Each individual, irrespective of background and context, wants to be valued for what they can bring to an organisation. It is this human-hunger to be valued that drives the positive power that cultural diversity can bring to the workplace. Being valued creates self-respect, psychological well-being and enhanced performance. For the organisation, this enhanced performance can often show itself as creative problem-solving, innovative new products or services or better rapport with clients...because something new is given birth when different things come together.

Regardless of the organization you join, you are likely to be dealing with people who come from various national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Communicating across language and cultural barriers at home (or abroad) will challenge your skills. Without leaving your own country, you're likely to come into contact with people from a variety of backgrounds who work in your company, industry, and community. That's real cultural diversity in the workplace!

People are not valued enough for so many different reasons: it can be because of different thinking styles, reasoning styles (you often hear people exclaim "S/he just doesn't get it!"), or just plain behaviour differences. All these can be turned into a useful attribute, by managing workforce diversity, because it means that those individuals do not follow the company ‘group think'.

Managing workforce diversity can be complex. People are different in so many ways. In the face of growing diversity, businesses need to change some of their traditional assumptions and approaches, and find new role models and best practices to imitate. However, you should be aware of the ways in which cultural diversity in the workplace manifests itself. This can be seen in the following practices:

1. team role style & fit
2. problem-solving style
3. value-set
4. creative thinking
5. logic & reasoning styles
6. national culture
7. ethics
8. soft or hard approaches to work (sometimes called masculine or feminine approaches)
9. embracing of technology
10. attitudes towards the boss & colleagues

Each of these factors, when not managed properly, can prevent your staff from performing well.  Equally, each of them, when understood and used sensitively, can improve performance of your team exponentially.

To bring about the best performance in people, it's important to be able to really look at a company's specific needs when it comes to managing cultural diversity in the workplace. You need to implement a very specific plan to develop the right communication skill set, the right attitudes to create value from workforce diversity. To find out more about implementing a planned ‘Managing Cultural Diversity in the Workplace' program, click here.