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academydr online

Training Can Damage Diversity Efforts | workforce.com - 0 views

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diverity diversity_intiatives

shared by academydr online on 19 Mar 08 - Cached
  • academydr online on 19 Mar 08
     
    The dark side of diversity training
academydr online

Diversity's Business Case Doesn't Add Up | workforce.com - 0 views

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diversity diversity_business_case diversity_intiatives diversity_metrics

shared by academydr online on 19 Mar 08 - Cached
    • academydr online
      academydr online on 19 Mar 08
       
      The sampling for this study was problematic in that they had difficulty recruiting for the study. Another problems was that there were few outcome measures data AVAILABLE. That does not mean that there was no impact of diverisity intiatives. They just could not jet the data. Also, Ely and Thomas did find a relationship between diversity and performance measures for "learning and integration"'cultures. I don't hink this point is brough up in this article.
  • The investigation involved a detailed examination of large firms with well-deserved reputations for their long-standing commitment to building a diverse workforce and managing diversity effectively.
  • At a time when charges of racial harassment are way up, and racial discrimination class-action lawsuits are enjoying a renaissance, diversity programs are flourishing. Organizations appoint diversity officers. They hire diversity consultants, coaches, and trainers. They adopt diversity scorecards, benchmarks, and best practices, and send executives to diversity conferences and leadership academies. But despite the astonishing number of products and services--ranging from the worthy to the banal--one item is in very short supply: hard metrics for measuring performance results or the return on diversity spending.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • 20 large corporations wit
    • academydr online
      academydr online on 19 Mar 08
       
      Compare sample size of 20 in this study to 200 or more in DiversityInc's Diversity Top 50 survey.
  • the number of job-discrimination charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including race-based charges, hit a seven-year high in 2002.
  • The recent increase in charges can be linked to the recession--work-related lawsuits typically rise during economic downturns--but there was no evidence of improved compliance before the recession hit.
  • Wal-Mart, ranked number one on Fortune’s prestigious "America’s Most Admired Companies" list for 2003, is facing the largest sex-discrimination lawsuit in U.S. history, with as many as 500,000 plaintiffs.
  • Xerox launched its first workplace equality efforts almost 40 years ago. The company draws 30 percent of its workforce from racial minorities and wins numerous awards for its diversity program. Yet it still faces multiple discrimination lawsuits. The number of racial-harassment cases involving hangman’s nooses has exploded in recent years, according to the EEOC, with incidents reported at dozens of leading companies, including Home Depot, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Texaco, and Northwest Airlines.
  • "Meaningful discussions and analyses do not occur because companies are concerned about legal issues and because people simply want to believe that diversity works," Kochan says.
  • struggled to find companies willing to participate in its diversity study. "
  • "There are estimates that companies spend $8 billion on diversity training annually," he adds. "Much of this is wasted because it is spent on programs for awareness and valuing diversity that do not give people the skills they need."
  • Instead, group members and leaders must be trained to deal with group process issues, with a focus on communicating and problem-solving in diverse teams.
  • Human resources executives often don’t demand documented results from outside consultants or in-house diversity staff because "it’s easier to create activities and get credit for doing something than it is to create metrics and measures and hold people accountable," he says.
  • Some companies measure diversity results with recruitment, promotion, or turnover rates, but few look beyond simple head counts to measure the full financial or performance impact of their programs.
  • "There is a connection between diversity and financial success, but typical profit-and-loss systems don’t capture the benefits that diversity creates," says Laura Liswood, senior adviser to Goldman Sachs on diversity issues and a senior scholar at the University of Maryland’s Academy of Leadership. "A lot of the benefits are not quantifiable, but it’s also true that we have not devoted the same level of resources to attempts to quantify diversity results."
  • "The needed data cannot, in most cases, be culled from existing human resources data," he says. "To create the needed data and analysis, human resources executives must run experiments within their organizations. They must invest in efforts to train departments in group processes, and then follow their performance over time, comparing the performance of groups that have been trained with that of groups that have not, using hard performance measurements based on the goals of the unit." These measurements might be time-to-market, error rates, sales growth, or any number of other productivity measures.
  • "Human resources metrics in general don’t have the same analytical power as other business metrics,"
  • The business case for diversity that dominates industry claims and corporate goals focuses on three related objectives: to allow organizations to tap talent pools and incorporate new ideas and perspectives from employees of different backgrounds; to expand market share; and to ensure legal compliance.
  • Trivialization also occurs as the number of groups covered by diversity initiatives expands to include every conceivable cultural minority, far beyond historically underrepresented or oppressed groups. "There are practitioners in this business who push a very broad definition of diversity because they are trying to appeal to a larger audience to secure their own fate," Hyter says.
  • Patricia Pope, CEO of Pope & Associates, a diversity-management firm in Cincinnati, adds that "there’s been this desire to get away from race and gender issues because they are so uncomfortable. It’s often easier for companies to tackle other differences, such as diversity of thought or diversity of birth order."
  • Several studies, including Kochan’s, have found that companies generally are more successful in managing diversity with respect to gender issues than racial and ethnic issues. The empirical studies indicate that racial and ethnic diversity may, in fact, have a negative impact on business performance unless specific forms of analysis, training, and monitoring are in place. If left unattended or mismanaged, diversity is likely to produce miscommunication, unresolved conflict, higher turnover, and lower performance.
  • Hyter says that some of his clients are "becoming much more aggressive about measuring the return on their investment in diversity training and consulting." He also believes that in-house staffing for corporate diversity programs is changing. "You can tell by the number of people with P&L responsibilities who are being tapped to manage diversity efforts, as opposed to people with just human resources backgrounds."
  • Kochan says. "Diversity can enhance business performance, but only if the proper training is in place and the climate and culture support it. If companies can’t do this, they will lose the opportunity that diversity represents. There could be backward movement, and the negative consequences of diversity could predominate."
  • The industry’s singular focus on success stories, and corporate reluctance to track and report results, makes it difficult to determine if diversity programs have fulfilled their objectives.
  • may succeed in "building a pipeline of people with all kinds of demographic characteristics" but then fail at dealing with different behaviors.
  • Building diversity programs on bedrock instead of sand begins with recognizing "that there is virtually no evidence to support the simple assertion that diversity is inevitably good or bad for business," Kochan says.
    • academydr online
      academydr online on 19 Mar 08
       
