Human Resource Management of Minority Groups

Introduction

Nowadays, all companies have to act in a business environment where different cultures, different sexual orientations, different religion, ethnicities, races, colors and differences in their education, experiences, knowledges bases. Companies and especially their greatest strength: human resources must therefore adopt strategies and appropriate behavior in order to derive the best benefits and open up new opportunities and prospects for individual or collective development to allow the company to remain competitive. Such as example, a cultural minority can give to a company new technical or cultural skills, which will allow to the company to diversify it way of producing and improve it place on the international market. The HRD (Human Resources Department) decided to use new strategies such as encouraging the hiring and facilitate the integration of a diversify minority in working group. But the thing is that companies are trying to look for common ideals, so we can ask ourselves: how to mix the values of the enterprise proper to all employees with the many differences of cultures within the same group? The problem is therefore how to successfully integrate minority diversity into a work group, since many companies do not realize that some of their practices will prevent a good integration of these different groups in the company.

Analysis of the current situation

However, these minority groups can still be discriminated, it can be earlier, for example at the job interview or later, at the workplace, despite its prohibition. I should also note that frequent intercultural exchanges can sometimes create true organizational problems, and this because of the difficulty of understanding the reference system of people of some different nationalities, with a different culture and that have a different way of doing. When a person want to cooperates with a team group, he does not act only as an individual, it will also behave and react according to its history, its culture, therefore as a member of a particular community with its own religious specificity, its own law system, with a different society and different way of living and/or doing. Differences in nationality within a random enterprise may therefore lead to opposition in style and management system, taking into account the values favored by each type of culture. These choices can then lead to marked differences in organizational principles and managerial practices (for example, with risk management the team approach...). It therefore seems important to take into account, to understand and therefore to manage this diversity of culture because the misunderstanding and disregard of cultural differences and their caricatural approach foster a climate of distrust and an obvious ignorance of the arguments of the other party and perhaps even lead to resistance to the implementation of certain professional projects.

To illustrate this, Geert Hofstede, a Dutch psychologist, conducted a survey of IBM’s 116,000 employees. At the end of his survey, he ranked 54 countries from all over the world, ranging from the richest and most industrialized countries to the poorest countries, according to 6 dimensions: The Power Distance Index (PDI), the Individualism vs Collectivism (IDV), the Masculinity vs Femininity (MAF), Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI), Long Term Orientation vs Short Term Normative orientation (LTO), and finally Indulgence vs Restraint (IVR). Thanks to the work of Hofstede, managers have been convinced of the reality of cultural differences within a company and their impact. Unfortunately, no real management improvement can be drawn, there is no real interest for Canada to know that it has virtually the same rate of individualism as Italy, even if this can lead to the reflexion of improvement track: for example if the manager sees that his hierarchical distance is too great compared to other countries of the world, he can then be more lax. Philippe d'Iribarne, French economist and anthropologist, will give the idea of a more subtle approach to management practices and a need to adapt them to different cultural groups according to the context, trying to understand, in a given cultural context, the reactions which lead to the establishment of precise management tools. It’s about understanding how one community responds to a situation, one community will not necessarily be as cooperative as another, and vice versa. The company must therefore put in place the right procedure to know what to avoid and what to favor. However, a company does not necessarily discriminate when it refuses a candidate for example. To illustrate this, we could talk about job selection, which means that the employer will distinguish candidates according to objective and legitimate criteria that seem essential to carry out the job in question. The selection system is established by a scale, which, as we have seen in progress, can sometimes be too demanding for some people, thus preventing them from being used. For example, we saw that firefighters were asked to be able to lift a certain mass, otherwise it was impossible to join the ranks of firefighters, women were therefore less represented among firefighters, so it was proved that lifting such a large mass is not necessary to exercise the profession of firefighter, the scale was therefore revised downwards, allowing more women to enter the firefighter profession. For example, many sectors of employment are very stereotyped: the bank is seen as an administrative profession, and to enter this sector it is necessary to have high diplomas. The building sector is seen as a man’s profession. But how do we promote the inclusion of diversity in companies and how do we keep it. First of all, asserting the difference is a voluntary process, and it’s very difficult to impose or be forced upon. It is a matter of personal recognition, to make the outside world recognize, if I so desire, my difference so that it is taken into account.

Companies are experiencing great difficulties on the issue of disabled people and their inclusion.

It is a problem for them to have disabled people in their workforce, because a number of them do not wish to appear labelled as such and be considered only as a means for their employer to fulfil the quotas, it can give the impression that this person is just a number and don’t really have something to give to the company through it' like and experience, and at the contrary he may feel like someone forced the company to hire him and they don’t need him here. The second difficulty would be to give too much importance to these differences in relation to the other elements of identity. More precisely, our identity is not just the differences that I may have from other people in my work group, it’s way more than that. Identity is not in how am I different but in how am I unique. Thinking that having an identity is depending on the differences that you have with other people means that you don’t have any identity if there’s no people around you. And if that were the case, differentiating would come to define oneself in relation to the other, to express oneself in opposition to the other and will naturally results into conflict. To illustrate the conflicts of generations where everyone defines himself in opposition to the old or the young, which leads to a debate without any solution.

