Describe Gerstner’s Diversity Task-Force Initiative
Managing Diversity is the organization’s commitment to integrate and develop individuals that make up a heterogonous workforce. Diversity management is the development of organizational strategy, culture, policies and practices that support interpersonal respect, communication, and individual, team and organizations performance in a diverse environment. A diverse organization employs people with different culture.
Gerstner’s Diversity Task-Force Initiative is a diversity management program that aims to communicate to the employees the company’s commitment to diversity. Gerstner launched the diversity task force initiative to uncover and understand differences among the groups represented in the company and find ways to appeal to a broader set of employees and customers. This became a cornerstone of IBM’s human resources strategy.
The goal of the initiative is to identify the differences between demographic groups in the company and learning from these differences and improving the business. Gerstner assigned different task forces to deal with diversity related issues. These task forces represent the different demographic employee constituencies, namely:
- Asians
- Blacks (African-American and of African decent)
- Gays/Lesbians/Bisexuals/Transgender Individuals
- Hispanics
- White Men
- Native Americans
- People with Disabilities
- Women
Each task force comprised of 15 to 20 senior managers. The members of the task forces were chosen based on their knowledge of and experience with the top executive. Each task force also had two or more executive co-chairs who were members of the constituency. High-performing, well respected senior managers and junior executives were recruited for these roles. Each task force was also assigned an executive sponsor from the WMC, who was charged with learning about the relevant constituency’s concerns, opportunities, and strategies and with serving as liaison to top management. The executive sponsors where senior vice presidents, and most reported directly to Gerstner. Once the task forces had been set up and launched, top management sent an email to every US employee detailing the task forces and their missions and underscoring how important the initiative was to the company. The top management also encouraged employees to respond with specific suggestions for how to make IBM a more inclusive environment. The responses (amounting to 2,000) were compiled and channeled to appropriate task forces. As a result of these suggestions, the task forces focused on the following areas for evaluation and improvement: communications, staffing, employee benefits, work place flexibility, training and education, advertising and marketplace opportunities and external relations. The initial charge of the task forces was to take six months to research and report back to the CEO and the WMC on four questions: What is necessary for your constituency to feel welcome and valued at IBM? What can the corporation do, in partnership with your group, to maximize your constituency’s productivity? What can the corporation do to influence your constituency’s buying decisions, so that IBM is seen as a preferred solution provider? And which external organizations should IBM form relationships with to better understand the needs of your constituency? The task forces identified the needs and concerns of their constituencies and then compiled them and presented them to the meeting conducted on December 1, 1995. Several of the task forces shared many of the same issues, such as development and promotion, senior management’s communication of its commitment to diversity, and the need to focus on recruiting a diverse and science related positions. Other concerns were specific to particular groups, including domestic partner benefits (identified by the G LBT task force) and issues of access to buildings and technology (raised by the people with disabilities task force). Overall, the findings made it clear that workforce diversity was the bridge between the workplace and the marketplace – in other words, greater diversity in the workplace could help IBM attract a more diverse customer set. A focus on diversity was, in short, a major business opportunity.
Former CEO Gerstner wanted IBM and its people to ignore cultural, racial, and other differences among its vast worldwide workforce. Gartner initiated a diversity task force initiative that would uncover and understand differences among the groups and find ways to appeal to a broader set of employees.
