Organizations Can Achieve Workplace Diversity Through Powerful Mentoring. Know How?

Today's corporate communication is significantly more condensed than it ever was. Interacting with professionals and experts from all around the world has become possible thanks to globalization and technology. There are now countless opportunities for individuals from different spheres of life to come forward and obtain employment in mainstream organizations. As a result, there is a high degree of diversity in today's workforce, with different groups of people from various ethnic and social backgrounds working alongside one another.  

Let talk about it in depth.

Diversity and Hurdles

This diversity has created a melting pot of knowledge and skills just waiting to be shared and developed through mentoring. Aspiring professionals are now no longer limited by time or geographical constraints. Add to that the benefits of diversity in the workforce and the opportunities for career development are endless.

But with the many benefits, some inevitable challenges come with mixing employees from different cultures, backgrounds, and disciplines. Some of these might include subtle racial profiling, favoritism, and even verbal harassment. If not addressed thoroughly and early on, these problems will ultimately get out of hand. They may lead to employees leaving the company, either due to termination or an unhappy and mistreated employee leaving of his/her own accord. It sends promising individuals away and forces the company to assign valuable resources to the time-consuming process of recruiting and hiring new talent.

Mentoring Values

A solid mentoring program is a valuable tool to facilitate the transferring of knowledge within a diverse workforce and a means to helping that workforce develop cultural and ethnic acceptance. A successful mentor can break communication barriers and moderate conflicts that arise between individuals. Besides providing professional guidance and assisting in career development, a mentor's role is also to enhance interpersonal relationships and meet employees' needs at a human level. One method a culturally sensitive mentor might use to bring together a diverse workforce is conducting group meetings. The purpose of these meetings could vary, but some of the more obvious ones would be to:

• Highlight the beauty of different cultures and encourage each other to respect and welcome their differences.
• Remove communication barriers through group activities.

• Instill confidence in employees to ask questions, despite language challenges.
• Build solid professional relationships by encouraging employees to share skills.
• Address and eliminating any negativity or bias that may arise.
• Constantly reinforce positive attitudes and a spirit of unity.

If your organization champions diversity and wants to boost the development—both career and personal—of its workforce, then you should consider incorporating mentoring into your business plan. Your employees will be thrilled at the opportunity to access skills and expertise globally, and learning from experts who come from different cultures will only serve to enhance their development further. Creating a mentoring environment within a diverse workforce is an essential step towards attaining unity, creating a positive, open atmosphere, building better interpersonal relationships, and retaining employees.

Contact MentorCloud learn more about how to get started. If this post was valuable to you, please feel free to share it across your social media channels. Also, please give us your thoughts on best practices or your experiences with mentoring. Thank you for reading, and check back in every Monday and Thursday for original posts on the #powerofmentoring!