Help please! I need information that I can use to fill 4-6 pages on the followin
ID: 454964 • Letter: H
Question
Help please! I need information that I can use to fill 4-6 pages on the following issue:
Scenario: Congratulations, you have just been promoted to the position of Team USA Diversity & Inclusion Manager at Facebook, working with Maxine Williams, the company’s Global Director of Diversity!
Facebook has been wildly successful. However, the Silicon Valley based business continues to be in the News regarding its challenges with not having enough of a diverse workforce. According to an article from Fortune Magazine in 2015, women hold 16% of the tech jobs. The company is about 55% white and 36% Asian and all other ethnicities total to 9%. However, other companies such as Patagonia, eBay, and Indiegogo hire and maintain a culturally-diverse staff.
According to the Fortune article, Williams has identified some projects Facebook has been involved with to help bring more women and minorities into the company. These include: “to present hiring managers in certain parts of the business with at least one diverse candidate for each open job, reworking the company’s training course on managing bias, and increasing the number of college students from underrepresented groups that it invites to participate in its paid training program.” However, Williams wants to do more. She has decided to hire several Diversity & Inclusion Managers, and you lead Team USA (fictitious position for this scenario)!
· Empower diversity and inclusion groups across the business
· Effectively build and manage diversity and inclusion initiatives globally
· Coach leaders across the business on progressive ways to enhance diversity and inclusion on their teams
· Create a new organizational design as well as programs to strengthen the organizational culture.
In addition, the Facebook executives are concerned with the development of their leadership team. Since they are in it for the long-term, they want to continue building a sustainable organization. They have many questions as you begin your new role. For example, how do they continue to build out their business, so it remains flexible and adaptable? How do they do a better job of crossing into other cultures and hiring from other cultures around the world and remain inclusive? How do they develop a high performance leadership team and learn various communication tactics to move the organization forward?
At a minimum, recommendations should include:
· An illustration on a sustainable organizational design that engages diverse stakeholders around the globe, including a few high-level roles and responsibilities. Why should the leadership team consider this design?
· Description of a leadership development program that the Facebook leadership team should consider. Why should they consider it? How will it help the organizational culture of diversity and inclusion? Address power and communication as well as conflict and negotiation.
· Ideas on programs that strengthen the teams and organizational culture with regard to diversity. Describe the programs and explain the effect they could have on Facebook. What will it take to implement these programs on a global basis?
· Use examples on what other organizations do to help the leadership team better understand organizational culture, diversity, and inclusion with references.
Explanation / Answer
An illustration on a sustainable organizational design
The fundamental concept of sustainable construction is to deliver long term affordability, quality and efficiency, value to clients and users, whilst decreasing negative environmental impacts and increasing the economic sustainability. It requires the development of enlightened institutions and infrastructures, appropriate management of risks and uncertainties and information and knowledge to assure intergenerational equity and conservation of the ability of earth's natural systems to serve humankind. For example, a building could be considered environmentally sustainable if the energy usage throughout the building’s life cycle is low Sustainability and it considers reusing of materials at the end of the building’s life.
Why should the leadership team consider this design?
The team member or participants are motivated by a mixture of control, management and organizing activities, in order to engage with their internal and external stakeholders in order to meet sustainability related target.
Diverse stakeholder involvement is necessary. Traditional community outreach through mailers, meetings and hearings are familiar and relatively easy, but they are passive and often ineffective at engaging a representative range of stakeholders. Despite the extra effort involved, diverse community voices can help any partnership see challenges and opportunities more clearly, reach a broader cross section of the community and engage community interests more effectively. For partnerships led by organizations outside of the community, diverse stakeholder involvement is also a basic practice for establishing credibility. Where healthier behavior and health equity are the focus and human capital is the primary resource, communities benefit by taking full advantage of the diversity in the room.
Diversity is not inclusion. Diversity encompasses the full range of how people differ (e.g., age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class and/or culture), and it is an important component for partnerships aiming to serve the interests of the whole community. Inclusion is the leveraging of that resource to ensure maximum use of what diverse partners can offer to the work. Partnerships that build inclusive structures, processes and relationships cultivate distributed leadership and more equitably distributed decision-making power. They are generally more trusted, resilient to change, deeply embedded in community life and sustainable over time.
