Staffing is an important organizational function that involves the practice of acquiring, positioning, as well as retaining a staff of adequate quality and quantity to generate positive effects on the success of a company. Staffing is among the major functions of management. In any company, it is the persons who perform the different tasks that are required for its running. Persons are the most essential resource of a company. The person supplies the skills, talent, experience and knowledge to attain the objectives and goals of the business. Indeed, organizational performance is essentially determined by the value of its persons. In staffing, the managers are challenged with the problems of not merely getting the appropriate individual for each task but also to harmonize the staffs with the tasks ascertained and to sustain their long-term welfare and growth as the members of the company.
Workforce diversity denotes the differences in cultural, demographic, as well as personal attributes of workers. Diversity happens when companies embrace an all-encompassing corporate culture —to be precise; they respect individual worker’s individuality and consider this uniqueness as an origin of continued competitive advantage. Employee diversity assumes numerous forms. For instance, surface-level diversity involves visible physiological or demographic differences in persons, for instance, their ethnicity, race, gender, physical incapacities, and age (Hubbard, 2012). Surface-level diversity is the most apparent type of diversity, and it has transformed significantly in the U.S. over the Last several years.
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Surface-level diversity gets the utmost consideration since it is the most noticeable and simplest to assess. Nevertheless, executives too should think through deep-level diversity, which represents discrepancies in the psychological attributes of workers, counting beliefs, personalities, and attitudes, in addition to values. People cannot directly tell deep-level diversity, nonetheless, it is apparent in an individual’s actions, statements, and decisions. The deep-level diversity is a derivative of, to a degree from a surface-level form of diversity in addition to demographic traits which lie directly underneath the surface. For instance, geographic location and religion shape an individual’s personal principles. Work experience and education influence an individual’s attitudes and beliefs concerning a range of matters. Also, a person’s personal wealth, parent status, and additional influences shape personal preferences and needs (Heggeness et al., 2016). There are several staffing issues with human resources when building and maintaining a diverse workforce.
To begin with, diversity necessitates support. Wondrak and Segert (2015) give details on the necessity for support to maintain and sustain diversity as well as diversity hiring. According to the authors, the gains attributable to diversity staffing lessen the minute support for diverse workforce and hiring is not constant, and could even have an undesirable outcome. Furthermore, the writers argue that in spite of numerous recognized benefits of diversity in society and business, office inequality discrimination, and exclusion with historical grounds still exist. The staffs which may inhibit diversity are malicious and every so often subtle, making it challenging to realize. Effective, sustainable diversity programs necessitate support from senior managers who might not have very similar experiences and background as diverse workers and thus might not distinguish exactly how to find, hire, and maintain diverse personnel.
Secondly, diversity necessitates commitment. Successful diversity staffing needs to be a portion of a well-structured diversity initiative. Diversity staffing is required for attaining tangible diversity and necessitates acknowledged support and a strategy to incorporate diverse applicants so they will remain and turn into a central portion of the firm. A survey of diversity by Podsiadlowski et al. (2013) established that, out of over three-hundred managers surveyed from corporations that have inclusion and diversity initiatives, over sixty-five percent had formal initiatives specifically for staffing, development, as well as retaining of a diverse staff. Over fifty percent of them partake in diversity staffing with college level diversity initiatives and take part in job websites as well as job fairs loyal on diversity. The findings of a study by Noe at al. (2017) showed that the effectiveness of diversity programs relied on top management’s accountability, commitment, in addition to oversight to real diversity issues.
Thirdly, diversity becomes diluted. In numerous businesses, staffing is allocated to various teams that have dissimilar goals. The on-campus staffing team can be centered on drawing fresh university graduates. The marketing and sales unit can hire sales workforce via industry recommendations. A special managerial search crew can occupy management positions. As a result, diversity initiatives become diluted and detached from staffing. Without an individual or a team at the top devoted to establishing a diverse management channel, diversity becomes disoriented in translation and certainly not wholly realized. According to Woods (2016), that business cannot satisfy customer requirements without a diverse workforce. Okoro and Washington, (2012) agree that diversity offers the best valuable consumer solutions as well as business goods in the marketplace. Pearl-Martinez and Stephens, (2016) conclude that a workforce that is diverse is crucial for business accomplishment.
