• Introduction

• Diversity refers to any perceived hetrogenity among people: age, race, religion,
functional specially, profession, sexual orientation, geographic origin, and lifestyle,
tenure with the organization or position and any other perceived difference. Diversity
has two dimension, the primary(mainly biological,usually visible:Age,
gender,race,ethnicity, sexual orientation,disabilities) and secondary(socio
culturall,usually invisible language,education,value, occupation, learning, shyness
etc).
• Diversity refer to the co-exeistence of employess from various socio-cultural back
ground within the company. Diversity includes cultural factors such as race, gender,
age, colour, physical ability, ethnicity. The broder concept of diversity may include
age, national origin, religion, disabilities, sexual orientation, values, ethnic culture,
education, language, life style, belief, physical apperence and economic status.
• So diversifying the employess composition require a type of organization culture in
which each employee can pursue his or her career aspiration without being inhibited
by gender,race, nationality, religion or other factor that are irrelevant to
performance.
• According to torres and bruxelies 1992”managing diversity means enabling the
diverse workforce to perform in full potential in an equitable work environment
where no group has advantage or disadvantage”.
Diversity management is ensuring that factors are in place to provide for and
• encourage the continued development of a diverse workforce by melding these
actual and perceived differences among workers to achieve maximum productivity.
Diversity management involves creating a supportive culture where all employees
can be effective. In creating this culture it is important that top management
strongly support workplace diversity as a company goal and include diversity
initiatives in their companies' business strategies. It has grown out of the need for
organization to recognize the changing workforce and other social pressures that
often result. Diversity is more than being politically correct; it is about fostering a
culture that values individuals and their wide array of needs and contributions.

Why Diversity Management?

Employees of are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. With the passing of days,

diversity is going to be an important issue for the HR manager for the following
reasons:

* A large number of women are joining the work-force.

* Work-force mobility is increasing.

* Young workers in the work-force are increasing.

* Ethnic minorities' proportion constantly in the total work-force is increasing.

 * International careers and expatriates are becoming common.

* Necessity of international experience is felt for career progression to many top-

level managerial positions.

Benefits of Diversity Management

More specially, diversity when built into organization at different levels, offers the
following benefits:

Easy entrance to a changing market situation.

If managed properly than increased in creativity and performance.

Help in faster decision making and problem solving.

Large scale business transformation.

* High quality customer service.

* To give power to work-force.

* Alliances with suppliers and customers.

* Uninterrupted learning process.

• Decrease in the cost in term of time.

how to achive Diversity Management in organization

The following are some important ways to manage diversity effectively:

* To consider female employee needs, such as child care and job sharing, to prevent
their turnover.

* Commitment from top management towards value diversity is a pre-requisite.

* To arrange mentoring programme by senior managers to identify promising women

and minority employees and play an important role in nurturing their career progress.

* To arrange diversity training programmes to bring diversity awareness and educate

employees on cultural and sex differences and how to respond to these in the workplace.

* There should be an apprenticeship programme to trained promising prospective

employees properly before they are actually hired on a permanent basis.

* Employer should set up a support group to provide a nurturing climate for employees
who would otherwise feel isolated or alienated.
 * To conduct diversity audit to review the effectiveness of an organization's diversity
management programmes.

* There should be a proper communication which includes speeches by senior

executives, inclusion of diversity in corporate vision statements, the publication of
diversity brochure and inclusion of diversity as a topic in new employee orientation.

* Managers need to be sensitive to the needs of working parents.

Principle for diversity management

Shift in thinking.
Strategic organizational goals.
Focous in personal and organizational goals.
Broad based relationship thinking.
Diginity and respect as a necessary factor.
Visionary leadership and empowered relationship.
People should be see as individual not number.

Workforce diversity in india

Composition: The composition of the workforce is changing in India. Young, skilled and
knowledge employees are occupying positions of importance. the private sector, employees are
no more fascinated by secure less paying routine and standardized jobs offered by the public
sector (barring companies like BHEL, NTPC etc). and other government owned and controlled
organizations. . Big private sector firms have been exploiting their talents to conceive operate
and develop new ventures in emerging areas such as oil, telecom insurance banking health care
etc.

Organizations now cannot discriminate on the basis of age. They must listen to their experienced
employees, to draw from their expertise and initiate programs. That meets these needs.
McDonald’s a heavy recruiter of older workers has developed its masters programs in which
newly hired seniors work along side experienced employees so that in a matter of four weeks
they can turned lose to work on their own. The training program is meant to help seniors unlearn
old behaviors while acquiring new skills. At the same time companies have to understand and
appreciate the changing values of the young workers who join the company with a lot of
expectations. The days of lifetime employment total loyalty to company and commitment to
work seem to be a thing of the past. To attract and retain young brains, organizations have to
institute appropriate HR policies, supported by attractive compensation offers.
A large portion of Indian women occupy an inferior position in Indian society
(Mayer 1999 in Patrickson & O’Brien 2001). However, women are gaining more
access to basic and higher education and gender issues in organizations, thus
becoming more relevant. Particularly, there is a significant increase of women in
the workforce in urban cities (Datt & Sundharam 2004). The surge of knowledge
based enterprises in service and manufacturing sectors creates more job
opportunities for women. Concurrently, the mechanisation of industrial (Breman
1999 in Patrickson & O’Brien 2001) and agricultural work tends to marginalise
women. Despite Equal Employment Opportunity being deemed a fundamental
policy, enforcement practices range from full compliance to negligence. The
Equal Remuneration Act (1976), applicable to all work sectors, does not serve
the purpose of creating pay equality because of weak labour inspection
machinery (Heggade 1998). Significant gaps in the earnings of men and women
still exist and can amount to 24 per cent less pay in the private sector among
full time employees (Patrickson