Cultural Diversity Auditing
Workforce diversity is a transient phenomenon, but it is the truth of the times we are in. In today’s globalized market corporations need to look at their market, competitors, and technologies to prepare the workforce and formulate strategies to work with diverse stakeholders. For such reasons organizations need to be more equipped to handle the diverse cultures, capabilities, and customer base to operate in a challenging environment. Organizations feel more accountable to promote their employee base by inculcating guideline, practices, and policy for diversity and inclusion in organizational culture. Before jumping the gun to involve in training, it’s first important to audit diversity.
The encouragement of good practices is needed with careful evaluation for the need of the organization. To achieve beneficial and valuable outcomes from diversity and inclusion occurrences, organizations must work upon –organizational, group and individual levels. To avoid human biases and to become the highest performing organization even AI’s are suggested to be a part of the decision-making.
It is important to recognize that dimensions of diversity vary in its spate and significance across cultural groups and organizational leaders to be more aware of the inclusivity in the existing organization and monitor the progress to do the drift correction with the help of programs, conflict resolution and change management as an on-going process. The phenomenon of globalization offers a clear opportunity for organizations to utilize the workforce and diverse talents from all over the globe and maximize revenue and take more challenges.
Why cultural diversity audit matters?
Effective management of cultural diversity is becoming increasingly important for all the organizations operating both in domestic and international markets. Appreciating and valuing dissimilarities among employees and clients translates directly into economic prosperity and playing in a global market. That’s the reason it becomes very important for internal auditors to understand the fundamental aspects of culture, the impact of culture on the short term and long-term feasibility of the organization, and how to introduce cultural audits as a routine practice.
Moreover, we need to recognize that diversity and inclusion are more than mere numbers, its effectivity is more when it percolates down to individuals and groups. Therefore, it is most important to increase managers’ awareness of workplace diversity and support their involvement in the implementation process. Few questions are relevant to ponder upon—Are you auditing cultural diversity? What are the effects of different participatory methods on increasing the manager’s awareness of management before the audit?
For cultural diversity audit, it is essential to find out the implicit values, assumptions, and rules to deal with individuals and get the work done within the organization to know more about what hinders or supports an inclusive environment. Audits are a powerful tool for organizational self-reflection and to generate an internal review. Setting the foundation for designing effective initiatives, they help assess how both organizational insiders and outsiders perceive the success of the organization in its quest to embrace diversity.