Future Manager Italy Insights

Corporate Inclusion Policies and Diversity Managers

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Author: Future Manager Research Center

The key to the success and good functioning of a company lies, in addition to the value of the product, in the importance that is attributed to each individual and in human relationships. To achieve excellent synergy in a teamwork, collaboration and communication should be prerogatives, although each individual is different from the other. From this perspective Human Resources should therefore be considered not as a cost but as a brilliant investment.

So how can you make good deals in such a heterogeneous global context? For the proper functioning of a company, it is necessary that the top management do their best to implement practices aimed at the inclusion of each employee and the formation of teams in which everyone can give equally their contribution to the development of new ideas. Companies constitute the social fabric of a country and, many times, they have greatly influenced cultures, pushing them towards innovation and inclusion. In the wake of this observation, a new figure appeared in Europe to support and enhance diversity, whether of sex, religion, age, ethnicity or sexual orientation: this is the Diversity Manager.

Those who hold this position do not identify themselves in a specific category rather they can be traced back to the different figures who embody, even under different labels, the main activities in the area of ​​Human Resources management. More specifically, a Diversity Manager is placed below the positions of middle managers and executives and, when necessary and possible, he takes on a role of coordination and management of the Human Resources department (always respecting the regulations issued by the HR Manager).

A DMan must be equipped with all those qualities typical of any manager who deals with human capital, with a particular preference for cultural sensitivity, that is the ability and naturalness that an individual has in acting effectively in situations characterized by strong cultural diversity. In practice, it is during the hiring process that one risks stumbling upon unpleasant misjudgments or iniquities; during an interview the candidate and the recruiter find themselves in a situation of “asymmetry of information”, that is, the candidate does not have the same amount of information that his interlocutor has about him/her. The recruiter has the obligation to remain non-partisan, without being influenced by nationality, appearance, physical disabilities or religious affiliation. A positive consequence of these considerations is the fact that today’s companies are no longer morbidly attentive to the economic aspect, in addition to this they have an eye on the internal management of diversity, aware of the fact that it stimulates innovation, creativity and makes the highly attractive company for high-level candidates, who are notoriously open-minded. There exist many statistics that highlight the positive impact of inclusive policies on business results and companies seem to have already noticed this fact.