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10-01-09 | Workshop To Highlight Benefits of Diversity in the Workplace

Reprinted from the The Ventura County Star

Heeding the need for diversity in the workplace can help the bottom line.

Businesses that don’t encourage diversity can lose out on potential clients and employees who are seeking sensitivity and diversity in the companies they do business with, said Karen Gabler, an employment law partner with Nordman Cormany Hair & Compton in Oxnard. Gabler is scheduled to be a keynote speaker at the Professionals in Human Resources Association’s Diversity & Cross-Cultural Leadership Summit today at CSU Long Beach.

“It’s a matter of not just social responsibility, but smart business,” she said.

If a client or job candidate asks what your firm does to promote diversity, it’s too late at that point to try to throw something together, she said.

Sangeeta Gupta and Mariah Bieber started the summit about three years ago because they realized there wasn’t a conference in Southern California that talked about diversity issues, reviewed best practices and offered practical tips and tools, Gupta said. She heads Gupta Consulting Group, which offers diversity and intercultural consulting and training.

With the demographics of the United States changing rapidly, it is important to have those discussions, Gupta said.

“It’s so important that we understand each other and how to work across our differences,” she said.

Diversity discussions stretch far beyond the talk of quotas and affirmative action of yesterday to tackle multiple generations in the workplace and myriad cultures and backgrounds, even among Americans in a U.S. firm.

In an increasingly global economy, businesses from the sole proprietor to an international business have to look at diversity issues, Gabler said.

Gabler will be speaking on hidden biases at the conference. These are the sudden, subconscious judgments people make, often without realizing the bias is there.

“We all have immediate impressions,” she said, whether they are about other genders, peer groups or racial groups — or the way someone communicates.

“Not recognizing those exist means we’re not paying attention to how they impact our decisions,” she said.

A large part of the battle is awareness of the issue, which can be tackled through training sessions, policies or workplace discussions. Gabler said diversity has become such a mainstream issue that there is more awareness and more discussion. Many businesses are starting to have senior management in charge of diversity.

Biases can affect hiring, promotion — even interaction in a workplace disciplinary issue. It can stretch from first reactions all the way to overt discrimination, Gabler said.

Gupta said even with all of the attention to diversity, people don’t understand how central it is to everything we do as individuals and how it affects business.

Businesses that tie their diversity strategy to their overall business strategy are the ones that understand that the biggest resource they have is human capital, she said.

“It is here to stay,” she said. “It is not a soft skill, it is not nice to have, it is a business imperative.”