      This is true, simple diversity = performance does not work and in fact makes no sense. Testing of decatergorization via expose to difference over time fails without certain conditions (that can be linked to cultural factors) in place. The fact is we need to find out what diversity interventions work and under what conditions and contexts. The only way to do this is to find links to observable/percievable/measurable aspects of the organization.
  • "Unable to link HR practices to business performance, HR practitioners will be limited in what they can learn about how to manage diversity effectively, and their claims for diversity as a strategic imperative warranting financial investment will be weakened accordingly," Kochan says.
    • academydr online
      academydr online on 19 Mar 08
       
      I disagree with the narrow focus on business performance. Not even IT, plant and equipment investments can be justified in this way. I prefer a look at effectiveness and all the factors that contribute to how well objectives are met. There are affective indicators as well (See Toyata story). Plus, I think we will need to take an other look at indicators of culture change and its effects on effectiveness. Let's see more research linking all the different over and under forms of executive conpensation to performance! Last, I saw there was no direct link there either! The issue is likely the emphasis on training and training is useless unless the person will use it and has the opportunity/ need to use it. Also 8 billion looks big but how does that compare to other spending on training, development, office furniture. Are we making a mountain out of a mole hill? I know 600 milliion a year in consulting fees is probably not much compared to what Mckinney etc draw for expert consulting...
  • academydr online on 19 Mar 08
     
    Trade article on Korchan study
academydr online

Don't Make Texaco's $175 Million Mistake | workforce.com - 0 views

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diversity diversity_intiatives diversity_lawsuits

