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Diversity in the workplace: Its meaning

Diversity in the work place does not mean affirmative action. Diversity in the work place does not mean having a person of each sex and each race in the office or the company is biased. Diversity in the work place simply means having people of diverse backgrounds with the skills to do the job.

If companies were made to hire according to some acceptable, politically correct, governmental diagram some companies would have to shut down or would never get to open. The main reason this would happen is that not every employer has a diverse pool of ethnic backgrounds to choose from nor do they have a pool of various genders that can do the job. Some places in the world are made up of a large majority of one ethnicity or only one ethnicity; other areas may not allow one gender to work or only allow that gender to hold certain jobs.

If the area the employer sought employees from was made up solely of one ethnicity but were made to hire from a specific model what would happen? Would they have to branch out further afield to seek employeess and hold off on opening their doors to commerce until the employer finally found the perfect candidates from the model? This leads to another question: would the "model" employee have the necessary skills to do the job?

After the employer finally found the exact people to fit the model, would these people have the rights skills to do the job? Employers need people who can do the job, not people who come from various backgrounds (or various genders) that can sort of do the job. Having a diverse group of people who CAN do the job is a good thing, however.

Diversity is not a bad idea however, on the contrary diversity can help a business to grow. Diversity means that employees can get to know other cultures, ideas, and have input from a different viewpoint. If all employees were cookie cutter versions of each other then nothing would get done. Everyone would either agree or disagree with a solution and when that solution failed there would be no creativity or diversity to come up with a solution that would work.

In the end, diversity is dependant upon the availability of people in the area a business is run in. Even among a single ethnicity diversity exists. People are individuals and for a work place this diversity brings in fresh ideas, various inputs, and solutions that would not come from a cookie cutter employee pool. That's what diversity means, the ability to pool together various backgrounds to come up with ideas and solutions that might not otherwise come to light.

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