Managing a Diverse Workforce

In engineering, as in many fields, employees are often promoted because of their skills and technical expertise. Managing a diverse workforce is not necessarily an innate civil engineering skill, however, and, in homogeneous workforces of the past, was not a necessary skill at all. 

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Ferdman, B. M. (2011). The inclusive workplace. In G. N. Powell, Managing a diverse workforce Learning activities (3rd. ed., pp. 123-127). Thousand Oaks, CA Sage. 

Awareness of the need for HR to successfully manage a diverse workforce is not limited to United States. A recent survey conducted for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) across forty-seven countries (Society for Human Resource Management, 2010b) found that paying attention to workforce... 

Fernandez, J. P. (1991). Managing a diverse workforce Regaining the competitive edge. New York Lexington. 

Managing a Diverse Workforce (Chapter 5) provides techniques for engineering managers to guide and enhance their diverse employees productivity and career satisfaction. 

As manager of doctoral recruiting at P G, I have the responsibility to attract advanced-degreed candidates to apply for R D positions with our company. P G has a commitment to building a diverse workforce, and thus I also own the particular responsibility of ensuring that our applicants represent minority, as well as majority, scientists. This has allowed me to develop an information-based perspective on how successful P G has been in meeting diversity goals, and I will share these results with you today. 

LEAD—Senior, middle, and lower management must champion the cause of diversity as a business imperative, and provide leadership for successful attainment of the vision of a diverse workforce at all levels of management. 

Firms that make a commitment from top management to actively search out and include a diverse workforce in positions of responsibility - and to be held accountable for the results - are in a better and stronger position to keep the workforce diverse and the firm successful in the future. 

Help managers to integrate and capitalize on the different talents of a culturally diverse workforce. 

Loden, M. and Rosener, J. B. (1991). Workforce America Managing Employee Diversity as a Vital Resource. Business One Irwin. 

We realize that putting minorities and women into community-related or urban branches was an attempt by Big Bank to leverage their employment diversity using an Access and Legitimacy paradigm. They were simply trying to match market and customer base, which was what one Big Bank manager saw as a benefit to a multicultural workforce. 

Diversity training, although perhaps not an across-the-board, stand-alone solution, is still an important component that should not be overlooked in a firm s efforts to diversify its workforce. For example, for any diversity initiative, it s critical to get buy-in and endorsement from senior management - and diversity training is a good start to make the business case for the diversity program. 

The technical workforce has become more diverse. Technology managers need to educate themselves about the changing nature of the workforce, the implications for the future, and the opportunities made possible by a more heterogeneous organization (66). 

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