shared by academydr online on 19 Mar 08 - Cached
  • In fact, Texaco's cash settlement of more than $140 million, combined with additional concessions valued by plaintiffs' lawyers at $35 million-is the largest settlement ever in a racial-discrimination case.
  • With the hiring problem mostly solved, the next round of lawsuits is being based on the failure of companies to promote and compensate those employees at the same level as white males.
  • Diversity consultant Elsie Cross of Elsie Y. Cross Associates in Philadelphia agrees, adding that much of the training done to date has been superficial. "You can't take people who've grown up in a prejudiced society and get rid of their beliefs and attitudes in a half-day training session," she says. Not only that, but in seeking to address every kind of difference imaginable, including age, religion, management level and even the particular concerns of white males, much of the training has become watered down. While this may make the training more palatable to some, Cross says it takes the focus off the very real oppression that still exists for women and minorities.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Up to this point, most diversity work has been focused solely on diversity-awareness training, she says. This raises the awareness of individual employees but does nothing to change the culture itself.
  • The report found that the annualized return for the 100 companies which rated lowest in EEO issues averaged 7.9 percent, compared to 18.3 percent for the 100 companies that rated highest in their equal employment opportunities.
  • But as the 1996 A.T. Kearney survey revealed, 74 percent of companies with diversity efforts attribute them to business, societal and/or political pressures—not basic ethical values. Given that, one of the primary business reasons to pursue diversity sensitivity is increasing the company's ability to attract and retain customers.
  • This is because training done in the absence of any formal support for change can increase divisiveness in the workplace. Why? Not only because it raises awareness of tense issues, but also because it can increase the expectations of women and minorities, and increase fear and resistance among white men.
  • We realized that diversity efforts can increase employee satisfaction," Cromwell says, "and the Harvard Business School has been able to demonstrate a strong link between employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction and shareholder value.
  • companies must begin to think of training as a component of their diversity strategy, not the strategy itself. Hyater-Adams believes companies must now concentrate on the second stage of diversity work that she calls "integration and application." This stage not only seeks to address what training ignored, such as management hypocrisy, but also seeks to make diversity work a business strategy. The goal, according to diversity experts, is to create a workplace in which white males, women and minorities are fully integrated and have equal access to power, promotions and opportunities.
  • At US WEST, for example, managers must demonstrate their personal commitment to diversity through direct involvement on committees, task forces or community groups-they can't pass the task off to a subordinate-and they must show how their commitment is changing the demographic profile of workers in their unit, division or community. Furthermore, a portion of their compensation is tied to the achievement of diversity goals.
  • "Most organizations that have invested in diversity training haven't received a proper return on their investment," Cox says. Just look at Texaco: the company had initiated a diversity effort a year before the secret tape was made, and senior executives had attended at least one awareness session.
  • Diagnostic work helps diversity professionals understand what issues to tackle first.
  • Finally, make sure you conduct regular evaluations. Companies must always be taking the pulse of employees to make sure that no diversity issue is overlooked. "What most companies need today is better information on minority issues," says Robertson. This includes statistics on the workforce profile, on major lawsuits or employee complaints of discrimination, and performance data about individual managers. This information must be shared with upper-level executives on a regular basis along with all the other profit-and-loss data they receive. If Texaco's executives had been receiving this information regularly, Robertson suggests they might never have been the target of a discrimination suit, or the ensuing negative publicity.
  • In the final analysis, perhaps the best way to look at this issue is the way Cross describes it: "Diversity isn't the problem, it's the ideal." It's certainly an ideal worth striving to attain—and a financial driver we can no longer ignore.
  • Performing regular diagnostics, in the form of focus groups and employee evaluations, can help HR executives uncover these issues. "Companies must [analyze] the data by different populations," says Cromwell. If they don't, issues that affect certain employee populations-the lack of informal mentoring for minorities, for example-may not be noticeable when combined with other employees' responses.
  • But if company leaders begin to approach diversity like any other major business initiative—be it safety, reengineering or self-managed teams—they'll be in a better position to institutionalize diversity and truly encourage and embrace the different perspectives of each employee.
academydr online

KeyBank: Diversity Awareness - 0 views

www.key.com/A-3.6.1.html

diversity diversity_intiatives

shared by academydr online on 18 Mar 08 - No Cached
  • need for a diverse set of tal
  • academydr online on 18 Mar 08
     
    Using Diversity Top 50 as main reported
  • academydr online on 18 Mar 08
     
    Notice the types of interventions listed.  Metrics on effectiveness?
academydr online

YouTube - Diversity: not whether, but how! - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

diversity diversity_business_case diversity_intiatives

shared by academydr online on 03 Apr 08 - Cached
  • academydr online on 03 Apr 08
     
    Short introduction to HRM approach to diverisity and linking to organizational efffectiveness
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