Authentic community engagement is an intentional, ongoing process of shifting the balance of initiative, control and power to the community. Residents know the difference between true engagement and something designed for show. They can rise to the occasion when sincere efforts address their most urgent and important needs. Processes that acknowledge and create pathways for community leadership and networks are better able to achieve full participation in decision making and greater ownership of the work.
Community visioning can be an effective engagement process on multiple levels. When a range of stakeholders, including a diversity of residents, are included early in a well-facilitated process for developing a shared vision and understanding of challenges and priorities, many strategic goals can be advanced at once. Benefits of a quality visioning process include shared knowledge and understanding; more and stronger relationships within the partnership; a broadly shared vision; more refined strategies with increased confidence and commitment behind them; more distributed leadership and decision making; more careful attention to equity; and a richer base of information to inform strategic communication.
When establishing structures to support the work, it is useful to begin with the end in mind. It is difficult for partnerships that retain one structure for doing the work to succeed across the range of challenges they will face. Successful partnerships and work groups let their priorities determine their structure, whether the priority is an overarching goal such as equity or sustainability or a core commitment such as community engagement or strategic communication.
Equity deserves and requires multiple forms of support. Equity is an important and humbling aspiration. The rigors of achieving health equity require extraordinary focus and effort from healthy community partnerships and leaders. Partnerships driven by white, middle- class leaders need to be even more attuned to equity challenges and opportunities. Short-cut solutions, such as inviting “representative” partners or establishing a separate committee addressing equity, don’t work and can even damage relationships and credibility when they are perceived as insincere. Success is difficult and not guaranteed even with well-intentioned attempts by sincere leaders to hire community organizers that support healthy community partnerships in low-income neighborhoods, or to include resident leaders on all action teams, or to train and use paid “promotors” to conduct assessment, education, recruitment and mobilization efforts. This is because multiple barriers and constraints to ongoing participation sometimes make execution difficult. Partnerships with a strong commitment to equity can benefit from additional structural supports as well, such as an equity charter to guide all goals, strategies, measures and decisions; a leadership-training curriculum and learning network for emerging resident leaders; or an action-oriented youth council with training for adult partners. Whatever the specific combination of resources for equity, a robust combination with structural support is advisable.
Sustainability involves much more than new grants. Partnerships that see sustainability as a broad-based effort to embed change in the community are often more successful at continuing the change process and increasing their impact. Such an effort involves intentionally building capacity and increasing impact for healthy community change along social, environmental, policy and economic spectrums of the work. It could also involve promoting key allies to influential positions, electing them to public office, or creating a permanent staff position within a key agency or institution. It could mean building a new health-promoting facility with a good maintenance budget, winning a new policy or establishing a permanent advisory council. It could also mean a dedicated funding stream or funder consortium to advance a strategy or initiative, or any other combination of supports that deepen change and increase impact over time. Whatever the specific mix of priorities and pathways, it is useful to pursue sustainability along multiple paths and experience the kinds of interim success that provide for the future.
Openness to multiple frames or broader frames such as equity provides greater opportunity to focus on root causes and sustain a movement. It broadens the potential impact over time by building understanding of upstream or root causes of multiple health challenges and inequities, and helping identify solutions that solve multiple problems. The flexible partnerships formed today offer the kind of leadership and structures that can help communities address a variety of health and equity challenges in the future.
The assumption that international diplomatic and business negotiations should normally open with a tough adversarial phase (especially with new opposing negotiators) is less obvious to many non-Western societies. Asian and many other cultures value harmony, consensus and indirectness in communication. Countries such as Japan and France might employ avoiding as a delaying strategy. The Japanese prefer to use the formal session to announce agreement reached through bargaining at the informal level In many parts of the Middle East, Asia, Mexico, France, Russia and elsewhere compromise has a negative connotation, often associated with a second-best solution, with surrendering principles and losing face. Western cultures tend to underemphasize the importance of "face" considerations in negotiations, mediation and conflict management.
An approach to interpersonal conflict involves five main options :
At the interpersonal level, a five-country study demonstrated the utility of the five-style model of negotiating.
Americans made most use of the competitive style while the collectivist cultures, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, utilized more the obliging and avoiding styles.
