Diversity is a real concern for more and more companies. I think the reason for that is the increasing awareness of human rights protection.
I talked to many people in work place about diversity as well, I think different people have different understandings.
I knew one guy, he has opinion like this.
We are a real diversity focused team, because we have people from Asia, we have people from America, Europe, and We have local people, we have males and females.
I knew another person who cares about diversity in workplace, she asked a question I remembered during acquisition.
Nearly all the board members are male, do we have a diversity in the organization, and do we really care about it?
Honestly, I think gender diversity, nationality diversity should not be such a big concern. What is more important, is to respect the difference, and collaborate different people and understand different people to work together towards the objectives.
It does not really matter where the person is from, or whether the person is male or female.
Everyone is unique, if an employee’s review is based on whether he is social, whether he is good at a specific language, or on appearance, it would make it unfair, and it makes the problem in the workplace more serious to have a gender or race diversity.
A fair and a diverse working culture should be a person’s review is basing on
- what the person does,
- what the persons are good at,
- how well the person communicates, (even the work language is not the person’s native language, or whether the person communicates in a tech-guy way or not).
- etc
I met a colleague in workplace, he always likes to give colleagues tags, like,
Social, Hard-working, Brave, Collaborating, etc. It is OK because of all these tags are neural, nothing good or bad. The only problem for that is the criteria, his standard is that, if you are not doing like me to meet people or talk to people, you are not social, if I cannot understand what you talk, you are not collaborating, if you do not match my exception in my mind, you are not hard-working. All criteria are subjective. This basically creates more problems in work place, even have a good diversity, but no respect, no objective standard for review, that only makes things worse.
So IMO the real diversity is to respect the difference and the most important thing in a work place should be Respect, Objectives, Collaboration and Happiness.
