Knowledge Questions Assignment: CHCDIV001 Work with Diverse People

This document provides comprehensive answers to knowledge questions from the CHCDIV001 Work with Diverse People unit. The assignment explores strategies for mentoring a deaf employee, outlines essential components of a diversity policy, and examines the emotional and practical challenges of adapting to a foreign culture. It delves into qualities a trainee can embrace for workplace success, the benefits of a diverse workforce, and the importance of addressing cultural insensitivity. The assignment also addresses the business, legal, and ethical implications of workplace discussions regarding cultural events and defines the concept of marginalized groups, emphasizing the importance of inclusion, respect, and equal opportunity in a professional setting. The document provides valuable insights for fostering a culturally sensitive and inclusive workplace.

CHCDIV001 Work with diverse people
Knowledge Questions v1.0 (2016/10/27)
CHCDIV001 Work with diverse people
Name
Email address
Assessment
Knowledge questions
Carefully read through each question posed. Reflect on your learning unit and your own research.
In your response, you should use terms and phrases that you defined in your previous
assessment. In order to fully demonstrate your knowledge in this area of study, you should aim to
present 180 words for each response. A minimum of 150 words for each response is required.
Please note: Where the word count is not met, your submission will be returned to you for re-
working.
1. Your practice has just employed a dental assistant who is profoundly deaf. As you are the
senior assistant at the practice, your manager has asked that you mentor this person to
ensure their smooth transition into the business. While you have mentored other new
employees in the past, you have never experienced working with a deaf person. What
strategies will you use in order to reflect on your own beliefs and values and ensure that the
new person receives all the assistance they need?
Communicating with a deaf person can be difficult yet few clever strategies can make this
thing less difficult and help in effective communication. At first it is necessary to ask the
employee, how to get his or attention (like tapping shoulder or waving), allowing extra
timing for communication at the time of the training, using hands on demonstration at
the time of the training, to use visual signalling equipment , using flashing lights in
conjugation with the auditory alarms (Dickinson 2017). I should make sure that the
disabled employee is not discriminated in terms of the basic workplace rights. While
using the training video, I should make sure that captioning has been provided in each of
the training videos. While the orientation of the new dental assistant, all the other
associated people who would be working with should be educated about the new hire's
communication methods and the proper etiquettes of treating a person with a disability.
2. Your practice has made a commitment to embrace diversity, and management is eager to
demonstrate how they are promoting and acknowledging difference. Your supervisor has
asked you to attend a diversity meeting with other team leaders and would like your input
about what to include in a diversity policy. Outline the types of inclusions that should be in
that policy.
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CHCDIV001 Work with diverse people
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The elements that has to be included in the diversity policy are:-
Creation of an environment where individual differences and the contributions of all the
team members should be valued and recognised.
 To create a working environment that promotes respect and dignity for all the
employees.
 Zero tolerance towards any king of discrimination or acts of bullying, intimidation
and harassment.
 To ensure a culturally safe workplace, encouraging the employees of different
religions or different ethnic background, to work together.
 To encourage all the workers to treat their coworkers with dignity and the
respect (Ferrell 2016).
 To provide equal opportunities to different employees and make training,
development and the promotion opportunities available to all the employees.
 To review the workplace practices regularly such that transparency and fairness is
maintained within the organization.
 All the organizational policies should be devoid of any gender discriminatory
process and anyone who feels have been discriminated should be encouraged for
raising the concern, such that corrective measures can be applied.
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3. Imagine that you have been transported to a place in the world where the culture, language,
traditions, values, beliefs and practices, food, dress, gender roles, religious beliefs, individual
rights, family roles, and child rearing practices are completely different to your own. You are
required to live in this place for six months without any contact with your home or family.
Describe how you might feel and what would you miss most. What assistance would you like
from your new community to help you settle in and feel safe? Describe how you might
translate this self-reflection to your work with customers and colleagues from a culture other
than your own.
