Last week, the focus was on diversity as it relates to age, race, gender and religion.
We continue this series on exploring diversity with additional dimensions of workplace diversity namely: physical ability, personality, education and life experience.
Physical Ability
Physical ability differs from an individual although those with disability represent a seemingly insignificant minority. Disability is relevant in discussing diversity because the minorities hardly get the support that they require to be the best they can be. There are undeniable biases and exclusion attitudes against people with reduced mobility and physical ability. Research by the Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion showed that one-third of people display unconscious bias against those with a disability, higher than applies to race and gender.
Diversity in physical ability should recognise impaired vision and hearing, lack of mobility and cognitive shortcomings. Pertinent issues include technology and building design to accommodate, for example, wheelchair users in elevators and toilets. Specific published policies are also necessary for companies to enable employees with disability. For example, the policies of technology giant Oracle state that the company “does not discriminate based on personal preference or physical characteristics, and our experience confirms that supporting policies and practices with a strong commitment to equal opportunity is a good business practice.”
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Personality
Personality is the combination of the physical, mental, emotional and social characteristics of an individual. Building a collection of people with different personalities gives a business wider perspectives, enhanced productivity and a greater level of adaptability. One of how personality is categorised is with the five labels of; extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. The beauty of personality is in the diversity which organisations can call upon.
Personality is like DNA because people, including those from the same family, possess different attributes. Psychometric tests have proven for more than fifty years that personality traits can be assessed. Such tests have their benefits and demerits but their popularity and utilisation continue to increase. The positive side of personality and why organisations should recognise them is that there are no good or bad personalities, just different personalities waiting to be optimised.
Personalities affect business and a good mix of them is of greater benefit than is often acknowledged by organisations.
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Education
There are thousands of study programmes in higher and vocational institutions across the world. In Nigeria, JAMB, the university admissions body lists more than 140 courses but that is only a small fraction of what is available globally. Harvard University displays 49 areas of focus at the undergraduate level. Some UK universities such as the University of Southampton offer as many as 361 courses including business analytics, international marketing, marine biology and fashion and textile design. These are all pointers to the variety of what individuals can study. Another fact is that university first degrees represent only one aspect of education. Formal and informal vocational and apprenticeships programmes abound in every nation of the world and direct a host of entrepreneurial activities.
The levels of education and grading of degrees also affect decisions on who is qualified to be employed. In reality, these parameters do not necessarily determine who will turn out to be a valuable employee. For instance, many companies advertise jobs with university degrees as minimum qualifications although those jobs do not require that level of education. The corporate world has also established a pattern of excluding people with second class lower degrees from recruitment processes.
A change in this pattern was instituted in 2016 by the professional services firm, Ernst & Young (EY) based on their internal research of over 400 graduates. The research disclosed that screening students based on academic performance alone were inadequate for recruitment. The research also “found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken. Instead, the research shows that there are positive correlations between certain strengths and success in future professional qualifications.”
EY’s new approach is widening access to jobs in professional services and taking educational diversity beyond historical university grading. It is foreseeable that many other organisations will follow suit until it becomes the norm.
READ ALSO: Women in the Nigerian workplace – Advocating for better balance
Life Experience
Life experiences may be similar but they are as diverse as the human beings on the face of the earth. Placing everybody in one box within organisations without regard for backgrounds, and the lessons they teach people is more of a disadvantage. Organisations have to devise ways of productively assembling and utilising the diversity of life experiences of their employees.
Human beings encounter experiences from which organisations and other individuals can benefit if properly harnessed and communicated. In his book “David and Goliath”, Malcolm Gladwell provides accounts of people who translate adversity to lifelong advantage. He cites the example of David Boies, a top litigation lawyer who suffered from the reading disorder, dyslexia. Boies was able to overcome his reading challenge by learning how to listen deeply and absorb words to memory. He continues to use listening as an effective tool in his law practice. Learning from Boies, organisations can gather individual advantages for corporate benefit.
More dimensions next week…
Weyinmi Jemide
