11 Pros and Cons of Diversity in the Workplace

A particular survey has found out that forty-percent of workers love their jobs because they feel comfortable with their coworkers. This means that coworkers are the top reason why office employees loved their jobs.

However, diversity in the workplace seem to be the trend in almost every modern office these days. In fact, modern offices have become melting pots of various ages, genders, and cultural and educational backgrounds. According to the survey, millennials or the Gen Y people make up about fourteen percent of the workforce in the US. Meanwhile, thirteen percent of the working population in the country are the so-called baby boomers.

Surprisingly, age can be a polarizing and challenging factor that is sometimes unnoticeable in the office. Hence, evaluating your next career move should involve finding people who will be helpful to make you love your job in the long term. If you are going to do this, you should have an idea about the pros and cons of age-diversity in the workplace first. Take a look at some common reasons in response to such a working condition.

List of Pros of Diversity in the Workplace

1. Working with Individuals Having Various Skillsets
It is safe to say that each employee should have a variety of skills that can be utilized to excel on their job. This can be based on the educational background of the employee, others take interests and hobbies as a basis, and some take pride on their generation and age.

In a diverse working environment, it can’t be denied that there are people who excel in some skills while fail on other departments. This is because not all people have the same set of skills. The opportunity of working with a variety of people with unique set of skills should make that workplace an excellent learning environment.

2. Good Opportunity for Mentoring
Young professionals shouldn’t consider this hard to understand. This is because they can have a good option to have a mentor to help them accelerate and progress in their careers. For offices that promote diversity of age, the younger generation should be able to seek the help from professionals with more years of experience, which could be a great mentor.

3. Be Exposed to Diverse Perspectives and Opinions
The secret to having successful businesses should include the value of varied opinions in a working environment. For instance, if a company is composed entirely of engineers, it couldn’t get sales closed as expected. In this case, it should also include great customer service. Likewise, a company composed entirely of salespeople shouldn’t be able to build products solidly. For this reason, there should be diversity in order to have a good combination of values, perspectives, opinions, and experience to bring new opportunities for business acceleration and growth. This will be so much helpful for a company to have a diverse workforce.

4. Offers a Wider Talent Pool
If employee selections should not be governed by criteria such as educational experience, location, and age group, there is a huge possibility of finding the right match between the employee and the employer.

5. Better Service to Diverse Customer Base
Marketing efforts targeting new countries are a lot successful when the skillset and knowledge of the local talents in a particular country should be utilized. Thus, it will help companies to become able in serving a diverse customer base.

6. Easier to Engage in Internal Cross-Training
This can be done if departments can work together as a team. More so, if companies should be able to increase overseas employment, then it could lead to increase in the understanding of cultures or simply a world without borders. Thus, employees having differences in terms of generation, department, culture, and others should have an opportunity to seek common ties in professional and team-related objectives.

List of Cons of Diversity in the Workplace

1. Difficulty to Communicate
Just as there is diversity in a population, environments with various generations working towards a common goal should find it hard to communicate or understand each other. This is possible for a workforce to deal with people from different generations. Thus, it is essential to have balance when there are conflicting opinions and needs. This can be resolved by not engaging in provocative languages. So, it might still be beneficial for the company to assume the best of your coworkers.

2. Personal Prejudice is Possible
In a diverse environment, one worker’s background, including his or her age can be subject for certain prejudices. This is practically comparable to workplaces some fifty decades ago, which should be so much different as they are today. To resolve this issue, it is essential to deal with elder people openly and politely when there are prejudices in the workplace. It is also important to escalate the issue to the human resources or the management when harassment or extreme prejudice happens.

3. Exposure to Differing Perspectives and Opinions
Although this might sound positive for most people, this can also be negative once you consider a new workplace. This is because diverse perspectives and opinions can also be distracting as it can build a hostile environment to work.

4. Selecting Candidates for a Position
There is said to be conflict that could result in the selection of the right company as well as selecting a more diverse candidate who is more suitable for the job.

5. Communications Barriers Leading to Resentment
If there should be any unresolved language or communications barriers, this should lead to resentment. More so, if there are any increases in expatriation, this could lead to the disappearance of demarcation between countries or homogenization. Likewise, if employees in the home country of the company should be concerned with job outsourcing, this will lead to certain layoffs.

Final Thoughts

Issues in the workplace can affect the atmosphere where people could work productively and efficiently. In order to resolve some cases that should involve diversity in the working environment, it is essential to look into the essential pros and cons first before deciding to find your next job.