It is natural to suffer from a cultural shock if a person is transplanted in to a totally
foreign setting, different from our own culture. I may probably suffer from frustration,
depression or might feel isolated. The most important thing that will be missed is my
culture and the family roles. The new culture will presumably have a totally different
perception about family roles (Cullingford 2017). The way of interacting with the family
members and the elderly are totally different from this culture.
There can be some volunteers who can help in establishing community activities allowing
the international students to get involved and get accustomed to the new culture.
Foreign universities often have fraternity groups that provides support to the
international student to help them to assimilate to the new culture without being
discriminated or getting bullied.
This self-reflection can be conveyed to people with other cultures only by accepting their
culture. If they found us accepting their culture, they will also have a sense of
responsibility of paying respect to our culture and would listen to my grievances for
understanding my culture. A mutual acceptance of both the culture will facilitate cultural
assimilation.
4. A new trainee has begun working at your practice. He has only recently arrived in Australia
from a country that expects women to behave very differently to the way women behave
here. He holds those attitudes, and this has resulted in a number of incidents where there
has been friction between him, other staff, and customers. When his manager has a
discussion with him, he responds positively and understands that he needs to modify his
behaviour in order to continue working at the centre. Outline at least six qualities that the
trainee could embrace in order to achieve success.
 Acceptance to the new culture- An employee should be able to accept the new
culture and its pros and cons. One should try to focus on the strengths of the new
culture other than the weaknesses.
 Flexibility in thoughts to accept positive changes inside an organization.
 Dignity and respect- As an employee of an organization, it is the duty of the
person to ensure that all the coworkers are treated with dignity and respect
(Ferrell 2016). Opinions of every employees should be given consideration
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irrespective of the culture, gender or race.
 To become knowledgeable about the key cultural aspects such as the
assertiveness, body language, communication styles and directions, conflict and
eye contact while communication with the colleagues and the peers from other
cultures.
 To promptly convey to the organization that that the person wants to get
sensitive to their culture, for example behaving properly with the women and to
understand the job role of the women to be totally different from their own
culture.
 To be aware of the personal preferences, biases, styles and focuses.
5. Your manager recognises the value of inclusion and mentoring and has asked you to become
a mentor to the new trainee from the scenario in Q.4. The manager believes that you are a
hard worker with excellent interpersonal skills. What are the positive effects that the
manager believes will result from this pairing, and how will you go about mentoring the
trainee?
It is evident from the previous question that the person belonged to a different cultural
background. A culturally diverse workplace often brings different benefits like improves
the employee engagement, increase the creativity and have found to have reduced
employee turnover and increase the organisation’s productivity. These are some of the
advantages that has been perceived by the manager.
Some of the strategies that should be applied to mentor an employee coming from
different cultural background are –
 Connectedness- since each and every person is driven differently, it is necessary
to connect with the employees and find out what motivates them.
 Effective communication- It has to be remembered that conflict arises in case of
misunderstandings and hence the communication style has to be employee
specific. It is necessary to understand, the effective means of communication for
this employee (Ferrell 2016).
 Introduction of a free speech-Acceptance and appreciation are the two important
factors for creating a harmonious workplace so that the employees belonging to
different cultural background feel comfortable to express their opinion.
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6. Allira is a Murri woman. She enjoys sharing her culture with customers and colleagues and
feels proud that she has contributed to a better understanding of her people. She is an
active member of her community and both contributes to and participates in a range of
social and cultural activities. Allira has been granted a week of special leave to assist in
planning activities for Sorry Day. The practice manager becomes extremely concerned when
he hears two employees discussing the unfairness of Allira being granted special leave for
Sorry Day. “I don’t know why they have Sorry Day anyway. It’s time they moved on!”
Why should the practice manager be concerned about this discussion from a business, legal,
and ethical perspective? What would be a more positive and worthwhile response to Allira
attending Sorry Day activities? What information could the practice manager provide?
As per the business norms, all the employees have equal rights towards any kind of
organisational privileges in terms of the monetary privileges or leaves or other basic
employee’s rights. In this case special leave has been granted for Allira to attend the sorry
day. The other employees might feel this to be unfair, unethical and discriminatory and
may take legal steps for breaching the workplace policies.
