While many documented examples of diversity focus on race and gender, the concept of diversity is broader and encompasses factors including age, culture, personality, skill, training, educational background and life experience. The influence of a variety of perspectives and viewpoints can contribute to flexibility and creativity within organizations, which can help them thrive in a complex and competitive global economy.

Is she suggesting organizations hire unskilled and inexperienced workers with poor personalities?

Probably not—at least not exactly.

At HRinfodesk.com, we’ve laid out the business case for workplace diversity a few times before, but the CICA guide adds some nuance to the discussion, suggesting that directors must take diversity to heart and “set the tone at the top”. For example:

• How does diversity affect an organization’s ability to innovate and stay ahead of its competition?
• How can diversity improve problem solving at all levels and increase the effectiveness of risk management?
• How will diversity come into play with respect to management succession planning?
• What is the relationship between board diversity and board effectiveness?

There is no longer a uniform market—in Canada or around the world. Your markets and your employees are diverse and have diverse needs. The key is understanding that your market and your people are factors that continually support each other and push your growth. So when an organization incorporates diversity into its strategic planning, and its directors take on the challenge, it can gain the competitive advantage with its diverse and unique ideas, problem-solving capacity and risk management.

For detailed information on developing a diverse workplace, take a look at the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s A Place for All: A Guide to Creating an Inclusive Workplace.

You can find more information and sample policies on employment principles, employee relations, recruitment and selection, job posting, religious accommodation, accommodating disability, workplace harassment and violence, dispute resolution, fitness to work, flexible work arrangements, holidays and other issues related to diversity in Human Resources PolicyPro from First Reference. Finance & Accounting PolicyPro examines board structures, the role, rights and responsibilities of directors, succession planning and more.

Adam Gorley
First Reference Human Resources and Internal Controls Compliance Editor

© 2010 First Reference Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Permalink | Make a comment |

Image from: 1minionsopinion .wordpress.com

“It is simple. Saying yes to diversity is saying yes to modernity, to opportunity, and to the very future of our country.” Those are the words of Canada’s Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, at a recent lunch sponsored by Toronto’s DiverseCity initiative.

She wasn’t talking about specifics: programs aimed at achieving proportional rates of ethnic employees or women, or incentives to businesses for hiring minorities and helping them advance. This was a Big Idea speech, but with consideration for the little guy. The message is: immigrants, visible and ethnic minorities, members of different religions, disabled persons, women—they are all here to stay, and they’re all part of Canada, and we ignore them at our own peril. We either support them or we fail, individually and collectively.

“For each time social exclusion closes a door, another door is opened to desolation, frustration and despair.”

By neglecting or ignoring any group, we risk dividing our country into smaller and smaller pieces, which will further prevent us from achieving consensus and succeeding—again, individually and collectively. Moreover, the Governor General noted, “When corporations are indifferent to this reality, criminal gangs are there to prey on alienated youths”.

Still, Jean did offer some general insight into the business case for workplace and boardroom diversity:

“Having people from diverse backgrounds in senior management positions can confer better access to lucrative local and international networks and markets.
“Maintaining a plurality of perspectives and life experiences in an organization can boost creative and innovative output.
“Employing a greater number of people from diverse backgrounds can help to raise the overall consumption power of a broader proportion of the Canadian population.”

Modernity, opportunity and the future of the country:

• Modern thinking requires businesses and citizens to forget about race and gender and religion, or, maybe better yet, to see them as advantages—to embrace them, not to ignore them—and to forget the “‘everyone for himself and for his clan’ mentality” that Jean mentions.
• Opportunity arises for businesses and individuals when the barriers crumble and no one stands in the way of anyone else’s advancement.
• And the future of the country, well, we’re looking at it right now, I guess, and we have been for a long time: where would Canada be if we had prevented waves of past immigrants and minorities to climb the corporate ladder—Italians, Irish, French, African-Americans, Chinese and others. That these Canadians have succeeded as well as they have is testament to the forward-thinking of past generations of leaders.

Image taken from: http://www.imdb.com

On a lighter note, here’s a real-life (if on a slightly different scale) example of the benefits of diversity hiring. Thanks to Tom Selleck, we all know that baseball is big in Japan, but it wasn’t big among Japanese-Americans until US major league teams started hiring Japanese players. A 2005 study on the topic found that, “Since Japanese baseball players began playing in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the mid-1990s, the popularity of MLB has been increasing in the Japanese market. This popularity has resulted in increased MLB TV ratings, sales of MLB licensed merchandise and sponsorships, and event business in Japan.”

When Hideo Nomo started pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers, “Japanese media and fans appeared in large numbers in games he started”, and some enterprising folk have prepared tour packages for Japanese fans to fly to Seattle to watch star Ichiro Suzuki bat for the Mariners. And not only that, but those Japanese players are helping their teams perform and excel.

So what do you think of that?

Have you got a success story of an employee from a visible minority or any of the other affected groups mentioned? What challenges have you faced with diversity hiring?

Adam Gorley
First Reference Human Resources and Compliance Editor

© 2010 First Reference Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Permalink | 2 comments |

Last week, I wrote about a case in which the owner of a trucking company repeatedly harassed his South Asian employees with racist comments. When one employee confronted the boss, he said it was his company, implying that he could say and do what he wanted.

Also last week, I read a news story about Asian-Canadian anglers facing racially motivated attacks on Central Ontario’s lakes and rivers. The Community and Race Relations Committee of Peterborough even produced a public service announcement, indicating just how troublesome the problem has become.

And recently, Yosie (re-)tweeted about black farmers in the United States who won a $1.25 billion settlement from the government for systemic discrimination that prevented them from getting bank loans or forced them to wait for excessive periods to receive loans.

