Diversity and Discrimination Regulations: Company Analysis

Diversity and Discrimination Regulations

Evaluate the diversity policies of the publicly traded company

The three companies I chose to evaluate for diversity and discrimination are IBM, Kellogg, and Coca-Cola. Diversity in the workplace can be used to promote teamwork, respect, and acceptance between different race, gender, age, religion, and languages. There are benefits of having a diverse group of people working for you, you can have a better work environment, better language speaking people if need to transcribe or translate a language.  When different people come together for a common goal, you never know what you can accomplish. Most companies with some form of diversity, normally outperform other company that has non-diverse personnel by about 15-20% (Hood, 2017).

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IBM diversity can be traced back to 1953, CEO Thomas J Watson Jr.  His policy was to hire people with the right personality, background, and talent that could do any given job, regardless of their creed, race, sex or color (IBM, 2009).  As long as they could do the job, that was good for him. The main key to IBM success is in workforce diversity is its commitment to equal opportunity.

Their management team is there to ensure that there is no form of harassment in the work environment. When hiring, HR makes sure that promotion and employee compensation are done, and it is conducted without any regards to a person’s race, gender, religion, age or disability, or sexual orientation. They try to have a work environment that is free of discrimination and harassment and will provide what is needed for handicap and disabled employee to help with their workplace success.

IBM has a global presence, and they will need to inclusive when hiring people of different culture who are bi-lingual, and they will need to retain them in order to keep a presence in certain areas, like Japan, China, Mexico, and Germany, just to list a few.  If we already have people who speak the language, we will need to retain these people. Having people who speak a different language and are familiar with a different culture can help a company greatly with success. Many companies hire handicapped people, and they have to make arrangement for whatever their handicap is, if they need a wheelchair ramp, a handicap parking spot pass or just a different computer and desk area, IBM has that for them.

IBM has three pillars in its workplace diversity strategy:

• Creating a work/home place balance, many people spend most of their time at work and think they do not need to take time off to be with their family, this is what vacation is for, and we must balance work and family life.
• Women innovation, many times we overlook women who make be more qualified for a position, and we give it to a man, who may not be qualified.  Women can do the job just as a man can and should be given an equal opportunity to prove themselves.
• Incorporation of people with disability, there are many people with disability, they may not be able to walk, but they may be a great programmer, we want them to do a job, and we should give them what they need in order to do their job.

IBM cultural diversity and inclusiveness deals with generating a level of awareness of

different cultural for those within the organization. They celebrate the Chinese New Year’s for the different employee, and they allow those who want to celebrate their cultural holiday, to do so by exchanges one of the original holidays for the holiday they want. They call it the floating holiday program. Many people have certain holidays and religious days that may be different from us in the USA, and we like to help them with our floating holiday program.  This way they can feel more at home and hopefully appreciate what we do for them as well as what they do for us.

Kellogg has made diversity and inclusion a part of their corporate key initiative in 2005.  Since then they have concentrated on retaining their diverse employee and creating awareness in a positive environment.  Diversity should be seen throughout the entire organization for all to observe and know (Kellogg, n.d.).  They ensure that all their employees go through a process and have equal opportunity for success.  All employees are treated with dignity and respect and are in a position to help themselves and the company be successful.

Kellogg set up different groups of diverse people to ensure we all learn about diversity within the company.  They had groups in different countries and the group job was to teach diversity training.  They also created an LGBTQ and a women’s group to address their community, so we could all understand their issues. Since Mexico is one of their biggest customers, they have a Latin America group who likes to march in the Mexico City Pride Parade each year. They also created a WOK group for the Asia Pacific region mentor program that matches junior female employees to senior women and men in the company. It’s a one-year program to teach new employee the ways of the company to help them advance and be future leaders. This should aid them to attain their target of gender equality at the manager level (Kellogg, n.d.). 

Coca-Cola, just like Kellogg and IBM, is also a globally diversified company whose main mission is to serve a diverse marketplace in a fair and ethical manner. Many of their suppliers, employees and community personnel are of a different nationality.  With this being said, they will need to hire bi-lingual personnel to work with the company in order to deal with the global communities and employees working around the world.  With diversity being at the center of their business, they try to create a good working environment for everyone, so they can have access to information and opportunity to be successful.  Our global teams will be trained to work in a diverse environment, so they can develop their talent and ideas in order to become great leaders.

Everyone upon hired will be given a copy of the policies and practices dealing with diversity, inclusion, and fairness for the organization. This will show everybody who we are as a company, how we do things and where we see ourselves and the company in the future. They use our business resource groups to help advance our diversity process to help train and practice diversity, inclusion, and fairness. Feedback can be given by a survey’s from our customers, the community, and our employee, once these are collected and review, our associates can start working to improve thing within the company. Coca-Cola has four pillars:

• Workplace
• Marketplace
• Community
• Partners

These are the people who are the center of the operation, our employee, our suppliers, the

community, our customers/clients and our consumers (Coca-Cola Company, 2018). Without them, we could not make our organization such a success, and many of these people come from a diverse background. The action is what we need in our people, this is how we align the pay and incentives for our associates who show us what they can do.  This way we attract people who can develop and retain so we can foster our global mixture of talent that will produce great performance and growth for the company now and in the future.

 Coca-Cola is trying to strengthen its female talent in the leadership roles to be a key factor for the company. At the end of 2017, women represented about 47% of the leadership talent, which was a rise from 2016. We also had an increase in our multicultural leadership roles here in the USA where they represented about 32% of our senior leadership in 2017 (Coca-Cola Company, 2018).  This information is shared across our global workforce on a quarterly basis, where we highlight our progress, success, and accountability.

