“Affirmative action” refers to the positive steps or policies executed in representation of Disabled people, women and minorities in the areas of education, employment and business from which they have been historically exclude. Affirmative action is an attempt to make the organizations to balance the diversified workforce. Affirmative action, as a policy, is usually said to be in place when a company or an institution takes reasonable action to remedy any discriminatory behavior, which has occurred in the past.
In other sense, affirmative action was developed because of the need to take “affirmative action” to as anti-discrimination activity. The potential benefits of Managing Diversity include increased employee and client satisfaction, increased productivity, and more inclusive management. The success of this program pivots on understanding, commitment and participation. The firm aims to prevent not only clear acts of favoritism, but also requires practice.
Affirmative action policies are intended to support the development of good employment practices in respect of all employees and to promote equality and opportunity for all employees and job applicants on the basis of merit and the ability to do the preferred job. The best practices of equal opportunity practices include: Recruitment & Selection, Pay, Terms and conditions, Learning & Development, Staff Development, Working environment, HR Policies and Procedures.
Diversity Diversity is the approach to provide equal opportunities in work place. It integrates the principle of that all workers should receive equal rights by ignoring the differences between the people in terms of their gender and race. By valuing these differences and qualities, managers may create an environment where everyone finds value for their individual talents, and where individuals’ skills and competencies are fully utilized.
In order to maximize its productivity, organization must create an environment that attracts and maintains highly skilled people who can commit to contribute their maximum potential towards the organization goals. The awareness of diversity allows better understanding of global customers’ needs, and provides access to greater labor pools (Agocs & Bur, 2000) Diversity management provides the active working environment which values differences as assets, fully valves the potential of all individuals and invests the employees to achieve the goals of organization.
Organizations can manage diversity by educating people about differences and by defining the desired organizational culture and developing and implementing the plans to reach that desired position. Managing diversity solves the problems of: managing differences, managing disagreements, managing relationships, managing conflicts, managing ignorance. Adoption of diversity policy brings to an organization a wide range of experience, ideas and creativity. At the same time, it enables the individual employee to work to utilize their full potential.
Managing Diversity is the program which recognizes the association between the effective people management and increased organizational efficiency and productivity. It is nothing but about increasing the diversity at all levels of the sections as well as making the most of the talent inside the organization. However, the inability to manage diversity in a proper way in the workplace can be extremely harmful and can costs the organization by creating negative image, high employee turn over rate, loss of advertising revenue discrimination suits, litigation time and money.
Diversity can be managed by providing Equal Employment Opportunity, affirmative action and by categorizing and eliminating the biasing barriers in the recruitment, retention and upward mobility of employees, especially minorities, women, persons with disabilities and Developing positive employment strategies to achieve adequate representation of groups. Equal employment opportunity and Affirmative action are important stages in the evolution of diversity management (Vines 1999). Managing diversity in work place means staff and managers recognize all others regardless of background, religious belief, gender, age or disability.
Equal opportunities are concerned with keeping the organizational practices within the law and ensuring that all personnel decisions concerning pay, recruitment, and promotion are based only on the individual’s ability to do their job well. This is achieved through a systematic policy approach to all aspects of personnel activities. The establishment an equal opportunities policy is not just enough to mange diversity but it requires a system to check the implementation of that policy. Steps to managing diversity: – Developing a policy of equality in opportunities within the business.
– Implementing a system to check the implementation of equal opportunities policy regularly. The Diversity management is different from the activities like equal opportunity and affirmative action approaches in many ways. The principle of diversity management is to improve the organizational competitiveness and efficiency for business purpose and market advantage. Diversity management is not a policy practice exclusively targeting to fulfill the interests of excluded or under-represented minorities, but it should be an inclusive policy to protect the interests of all employees eg, like including white males.
So making practical implementations to overrule such difference between employee groups is important in organizational policies. Such types of equal employment practices encourage people to value their individual differences and to work more productively utilizing the differences of each other collaboratively. Barrier to manage diversity in U. S: There are structural, cultural, and semantic barriers in managing the diversity and to practice equality. According to the 2000 Census, about one third of the population was
made up of minorities, consisting of persons of African American, Hispanic, Asian and other minority origin, compared with about one quarter a decade earlier (D’Vera Cohn and Darryl Fears as cited in Gerald E. Caiden) Civil service requirements and the agency’s culture hindered diversity efforts. The effects of social networks, limited accountability in hiring, and inadequate communication of the vision for diversity also delayed the diversity initiative. In organization, the success of diversity depends on the support of top management.
Rose Mary Wentling researched on the Factors that assist and barriers that hinder the success of diversity initiatives in multinational corporations. In this research, he found that the integrating strategic plan of diversity initiatives with corporate strategic plan, culture to value the diversity, top management support are the factors that help the diversity initiatives and people not understanding the value of diversity, competing agendas, size and complexity of the corporation and economic changes were the barriers in hindering the success of diversity initiatives in multinational corporations.
This notifies that the poor back up from the management means lack of affirmative ctivities in the organization to the diversified groups. Affirmative actions & Diversity Affirmative action cites the polices meant to promote access to education or employment aiming at a traditionally on socio-politically non-dominant group typically minorities or women. It acts as an instrument to manage diversity. Motivation for affirmative action policies is to remedy the effects of past discrimination and to encourage public institutions such as universities, hospitals and police forces to be more representative of the population.
Affirmative action takes a practical approach to achieve the equity in the work place. Affirmative action is an attempt to redistribute economic power by forcing employers to give preference to women. Affirmative action programs are removes the prejudiced employment barriers and take action to promote equal opportunity for women in the workplace. In the U. S, Affirmative action is necessary to increase the representation of certain designated groups allegedly seeking to correct discrimination or bias in education and employment. Usually it is achieved through the use of discrimination and preferential treatment for those groups.