Professional Design Workshop on Diversity: Challenges and Opportunities

Running head: PROFESSIONAL DESIGN WORKSHOP
Emotional Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence and Diversity
Assessment Title: Assessment 3 - Individual Design of a Professional Workshop
Student’s name:
Name of the university:
Author’s note:

1PROFESSIONAL DESIGN WORKSHOP
Fulton Hogan Pty Ltd is Construction Company which does road works and this
organisation is aggregate suppliers of construction materials. Fulton Hogan works in the
construction and civil engineering field. Fulton Hogan has more than 50 senior-employees in
Australia who work in Parkville, Victoria Australia. I am Consultant and I am going to prepare
professional development workshop in Fulton Hogan on Diversity: challenges and opportunity.
The target audiences of the workshop are the senior level employees. Fulton Hogan recruits the
employees from Australia, New Zealand and many other countries as well.
Part 1
Brief introduction of diversity: opportunities and challenges
Diversity is the situation that includes representation of multiple groups within the
workplace environment. There are various diversity traits which are enduring over the person's
lifetime and traits of diversity are associated with age, gender, race, sexual orientation, sexual
orientation, cultural heritage and religious heritage. Some of the factors are acquired over an
individual's lifetime and these factors are changing and dynamic; factors are personal and
professional experiences, political affiliation, citizenship, cultural background, educational
background, socio-economic strata and adopted a faith. There are two types of diversity in the
workplace; surface-level diversity and deep-level diversity. Surface-level diversity means the
observable demographic and the differences are associated with the group, such as ethnicity,
race, gender, physical abilities and age. On the other side, deep-level diversity in the workplace
is associated with the demographics and the differences in psychological characteristics which
are based on experiences and thinking styles. As stated by Madsen and Nielsen (2017),
organisations with workplace diversity employ people from wide variety of backgrounds and the

2PROFESSIONAL DESIGN WORKSHOP
people have different characteristics, experiences and beliefs. The organisations get the
advantage of a diverse workplace and these organisations are open to a plethora of ideas to
further the businesses and better meet the desires of customers and employees. In this article, the
authors further stated that some of the organisations follow monolithic organisational behaviour
where the workforce is homogeneous which is composed of mainly white people. In addition,
some of the organisations follow plural organisational behaviour where the workplace
heterogeneous in nature. In this workplace, cultural backgrounds of the staffs are different and
the HR departments recruit employees from a diverse background. In addition, multicultural
organisations integrate members from minority and different ethnic background. Both majority
and minority members are distributed within the organisation to make the workplace multi-
culture.
As opined by Guillaume et al. (2017), diversity within organisations ensures creativity
and innovation which arise where the multi-culture workforce put their viewpoints. Diversify
workplace makes possible the business to offer service and to appeal to large demographics. The
employees from different background tend to make the workplace relatable and it will be easier
to attract the employees from different background and culture. In this article; the author further
commented that diversity helps the organisations to acquire high-level talent by showing the
willingness to recruit the people (Kim et al. 2015). The talent pool can grow to represent
businesses with the high opportunity of making the workplace more adaptable. The organisations
can have the different cultures, religions and ethnicity to make the organisations more
competitive. Therefore, the organisations can be more sustainable by employing workplace
diversity in the global scenario.