Instead of granting her a week of special leave the managers could have reduced the
number of days of her leave, but at the same time could have given her monetary grants
or might have arranged for some activities within the workplace to commemorate the
sorry day. This could have been a positive approach from the organisation, keeping in
mind the basic rights of all the employees.
It is the duty of the practice manager to make Allira understand that, there are certain
rules and regulations of a workplace that cannot be breached and is applicable to all the
employees unless for exceptional cases, hence granting her long leaves might become a
cause of resentment among the other employees working within the same premises. All
the organisational policies can be reminded in a holistic manner without hurting her
cultural sentiments.
7. Describe in your own words the meaning of ‘marginalised’ when it applies to groups of
people. What do you see as potential needs of these groups?
Different group of people within a community ,within a given culture, who are at risk of
being subjected to discrimination for several reasons such as socioeconomic status, sex,
gender, ethnicity , age, religion or belief, disability or sexual orientation are known as the
marginalised group of people. Marginalisation involves individuals being denied degrees
of powers. It is the social process of discriminating or isolating or treating a group as
inferior.
Potential needs of the marginalised groups:-
 Equal access to health care and the basic amenities of life.
 Equal access to employment
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 Equal access to food and housing
 Preservation of the basic human rights.
 Respect and dignity.
 Protection for women and children and stringent rights against racial
discrimination.
 To integrate the marginalized group in the decision making process for them.
8. Q.1 looked at the scenario of a practice employing a dental assistant who happens to be
profoundly deaf. What types of resources are available for this person to ensure that their
needs are met, and what is available for all employees of the practice to ensure that they
have an awareness of those needs?
Recruiting a deaf employee at the workplace can be challenging and at the same time can
be solved by adopting certain strategies and integrating resources in the organisation-
 Closed captioning-Captioning on the training videos will make them more
accessible to the deaf and will help the newly hired to gain more information.
 Sign language interpreter Text phones or video related facilities- The person
should not be imposed with any task that is beyond his physical capacity such as
receiving phone calls. Even if such tasks are assigned, there should be facilities for
text calls.
 Written memos.
 Visual emergency notifications. Text alerts or email alerts can be used. For
emergency condition or announcements, flashing lights should also be used apart
from alarms that sounds.
 Arrangement of the workspace as per the convenience of the employee.
At the time of the orientation of the new employee, meeting should be conducted
involving all the employees to ensure that they are aware of the needs of the newly
recruited employee.
9. What can you see as some of the influences and changing practices in Australia and their
impact on Australian society’s diverse communities?
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CHCDIV001 Work with diverse people
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There are significant influence of the government policy which are found to effect the
culturally diver community residing in Australia. The present the Australian government is
increasing the provision for increase in the workplace diversity in order to increase the
number of aboriginal workforce in the professional field. One of the initiative of the
Australian government in order to fulfil this aim include acknowledging and celebrating
harmony (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2018). As an outcome of this the
aboriginal people are feeling more welcomed under diverse cultural climate with lower
levels of social stigmatization and workplace bullying. Increase in the employment
opportunity is also helping to increase their overall socio-economic status within the
society. The Australian Human Rights Commission (2018) is also promoting health and
safety in the workplace and as a result the concerns of the aboriginal workforce is
acknowledged and addressed. This is further helping to increase the overall health and
well-being of the aboriginal population residing in Australia like Torres-Strait Islanders.
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References
Australian Human Rights Commission. 2018. Culture and Diversity. Access date: 11th September
2018. Retrieved from: https://www.humanrights.gov.au/culture-and-diversity
Cullingford, C., 2017. Cultural shock or cultural acquisition? The experiences of overseas students.
In Globalisation, education and culture shock (pp. 121-137). Routledge.
Dickinson, J., 2017. Sign language interpreting in the workplace. Gallaudet University Press.
Ferrell, O.C., 2016. A framework for understanding organizational ethics. In Business ethics: New
challenges for business schools and corporate leaders (pp. 15-29). Routledge.
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