Managing Diverse Teams

Nowadays, the diversification of the enterprise work team has become a product of economic globalisation and increasingly reflects the social composition. With the spread of the economic crisis, at least in the developed countries, some of enterprises cannot achieve diverse team. According to Compensation Force (2013) said that employee turnover rate of Manufacturing & Distribution industry is 8.4% and services industry is 11% and Banking & Finance industry is 17.2% in 2013, which features data submitted by 40,000 organisations. As high unemployment rate, which lead to the part of employees lost the passion for the work and they may be ready all the time to job-hopping. Therefore, how might a manager use the knowledge of diversity to produce better results that is an important issue within any industry?

This is a video talk about the importance of the diverse team, in this video, Pascal Botteron discuss the benefits of diverse teams and how they help to created added value for clients at Deutsche Bank.

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                      How to build a successful team?

It is considered by most of organisations. It can base on the Tuckman’s team building Model (1965) to be created. There are four processes of the team building model, including forming, storming, norming and performing.

Forming means members start to acquaint everything of organisation. And then team moves into storming stage to set up relationship via leadership style. Gradually, team moves into norming phase, everyone follow the leaders. The last one is performing, member work hard and perform well in the team, even have achieve the goal. (Johnson,2009)

Meanwhile, business success depends on a team of diverse talented employees, they has the different education background, work experiences, knowledge, skills, thinking mode, and different gender, age, nationality and culture. Enterprise should respect for the diverse talent so as to achieve team cohesion and used the advantage of the diverse team member to create value for enterprise. The importance of diverse team can increase core competitiveness of enterprise in order to increase strategic value for enterprise. Diverse team is a high quality human capital, which is one of the biggest costs of business management. But people have to consider culture shock during the organisation implemented diverse team.

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In the diverse team, manager should pay attention to culture issue and make them realise that organisation existed various of cultures; encourage employee respect each other’s culture in a diverse team; employee also should understand how to communicate with collages who come from all around the world. Manager is able to establish diversified communication and diversity sensitivity training for employees in order to improve their awareness of diversity and help them understand the definition and importance of diversification so that produce better results for company. Manager can provide some specific training for employees and senior managers, for example culture sensitive training, cultural competence training and cross-cultural training.

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 For Motor industry, Ford is a one of the leader in the diversity. “You’ll find diversity at every level of the company, from the boardroom to the design studio, from the plant floors to the engineering centers.” (Ford Website,2014) According to Ford Website (2014) said that diversity makes company get better, get stronger and also bring in morefresh ideas, perspectives, experiences and life responsibilities. Ford has many diversity stories, for example several women join the Ford company in salaried positions in 1970, which the first woman to enter Ford’s marketing and sales management program. In 1956, Ford published a manual for salaried employees called “Going Places with Ford.” It includes language that articulates non-discrimination policies. (Ford Website,2014) “Today, Ford continues to attract a highly skilled committed workforce that reflects a broad spectrum of culture, ethnicity, race, perspective, age, religion, physical ability and sexual orientation.” (Ford Website, 2014) Therefore why does Ford is a successful global Motor company, because it focuses on create diverse employee who can bring a huge value for company. At the same time, Mark Fields who is the CEO of the Ford, he believes that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success.

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Conclusion and Recommendation

In conclusion, diverse teams are always closely bound up with culture issue. From the case study of Ford, it is observed that company cannot without diverse team and diverse talent, which is one of the viral factors to make organisation success, leader can used their different the way of thinking to make company have more opportunities and provide new blood for company. Company can intergrade multiple staff of different cultural background, using the experience of different advantages and diversity of creative insight for company. At the same time, diverse team can meet the different customer groups, preferences and needs, with diverse background and diversified thinking mode to better understand the customer so as to improve the personalised service. However, diverse teams are opportunities for company and it can bring additional value for company, but it is a double-edged sword, it means diverse teams can add values for company while it can bring troubles for company as well. Therefore Leader has to pay attention to training employees regarding culture issue so as to they can take advantage of themselves culture strength to produce better result.

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References:

Compensation Force (2013) “2013 Turnover Rates by Industry.” Available from: http://www.compensationforce.com/2014/02/2013-turnover-rates-by-industry.html(Accessed: 30/07/2014)

Ford Company (2014) “Our History of Diversity and Inclusion Ford’s History of Diversity and Inclusion in the Workforce-Ford.” Available from: http://corporate.ford.com/dynamic/metatags/article-detail/diversity-history-440p (Accessed: 30/07/2014)

Ford Company (2014) “A Word About Diversity and Inclusion.” Available from:

http://corporate.ford.com/careers/diversity/diversity-message-626p?&ccode=GB (Accessed: 30/07/2014)

Johnson.J (2009) “Heath Organizations: Theory,Behavior, and Development.” Canada: Jones and Bartlett Publishers,LLC.