business because of his thoughts on women in sales. This was not a company I wanted to work for and I did not and would not recommend the job to anyone because the owner was not giving equal opportunity to all the employees. My experience there was not as good as I thought it would be so I eventually quit the job. I think if management would have supported the employees more when it came to this discrimination many things would have made the owner have more of an open mind and see his views were not fair or right.