Fourthly, diversity staffing is not statistics-driven. A majority of present-day diversity hiring elements are regrettably grounded in established emotion, practices, as well as what is politically prevalent. In other words, diversity is a burning political matter and altering it is tough. This is despite the point that everyone knows that all recruiting and business practices are greatly more successful when they are determined by statistics instead of emotion. So as to be effective, the management needs to collect information to ascertain the crucial success factors of successful diversity staffing. The managers should also utilize data and facts to choose the most fruitful sources, where they post their hiring messages, the content of those messages, and to ascertain the “work acceptance conditions” for their target diversity set (Mathews, 2015). Facts must drive all decisions, counting who have a duty to carry out the hiring and which branding and recruiting methods have the uppermost effect. To put it simply, management should remove the emotion out of the practice and substitute it with an information-driven method.
Another diversity recruiting issue is that there is little market segmentation. People fail to consider it as a “market division issue.” From the business’ marketing side, the company cannot effectively sell if it treats all targets the similar manner. The point that diversity encompasses such a broad variety of segments counting Black-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, gays, women, incapacitated individuals, and so on, virtually warrants that some “one-size-fits-all” staffing method would fail. The better method (that was established in product marketing) entails treating individual subdivision as a micro-section and recruiting them through the use of a tailored information-driven method. This implies that one cannot anticipate a staffing method which works for Hispanics to similarly work for African-Americans and women. Inside any subcategory of targets, management also needs to carry out market exploration to ascertain the various requirements for hiring active employment hunters against passive seekers (Gwathmey et al., 2016). Without thorough market research interviews, surveys, plus focus groups to frequently bring up-to-date knowledge of the individual micro set, the general diversity figures will certainly carry on suffering. It is recommended that if the HR manager does not comprehend market segmentation, he/she should acquire customer market segmentation professionals from his/her own company and obtain knowledge from them. In case the diversity recruiters implemented a market exploration method and utilize that information to determine hiring, diversity outcomes can rise by as much as twenty-five percent.
Lastly, diversity referrals are often ill-managed. In virtually all companies, the uppermost quantity of hires, as well as the uppermost quality of hires, originates from worker referrals. Even though referral initiatives do not have an adverse effect on diversity any more, exploration shows that if one does not explicitly target diverse recommendations and then offer additional rewards and recognition for them, the referral outcomes will suffer intensely (De Cieri, 2017). The management should provide more rewards and focus for diverse recommendation hires by the same token that they at present do for hard-to-fill and higher-level tasks. Furthermore, positions should be prioritized, in order to ensure that the maximum focus could be placed on works that necessitate the greatest diversity. The minute a manager begins to effectively hire and refer diverse persons; others would have a higher likelihood of accepting to become a referral.
In a nutshell, staffing is an important organizational function that involves the practice of acquiring, positioning, as well as retaining a staff of adequate quality and quantity to generate positive effects on the success of a company. Workforce diversity denotes the differences in cultural, demographic, as well as personal attributes of workers. Employee diversity assumes numerous forms, for instance, surface-level diversity and deep-level diversity. There are several staffing issues with human resources when building and maintaining a diverse workforce. To begin with, diversity necessitates support. Secondly, diversity necessitates commitment. Thirdly, diversity becomes diluted. Fourthly, diversity staffing is not statistics-driven. Another diversity recruiting issue is that there is little market segmentation. Lastly, diversity referrals are often ill-managed .
References
De Cieri, H. (2017). International human resource management: from cross-cultural management to managing a diverse workforce . Routledge.
Gwathmey, T. M., Tallant, E. A., Howlett, A. C., & Diz, D. I. (2016). Programs to Recruit and Retain a More Diverse Workforce in Biomedical Sciences Research. Journal of best practices in health professions diversity: research, education and policy , 9 (1), 1188.
Heggeness, M. L., Evans, L., Pohlhaus, J. R., & Mills, S. L. (2016). Measuring diversity of the National Institutes of Health-funded workforce. Academic medicine: journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges , 91 (8), 1164.
Hubbard, E. (2012). The diversity scorecard . New York: Routledge.
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Noe, R. A., Hollenbeck, J. R., Gerhart, B., & Wright, P. M. (2017). Human resource management: Gaining a competitive advantage . New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
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Pearl-Martinez, R., & Stephens, J. C. (2016). Toward a gender diverse workforce in the renewable energy transition. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy , 12 (1), 8-15.
Podsiadlowski, A., Gröschke, D., Kogler, M., Springer, C., & Van Der Zee, K. (2013). Managing a culturally diverse workforce: Diversity perspectives in organizations. International Journal of Intercultural Relations , 37 (2), 159-175.
Wondrak, M., & Segert, A. (2015). Using the Diversity Impact Navigator to move from interventions towards diversity management strategies. Journal of Intellectual Capital , 16 (1), 239-254.
Woods, K. (2016). Organizational ambidexterity and the multi-generational workforce. Journal of Organizational Culture, Communications and Conflict , 20 (1), 95.
