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Does your organization have a diversity strategy? Do you understand what your demographics are,
not only within your organization; mainly your workforce, but the demographics of your
clients, the demographics of the population from which your clients come.
In our diversity keynote addresses, our diversity workshops, and our consulting work in diversity,
we help organizations identify what are the most important diversity initiatives for their
organization. If we focus on three or four key diversity areas, we know gender is a huge
challenge for organizations. Fifty-two percent of the Australian population is female, 45%
of full-time jobs are occupied by women, and 75% of part-time jobs, and in recent years,
we now have more than 50%, in fact, 56% of university graduates are now women.
What strategies do you have in place to tap into your women in your workforce? Increasingly
Generation X and Generation Y women not only want to have families, they want to have meaningful
careers. Their mothers have jobs; their grandmothers, when they got married, no longer worked and
a large challenge for organizations is that many older managers and board members have
not been exposed in the workplace to women who are career-minded.
We need to change that by putting in place strategies that enable organizations to embrace
generation diversity in a meaningful way, and purely for economic and business reasons.
If we look at cultural diversity, 53% of people living in Australia today were not born here,
or have one or both parents born overseas and one of more than 200 countries; speaking
more than 100 languages other than English as first languages in the home. So cultural
diversity is important, not only for organizations as employers, but to actually understand their
customer base who like to do business in different ways, and who like to actually be communicated
with and interacted with in different ways. We have disability diversity where today,
20% of people living in Australia have a disability, and it doesn’t mean that they’re in a
wheelchair or visually impaired. How do we embrace disabilities in the workplace
and give them the job opportunities that they are looking for?
And finally, think about generational diversity. Do you understand what motivates baby-boomers
versus what motivates Generation X versus what motivates Gen Y, because it is certainly
different for every single generation? And the way generations want to be communicated
with is also different. So if you’re looking for a diversity strategy,
if you’re looking for awareness sessions or workshops on different elements, or combined
elements of diversity, we can certainly help you with that. It is one of our passions,
and it is an area in which we have done research and written books over the last decade.