Enhancing IBM’s Success through the Diversity Task Force Initiative
Managing Diversity has many benefits for the company. Managed well, diversity can be a positive force, spurring creativity, dynamism and excellence, renewing and refreshing the corporation, and ultimately improving the bottom line (Aronson 2002). Diversity brings differences in styles and in ways of looking at and doing things which can help organizations do more than they ever dreamed possible. Diversity can help organizations create new and more innovative products and services, better meet the needs of customers and clients, and do more for the community the organizations are part of and serve. Diversity means differences, and differences create challenges, but differences also open avenues of opportunities. Diversity:
- Enables a wide range of views to be present in an organization, including views that might challenge the status quo from all sides
- Focuses and strengthens an organization’s core values
- Is instrumental in organizational change
- Stimulates social, economic, intellectual, and emotional growth
- Helps an organization understand its place in the global economy (Sonnenschein 1999)
Diversity Management takes many forms in practice, but can be defined as an organization’s active investment in the integration, development, and advancement of individuals who in the collective, represent the heterogeneity of the labor force, and in the development of organizational strategy, culture, policies, and practices that support interpersonal respect, communication, and individual, team and organizational performance in a diverse environment (Burke and Cooper 2004). For the case of IBM, diversity management has been a long-standing commitment of the company. The company views diversity management as a strategy to achieve success. The company believes the diversity of its workforce means understanding and appealing to its customer base. As IBM former CEO Gerstner said “our marketplace is made up of all races, religions, and sexual orientations, and therefore it is vital to our success that our workforce also be diverse”. The diversity task force initiative helps IBM to create a good reputation as employer and therefore attract best workers. IBM is among the most diverse organizations in the United States and as its share of the labor force increases, more and more of the best workers are drawn from the ranks of women and minorities. They will naturally prefer an environment known to be friendly to their concerns. Also, IBM will gain competitive advantage from its diversity task force initiative as it will be more able to hire, retain, and promote top performers, regardless of their racial/gender status. Overcoming the factors that unduly limit employees’ potential liberates talent that may have been hindered or gone under-utilized. A third benefit that the initiative may bring to the company is it will enable IBM to have access to creativity, knowledge and talent. This benefit is founded on the belief that the more perspectives that can be brought to bear on a problem, the more better solutions that are likely to be generated. Exposure to diversity helps individuals develop more complex understandings of the world, leading to more productive and creative problems solving. Another benefit is on the area of marketing. Successful marketing requires a thorough and intimate knowledge of the culture you are marketing to. Another benefit centers on globalization. The skills, languages, and cultural competencies of America’s diverse workforce are an invaluable resource in helping firms to compete abroad (Aronson 2002).
Enacting policies to facilitate the inclusion of all employees, the employment barriers traditionally suffered by women and ethnic minority groups can be overcome. Such policies open the doors to job advancement and promotions that have clear monetary benefits to individual employees and their families. They also open channels of communication and provide real decision-making power. In the context of human services organizations, real participation in the decision-making process has been linked to job satisfaction, which in turn can potentially affect worker retention and effectiveness on the job. The benefits for the organization center around four main issues: (1) cost savings due to lower turnover, less absenteeism, and improved productivity; (2) winning the competition for talent by being more attractive to women and members of ethnic minority groups; (3) the opportunity to drive business growth by leveraging the many facets of diversity such as marketing more effectively to ethnic minority communities or to senior citizens; and (4) the positive effect that diversity management has on the company’s image and stock prices. Companies today can reap the benefits of an increasingly global market place employing workers from different nationalities in, or outside, their native countries. This expansion creates new jobs, including international job opportunities, for these companies’ employees. Multinational companies such as IBM do business with more than 50 countries. Of the 1,000 largest industrial companies in the United States, 700 expect their growth abroad to exceed their domestic growth in the next five years. With foreign production currently accounting for more than 25 percent of their domestic production, U.S. multinationals have a great stake in the international scene. These global ventures and international collaborations allow companies to expand their geographical markets and to increase their economic activities (Barak 2000).
References
Aronson, D 2002, ‘Managing the Diversity Revolution: Best Practices for 21st Century Business’, Civil Rights Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 46+
Barak, M E 2000, ‘e Inclusive Workplace: An Ecosystems Approach to Diversity Management’, Social Work, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 339+.
Burke, R J and Cooper, C L (eds) 2004, Reinventing Human Resources Management: Challenges and New Directions, New York, Routledge.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment