Human Resource Management (HRM2001S) Assignment

Running head: HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT (HRM2001S)
Human Resource Management (HRM2001S)
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HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT (HRM2001S)1
Topic- Equality and diversity in the workplace
Introduction
This research report provides a comprehensive overview of equality and diversity in the
workplace and its growing importance in the 21st century. It has been that equality and diversity
is mostly defined as the action of promoting equal opportunity for all through diversity, which
means giving individual the chance to accomplish their potential. In general, equality and
diversity in the workplace can refer to many things because they can be about respecting the
employees of the organization for their individual characteristics. It could include employees’
age, gender, race, cultural backgrounds, career experience, and skills, religious, sexual
orientation, etc. However, apart from this general overview of diversity and equality, this
research report sheds light on the concept and practical implementation of diversity and equality
in 21st century.
Discussion
As the audiences or the consumers of all businesses or products across the world are
increasingly being conscious about social and ethical duties of brand, it is becoming tougher for
the brands to become competitive and fair in the mind and eyes of customers (Ruiz-Jiménez and
del Mar Fuentes-Fuentes 2016). Thereby, diversity and equality have literally been a mandatory
organization practice now days. However, Sharma (2016) argued that the concept and
application of diversity in the workplace is little vague in nature because corporates today are
justifying their diversity approaches by maintaining equality in genders and pay only, but those
two elements do not make up diversity and equality. In response to this statement, Hideg and

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT (HRM2001S)2
Ferris (2016) stated that when it comes to diversity, organizations also need to consider the
external market factors like economy, geographic and demographic characteristics.
Before delving more into diversity and equality, it is important to focus on the information
related to importance of diversity and equality in the workplace in 21st century organisations. To
address the concern of why diversity and equality, Armstrong et al. (2010) mentioned that there
has never been a more perfect and relevant time to guide and help organizations succeed in their
efforts to strengthen diversity and inclusion. This fact further allows people to assume that
diverse organisations can be better equipped to serve consumers more effectively, reduces biases
and enhance the bottom line of maximizing the market share (Barak 2016). In this context,
Ozturk, and Tatli (2016) mentioned that philanthropic engagement from diverse communities is
not the challenge, the acknowledgement from the society surrounding it is what needs to shift.
Workplace diversity covers all different elements between people in an organization and this
sounds simpler but it can be mentioned but the diversity can encompass race, gender, ethnic
group, cognitive style, tenure, and many more equally important elements.
Benefits of a diverse workforce
According to the global recruiting trends 2018, importance of diversity is echoed in
several areas with 78% of organizations saying that diversity can be extremely important. Such
global reports also state the fact that almost 78% of the organisations tend to prioritize diversity
to enhance culture and almost 62% do so to enhance the financial performances (Morley 2018).
According to Pasztor (2019), there are some major forces, which are at play, and changing
demographics are diversifying the communities, shrinking talent pool for employers that do not
adapt. In addition to this, the increasing evidence that diverse teams can be more productive,
more innovative as well as more engaged to ignore. In this context, Hideg and Ferris (2016)