These stories show that not only does racism still exist at the personal and systemic levels in North America, but it also cuts across ethnic lines: Asian-Canadians, South Asian Canadians, African-Americans/Canadians, all “hyphenated Canadians”—we’ve got a long way to go before we are all just “Canadians” (or “Americans”). Still, I think I can fairly say that we are also progressing toward that goal, and the many immigrants to Canada who are proud of their adopted home country are helping us progress.

Take Cheryl Khan, the woman who stood up to her boss at the trucking company—the very owner, who felt he could discriminate with impunity, at least in speech. I don’t know if she is a native-born Canadian, but somewhere along the line, her family immigrated to Canada, and now, she is standing up for the Canada that could be, the country that people around the world look at as a beacon of freedom and peace and equality.

I have a point, which is that we all have a part to play in eliminating racism from Canadian society, and the workplace is a good place to start, since most of us will find ourselves in one for a large portion of our lives. Also, workplaces are subject to more stringent laws and regulations than individuals when it comes to discrimination. An individual may hold whatever beliefs she or he wants—in fact, these beliefs are protected by law—but an organization must be officially inclusive, with specific limited exceptions (e.g., bona fide occupational requirements and religious exclusions).

Let’s take a closer look at the lessons of the Khan case.

According to several employees, the employer used racist terms like “Paki” and “nigger” regularly, even daily, which contributed to a poisonous work environment. This sort of behaviour clearly goes against employees’ right to a workplace that is free of harassment and their right to equal treatment. (You’ll have to look at the human rights legislation in your jurisdiction for the specific wording, but the principle is the same.) In other words, this employer was wrong, and the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal ordered him to pay a large fine to Khan. The tribunal also ordered the employer to undergo sensitivity training and to implement an anti-harassment policy.

The tribunal found that the employer discriminated against Khan (based on her race) in both her employment and her termination. In testimony, the boss claimed that he fired Khan over her substandard performance and because she spent time on Facebook at work. The tribunal might have accepted these arguments if Khan was still on a probation period and if she wasn’t fired against the backdrop of discrimination charges, but under usual employment circumstances, alleged poor performance and undesirable conduct do not add up to just cause for termination without a series of warnings, ideally supported by consistently applied policies on discipline, conduct, social networking, and any other relevant issues. In other words, the employer was probably lying, and even if he wasn’t, his arguments for termination were poor, and likely wouldn’t have swayed the tribunal in his favour.

What other lessons might employers and employees learn from this and similar cases?

Adam Gorley
First Reference Human Resources and Compliance Assistant Editor

© 2010 First Reference Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Permalink | Make a comment |

The Star article outlines a case in which the owner of a trucking company harassed several South Asian employees with racist insults, culminating in an incident where he called one employee a “Paki” and referred to her children as “half-niggers”. In another incident, the boss asked, “Are there not any good white people we could hire?” Several employees claimed they heard this type of language daily.

At the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, both sides brought witnesses, but the adjudicator found the complainant’s witnesses more credible, since they offered “clear and unproblematic” testimony, while the testimony of the employer and his witnesses was “inconsistent, troublesome and ultimately less persuasive”. Credibility is a key factor in tribunal cases, and defendants should look realistically at their witnesses and evidence before trying to defend against a charge of harassment or discrimination.

Ultimately, the adjudicator said, “Having weighed the evidence before me I find, on a balance (of) probabilities, that (the employer) did repeatedly use the terms ‘Paki’ and ‘nigger’ as well as making other offensive comments to the applicant that he knew would be unwelcome.” The tribunal fined the employer $25,000 for discrimination under the Human Rights Code, and $6,750 for lost wages due to her termination, and ordered the employer to institute an anti-harassment policy and undergo anti-harassment training himself.

This case is informative in a number of ways: while it would be wonderful and ideal to remove this employer’s racist tendencies, the best we can do is attempt to make him see the error of his ways via sensitivity training. It might be possible by some appeal to reason, emotion or simple economics to show him that his prejudices are harmful and plain wrong, but we can’t force someone to change her or his beliefs, no matter how much those beliefs disagree with the broader goals of society.

What we can do is apply rules consistently and impartially in order to discourage undesirable behaviour and build equitable and safe workplaces—that is, places that are free from discrimination and harassment. In this way, the employer might hold his disrespect for other races, but also hold his tongue in the workplace. In addition, the requirement to implement an anti-harassment policy should force the employer to consider his words and actions, and encourage employees to speak up when they feel someone is behaving unacceptably. I hope in this case, the penalty is enough to encourage the employer to look closely at his beliefs and try to understand why they are inappropriate.

This type of case is also the reason that HRSDC has a strategy to deal with racism in Canada’s workplaces. The strategy includes workshops, research papers, links and, importantly, statements of the business case for diversity in the workplace, in language any business owner should understand:

Diversity can help organizations: identify and capitalize on opportunities to improve products and services; attract, retain, motivate and utilize human resources effectively; improve the quality of decision-making at all organizational levels; and reap the many benefits from being perceived as a socially conscious and progressive organization. These benefits should be manifested in an improved bottom line and maximization of shareholder value.

At First Reference, we’ve been talking a lot recently about harassment in the context of occupational health and safety law and regulations, and in Ontario, as of June 15, 2010, all employers will have to have in place an OHS-based anti-harassment policy. It would be wise to develop a policy that deals with discrimination and sexual harassment, too.

Does your workplace have anti-harassment/discrimination policies? Have you experienced or witnessed incidents of discrimination or harassment?

Adam Gorley
First Reference Human Resources and Compliance Assistant Editor

© 2010 First Reference Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Permalink | 5 comments |