The Practical Approach: The Best Practices for International Companies
• Mandatory annual online training programs: Dell has introduced a number of internal diversity training programs. These initiatives vary from one-off workshops on a particular diversity issue to online training tools which help employees understand Dell’s diversity framework and support the business case.
• Creating a framework for managing work-life effectiveness: Dell has found that flexible working has had a real impact on morale, giving employees a feeling of being empowered and trusted to manage their own workloads. Also, ensuring a work-life balance has helped Dell's high-potential female employees achieve a much greater success in juggling work and family commitments.
• Management buy-in for diversity programs have built a more flexible organization with stable, global diversity initiatives now in place.
• The company’s external Diversity Advisory Board, which is comprised of some of the America's most recognized leaders in the fields of diversity, public policy and community relations. The Toyota Diversity Advisory Board's main purpose is to bring expert outside perspectives to help them shape and maintain their commitment to diversity.
• Diversity Councils and Business Resource Groups: Diversity advisory councils have roundtable discussions with associates and Business Resource Groups, to implement and maintain programs that help assure the success in embracing the similarities and differences of people, cultures and ideas. The Councils make recommendations for senior management on how to advance the Company's efforts towards achieving their diversity goals. Additionally, Business Resource Groups provide their associates with opportunities to connect with colleagues who share similar interests and backgrounds.
• Diversity Education and Training: Various diversity education program efforts have moved from minimizing conflict to strengthen their ability to amplify, respect, value and leverage their differences in order to drive sustainable business results. Three pillars of diversity education are Diversity Training, a Diversity Speaker Series and Diversity Library. Ongoing diversity training helps drive employee engagement, and create a work environment that visibly values and leverages diversity and accelerates productivity.
Leading organizations are paving the way for the future of diversity and inclusion. Between fostering innovation and learning to properly monitor — and model — their efforts, we have gleaned from these leading global companies five important lessons for organizations to successfully implement diversity and inclusion efforts that will have global relevance.
Lesson 1: Recognize the Shift in Global Understanding of Diversity & Inclusion (D&I)
There’s growing significance placed on creating environments where a variety of different voices are encouraged and heard. These voices come from people who may or may not be of the same gender, race, or ethnicity. Diversity in the workplace today can include some of the following:
This new way of thinking about D&I focuses on meeting the needs of the individual and not so much on an HR-centered initiative. Today, it is not only about having diversity within a company but leveraging that diversity to produce better products and services.
It is crucial to hire and maintain a diverse workforce, so gender and racial/ethnic initiatives will be launched and maintained into the foreseeable future. There is much to learn from leaders in diversity and inclusion, but it is important to remember that every company’s D&I initiatives will look different. You should tailor your initiatives to address your specific industry and your company’s areas of weakness. Furthermore, global strategies should be able to be adopted locally.
It is wise to remember that diversity means different things to different people, and organizations will apply those definitions to their companies respectively. For example, the percentage of workers of European ancestry in the UK decreased by almost 10 percentage points over the last ten years. This presents an area of focus unique to the UK workforce.
Another example is the focus on people with disabilities in India, where many people suffer from polio or other diseases because medicine was not available to treat them. Because of this, Deutsche Bank works with a non-governmental organization to train people with disabilities to work at the company.
It’s clear that the shift in D&I still includes, but stretches beyond, race and gender. We are in need of a collective push toward recognizing the need for diverse thinkers coming from a variety of different backgrounds, but companies are only slowly moving in this direction.
We all know intuitively that D&I initiatives are morally right, but realistically speaking, businesses are going to do what is best for the bottom line. This fact rouses sentiments about social responsibility, and part of this view naturally considers supplier diversity.
There are aspects of running a global business that are the same across the board, such as making a profit and putting forth efforts into D&I. There are also unique concerns that come with operating through different cultures and regions.
Lesson 2: Build an Inclusive Environment
Studies show that diversity and inclusion efforts are worthwhile, especially on a global level. In the United Kingdom, senior executive teams proved a 3.5 percent increase in earnings before interest and taxes with every 10 percent increase in gender diversity.
This implies that global business leaders should strive to create an atmosphere where multiple voices are heard, and their opinions are valued and considered. This fact should be engrained in the company culture. In the example scenario, David and Jason realized the importance of an inclusive global workplace, but were frustrated with the focus on a single group of workers – and frustrated that the company culture lacked a focus on global talent.