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 When it comes to inclusion, we concentrate on representing everybody, no matter what their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, nationality and or disability. They try to be fair and treat all the same no matter what their background or culture. They have a diversity advisory council of about 7000 members all over the global organization to help think of new ideas and help train others for success. Within this council, there are many different people who speak many different languages, this can help us perform as one, if someone needs a translator, we can check with the council and they can help us to keep going and work toward success.

Do the organization’s hiring practices exemplify inclusiveness.

 All three organizations had great hiring practices, all had policies that instructed them what they need when hiring people, they hired people of all races, religion, sex, and they tried to hire their share of female to file need jobs.  They have women and minority in supervisory position. They hire handicap employees and complied to making the building suitable for them to get in and out of work and perform their jobs.

 Since all three are globally active they need to hire a diverse group of people and train them to be a team so they can all know and understand what needs to be done in order to be successful. They make sure that when advertising for a job, they made sure that they advertised in a place where they can find the right candidate for the job they were looking for to make sure they got a larger selection of personnel. When posting for a job position, they try their best to remove any bias from the application and concentrated mainly on job qualification and skills. Each company made sure that they look at reevaluating their hiring practices and job requirement as needed.

Recommended ways to ensure ethical conduct toward employees

 One of the main problems in an organization when it comes to ethics is unethical behavior in the workplace and most of them are caused by falsifying a simple report (Wile, 2012). Something as simple as not counting items to get a total amount, saying Robert did something that he didn’t when you know he didn’t do it.  The people who do the proper counting of items and double counting, or the person who said that was not my doing, so I can not take credit for it, these are the people with good ethics that we want working for us.

 Here are some of the ways we can award these people for doing the right thing. Many companies do not do enough for these people.

• Rewards: Most employees feel good when they are rewarded for something that they work hard on and it did a great thing for the organization.  If you see them doing something good let someone know so they can be rewarded.
• Expectation: Let your employee know what you expect from them, let them know what the right thing is and that they can be rewarded for doing good.  Sometimes, just things like kindness, wisdom, and self-control can show a different side of a person, and it should be noted.
• Training: When a person is properly trained, and they know what they are doing, it brings out self-confidence in that person and it helps him to do a better job, and others can notice that confidence. You know what is right, and you should do what is right, train a person the right way, even though you might take short cuts.
• Policies: Make sure everybody knows what the policies are, and make sure they know when something has been updated.  Everybody should know where the policies are located and should read them on a regular basis (Wile, 2012). Some policies might say “if you use the last piece of paper in the printer, please add more paper.” This can be common sense, but if it is in the polices, then it should not be an issue.

Do white men fit into a diversity requirement, based upon the idea of inclusion.

 I think the white man should be added to the diversity and inclusion requirement, there is some organization that is owned by Asian and or Black.  All organizations should have an HR department to ensure that we hire from all races, religion, and sex, and white men are part of that demographic. White men are like all other men in many ways, they are father, uncles, husband, and supervisors, and they could have different races within their ancestry and they will have to know how to deal with diversity in the workplace (Orlopp, 2014).  For an organization to be successful, you have to work in an environment where all voices matter and can be heard. In most organizations, white men are in leadership/supervisors’ roles, and in these roles, they will need to know how to create a team of many different diversity and get them to work together.  So, yes white men should be placed into the diversity/inclusion role, it’s a learning environment, and all voices need to be heard, no matter the race, sex, or religion.

Some weakness of strategic organizational diversity and ways to strengthen it.

 When you have a group of employees that are from a different demographic of the world and of different sex, race and those with a disability, one of the weaker/problems might be:

• Difficulty in transitioning, if your organization is not familiar with a diverse work environment, it might take time to train a person and them getting used to the area. In their location or country, they might do thing differently, which might work better for them at that location.
• Short-term cost overlay, different countries has different holidays then we do, people with a disability need certain things like a wheelchair ramp and a larger bathroom stall, and some need certain areas and time to pray for religious reasons
• Training, sometimes there is a language barrier, they might speak broken English, and you might not understand broken English.

Some ways we can work on fixing or strengthening this problem is training, and if you know there will be a language barrier, find a translator to help to do training.  Many handicap peoples are good workers, but they need a little help.  Once they see you have done the thing they need in order to do their job and gain access to the building, they will be a better productive employee.  This will be less for them to worry about on a daily basis.  If you know what a person wants/need, and you know it in advance, make it happen, when HR hires them, they should know what will be needed, and should communicate it to the employee and the executives to make it happen before employment. Not everybody thinks or act alike, so ask around and see if there is anything that needs to be done to make your work environment better.

References

• Coca-Cola Company. (2018, August 29). Global Diversity Mission. Retrieved from https://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/diversity/global-diversity-mission
• Hood, A. (2017, July 14). 7 Biggest Diversity Issues in The Workplace – AI4JOBS. Retrieved from https://www.thiswayglobal.com/diversity/top-diversity-issues-in-the-workplace/
• IBM. (2009, July 1). IBM policies – IBM Corporate Responsibility. Retrieved from https://www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/policy10.shtml
• Kellogg. (n.d.). Kellogg Company | Diversity & Inclusion |. Retrieved from https://www.kelloggcompany.com/en_US/about-diversity.html
• Wile, E. (2012, October 19). Ways to Encourage Ethical Behavior in the Workplace. Retrieved from https://woman.thenest.com/ways-encourage-ethical-behavior-workplace-4797.html
• Orlopp, S. (2014, December). Why White Men Matter. Retrieved from https://www.diversitybestpractices.com/blogs/post/why-white-men-matter