Did you know that one of the reasons we were awarded the Olympic Games was our emphases on celebrating diversity? Adecco the recruitment sponsor for London 2112 has just completed a survey of employers’ views on diversity. Overwhelmingly companies reported that having a workforce that reflected the communities they served was a real advantage and good for business. However when asked about the value of campaigns to promote diversity there was a high degree of cynicism with more than half the 1000 staff surveyed saying they thought this was more about good PR than any real attempt to change the way things were done.
It seems that employers say that diversity is a good thing and may truly believe it they just don’t know how to support it. This is a problem we are very familiar with in the public sector. Despite two decades or more of recruitment strategies to encourage more staff form minority groups and changes to recruitment processes to reduce the opportunities for intentional or unintentional discrimination change has been slow. The focus is often on race and faith because these are linked to culture and people from different cultures with different life experiences will add something new to the organisation. Of course this is equally true of people who have a disability. Include someone with a disability on the working group to redesign the reception area and you will get a different perspective. Include a working mother on a group to look at flexible working arrangements and you might end up challenging the whole culture around what constitutes commitment and whether we are too impressed by how many hours a manager puts in when what we really should care about is how effective are they.
This prompts the question do we really want people questioning the way things are done round here? It can be very uncomfortable for those of us doing ok out of the status quo to have people come along with a very different way of looking at things and an expectation that their views will be listen to and acted upon. The idea of diversity as a good thing is much more comfortable than the reality.
Blair McPherson author of An Elephant in the Room –an equality and diversity training manual published by Russell House www.blairmcpherson.co.uk