The third difficulty concerns to erase all differences or to hide them as in the case of the anonymous CV (Curriculum Vitæ). What information should be included? Isn’t the risk of substituting even more dangerous implicit formulas for explicit Cvs (Curriculum Vitæ) because they require codes that only insiders will know? The problem of anonymity is that it is never reached, and I personally think that it will never.

What can be the solutions for these problems?

Alternatives – options for improvement 

These problems could be solved if companies embarked on real policies to implement diversity in the workplace, and this could be integrated into the company’s overall strategy.

Managers should take a stand in favor of a diversity policy and allocate specific means to implement concrete actions to promote diversity within the company. For example, communication actions within or outside the enterprise would be needed to set up a process for monitoring and evaluating this diversity, imposing more quotas than those already in place. These companies should at the same time favor inclusion in a working group. And to do this we must create a professional environment conducive to this inclusion, promoting openness and tolerance, raising awareness among the company’s employees about the different diversities and their multicultural differences that could influence their behavior. All this could promote the integration and development of the potential of each employee, while respecting the diversity of each employee.

Some companies have, however, attempted actions such as these to promote the inclusion of a certain diversity in the working environment. Only these actions, often carried out by the Department of Human Resources (HR), were too focused on a particular point without really caring about the overall aspect of diversity in the professional environment. This may include, for example, a willingness on the part of a company to address at all costs the accommodation of workspace for persons with disabilities as well as gender bias and pay equity. Unfortunately, this often leads to putting aside or even forgetting the question of representation of immigrants or elderly people.

But how does one build this awareness of diversity within a company?

The next part will answer that question.

Implementation 

For the implementation of these ideas, the human resources department could, for example, create awareness campaigns within the company in the face of the multicultural diversity they will inevitably have to face. The Human Resources Department (HRD) should try to give priority to the skills and experience of an employee rather than a diploma, often the multicultural and technical abilities as well as the experience of a person who comes from another country often has more to contribute to the business than a person who has evolved in the same mold as thousands of other employees. The company can try to develop a policy of pride of belonging and retain, or even increase the motivation, better adapt its employees to the changes. One might also think that the President could mention this issue in his objectives as well as HR strategies, and more specifically in the overall recruitment strategy. Another alternative would be to put in place a code of conduct in the company or to write a charter or commitment on diversity, acceptance and tolerance as well as a policy of non-discrimination. Companies could attach importance to gender parity by increasing the rate of feminization in certain sectors, often seen as 'male' occupations, equal pay and positive discrimination by increasing women’s pay, and why pass with full transparency on salaries given to employees. We could also organize these implementations by putting in place devices in favor of the elderly and/or disabled, such as elevators, stair ramps, offices and rest room arranged, and full transparency of the company on diversities related to origin or mentions of minorities.

Evaluation

The Human Resources Department is certainly the most important of the company. As the word implies, this department deals with the human factor in a company by hiring, training and integrating people into an already existing work team.

This department is extremely important because it allows to manage the skills of each one as well as the management of the available resources of a company. The Human Resources Department must therefore secure and guide the employees of a company while supervising them, by ensuring that their ambitions and objectives are the same, or very similar to those of the company while developing them individually.

So it seems necessary to know how it works and through this course we had the opportunity to understand the basics of human resources. The idea of creating groups and discussion topics for debate is the best way to learn, it allows us to form an opinion while confronting those of others and so it can make us change our own opinion, or at least nuance it.

Conclusion

To conclude, diversity is very important in a business. It helps to increase the company’s 'sympathy capital' with consumers and it is above all a very modern and inclusive strategy that can give a new breath to the company based not only on the diploma but also on individual experience and experience. Having a different approach to a problem can make it possible to find an optimized solution, with such as example the “cultural competence” (http://www.faqs.org/nutrition/Ca-De/Cultural-Competence.html) and it is to the Human Resources Department that this work of inclusion and optimization of a collective coming from a minority in an enterprise comes in the majority.

Even if the enterprise must seek to develop common ideals between each employee, ideals similar to the nature of the enterprise, The Department of Human Resources must combine these common values with all these cultural differences through work of integration and tolerance.

References

1. http://www.faqs.org/nutrition/Ca-De/Cultural-Competence.html
2. https://www.ginaabudi.com/does-your-organization-have-a-clear-definition-of-diversity/
3. http://understandcontractlawandyouwin.com/hale-vs-henkel/
4. https://ideal.com/diversity-and-inclusion/