Few senior executives have realized the importance of a diverse workforce powered with voices of people from different backgrounds, personalities and thinking styles across the global workplace. It has become important to create environments where all people are encouraged to draw upon their unique experiences, perspectives and backgrounds to advance business goals. To achieve this in a global work setting, it’s crucial to employ effective global communication and training efforts.
Healthcare provider Johnson & Johnson, for example, realized that to be successful in global diversity, it needed culturally appropriate efforts launched for every region. The company was struggling to combine its diversity efforts in the United States and Europe, so it conducted its first-ever live video conference on mutual perceptions, diversity and respect. Clients and employees reported increased productivity, and over 100 survey participants reported the conference was the most valuable training they had ever experienced.
Another example of a global company realizing the depth and scope of inclusive environments is Deutsche Bank, a signatory and founding member of diversity charters in Germany, Spain and Luxembourg. About 42 percent of its employees are female. Eileen Taylor of Deutsche explained, “We are in 75 countries and we hire the best talent in each locale. Diverse teams and companies make better decisions.”
Considering these examples, it’s clear that some of the top organizations around the world have set an example for diverse and inclusive global work environments. As these organizations continue their efforts and others follow, how do they continuously improve? And, more importantly, what areas of D&I are companies still falling short?
Sixty-five percent of 321 executives of large global companies surveyed by Forbes Insights claimed to have a plan in place to recruit a diverse workforce — but only 44 percent employ retention programs. This signifies a gap in collective progress when it comes to retaining diversity and inclusion in the workplace. In other words, you cannot simply have diversity; you must learn to leverage and nurture it so that it can thrive.
Lesson 3: Use Multiple Practices and Measures
Diversity and inclusion should not be treated as a ‘one-off’ initiative. Many leaders struggle with how to manage workplace diversity. Promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace is a constant work in progress, and it should be maintained and nurtured to be effective.
Instead of looking at turnover rates and other numbers, there is a need for measuring ROI based on different indicators and granular information, such as employee responses and consistent feedback about policies.
The eLearning modules would serve as a way to educate employees across the globe, placing emphasis on things that matter beyond racial and gender diversity.
The takeaway is that your global company should have solutions in place to monitor and retain a talented and diverse workforce, such as any of the following:
Lesson 4: Ensure Leaders Model Diversity and Inclusion
It is critical that senior leadership model diversity and inclusion. When senior leaders own D&I and make themselves a part of the diversity and inclusion management process, it sets the tone for the rest of the organization to follow suit
Is there a secret formula to learning how to manage workplace diversity, especially considering the breadth of differences between global companies? Here are three steps imperative to obtaining inclusive leadership.
1. Seek diversity
Companies must pull applicants from a diverse pool using the best techniques. Most global companies understand this fact, but it is not enough. Best practices include training hiring managers to ensure the hiring criteria and process is inclusive.
2. Create inclusion
It is not enough to only hire a diverse workforce. It is crucial to leverage diverse perspectives for the benefit of the business as a whole. It is important to bring awareness to unconscious bias and discuss it in terms of the organization. In doing so, multiple perspectives are shared and considered.
3. Drive accountability
Leaders in diversity and inclusion should make it clear that your global environment promotes free speaking. Encourage employees to speak out against biases. If necessary, launch a culture change in which every employee is involved.
This process can be slow and intimidating, but your efforts will pay off when employees feel empowered to take individual accountability and let you know when they notice a bias. Diversity and inclusion activities in the workplace are not always a simple process. In fact, sometimes they can be quite messy. But it is often in these situations — in which employees step outside of their comfort zones and are faced with new situations and ideas — that tremendous growth occurs.
A global organization catching on to this need for inclusive leadership is Ford Motor Company, which recognizes the need for leveraging different skills and perspectives, and for “respecting each other, and, in doing so, achieving profitable growth for all.”
Lesson 5: Recognize the Connection between Innovation and D&I
Perhaps the most significant lesson is that diversity and inclusion spark innovation. According to the global enterprise, diversity and inclusion increase innovation and reduce business risk.
The enterprise focused its efforts on three areas in 2014:
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