In the present times, diversity in workplace has become a more and more important part in an

organization. Organizations are now paying more attention to the study of diversity and this will
enable executives to manage and determine new effective strategies to adapt to change in the
workplace. By doing this, organizations are now making their employees prepared for achieving
its desired goals for the future. They can realize that managing diversity fairly can gift a healthy
work environment in the workplace and also stimulate employees to be loyal toward
organizations.

Diversity means recognizing and respecting the value of people  According to Kelli A. Green,
Mayra Lopez, Allen Wysocki, and Karl Kepner, they said Diversity is ordinarily explained as
understanding and accepting both obvious and unobvious individual differences, such as age,
ethnicity, gender, psycho-socio-spiritual, religious belief, and status. It also means
recognizing and respecting the value of people 

Therefore, to manage and improve individual potential, which is built upon those basic
differences, in order to create collaboration work and reach the organizations’ strategic goals,
every good administrator should be aware of those two different dimensions which can cause a
violent conflict and also can be a determination factor of each individual behavior. On the other
hand, if the administrators manage this obstruction well, the result will yield good return. The
most obvious dissimilarities of the primary and the secondary can be categorized into two
aspects: Age Differences and Cultural Differences

Managing Age Differences It is a common perception that every organization will be consisted
of employees from diverse generations. Generation B, generation X and Generation. Each
generation has distinctive characteristics. So, to create effective workforce diversity,
organizations nee to understand the features of the three generations so that executives can
effectively manage multigenerational collaboration. As executives realize how different between
each generation is, executives should also be attentive to employee knowledge improvement and
necessary skills development in order to substitute next generations for previous generations as
organizations are continuously moving on to the next era.
Knowing how to manage multigenerational workforce efficiently will enable to create
competitive advantage since it is a source of employee productivity development

Five Principles for effective Multigenerational Workforce Management are -

 Communication and Respect

As we know that generations differ in perspectives and values, employers ought to
encourage employees to ask reasonable questions rather than being judgmental based
upon suppositions when they are uncertain of others’ behavior. Moreover, employers
should make employees to see respect as the norm because most people always view
respect as what they have been taught and they expect others to do the same as them
which is impossible.

 Embrace Flexibility
Organizations need to set up performance principles and supply flexible work
arrangements to each employee: the right job to the right person. By dint of flexibility, it
can allow employee to utilize his or her experience on his or her interests.

 Organization and Team Mission

If organization Creates mission statements of teams or departments associated with
organizations’ missions, they can involve multigenerational work groups to conduct on
the same track. This will enable teams or departments to get together in a way of identical
common goals instead of having differing perspectives because of generational
differences.

 Mentoring
The key goals of mentoring programs are to transfer, instruct, and standardize the
knowledge from previous generations to the next generations. It can also be used to
improve new leaders in organizations. Mentoring programs, however, can be referred to
young generations mentor older generations since the bottom line of this strategy is
knowledge transfer.
  Awareness
People can basically work well together when they know, understand, and accept one
another enough. Therefore, employers should provide multigenerational employees with
educations and opportunities to learn each other such as each generation’s backgrounds,
characteristics, interests, and culture.

Managing Cultural Differences An invisible diversity that derives from external factors and
has an apparent impact on human thinking process and human conduct comes from culture and
religion. As it has great impact on organizational goal achievement, it is crucial for executives to
pay attention on cultural and religious management in order to avoid any possible cross-cultural
conflicts. Also, organizations will be able to promote employee engagement to have more
effective collaboration.

Four Strategies for managing cultural differences are

 Adaptation
Adaptation is an important strategy to manage the cultural differences existent in an
organizations. It is common to find employees with cultures. To get the strategy
formulated, organization requires employees to participate. Such strategy actually
depends on competencies and skills of employees.

 Structural Intervention
Organizational structure is an important component of organizational management. It has
an influence on proficiency and productivity level of organizations. An inappropriate
structure may not cause problems in the early stages, but it can cause problems in long-
term such as an obstacle in work processes, a decrease in quality and quantity of work, a
change of organizational culture and value, negative relationships and attitudes among
employees, etc.

 Managerial Intervention
Managerial Intervention is another strategy that organizations are adopting to ensure that
they efficiently manage cultural diversity. Many organizations have used the managerial
intervention strategy in diverse cases. This strategy has an important role in resolving
cultural diversity conflicts within organizations. Manager will become involved in
conflicts in order to create the ground rules and make a final decision to judge existing
 conflicts and what way they should be solved without employee’s involvement.
However, this strategy is commonly used in situations that cannot be solved.

 Exit
Exit is a rare strategy for reducing the issues of cultural differences. It is common that
when people from different backgrounds work together, conflict arises easier than within
a group of people who have identical backgrounds. If the conflicts cannot be worked out
and approach a stalemate, teamwork will no longer be effective.

The components of success and achievement of organizations rely on work teams which are
compared as a main machine driving organizations to reach a determined goal. Every work team
will consist of diverse workforces who have various backgrounds. This diversity of people can
be classified into two dimensions: the primary and the secondary. The primary is all about
differences among people that are clearly visible. The secondary is differences among people
that are invisible. However, the main differences on which these two dimensions place emphasis
are Age Differences (the primary) and Cultural Differences (the secondary). Age differences and
cultural differences are considered a challenge for organizations in terms of human resource
management so that diverse workforce will be managed more effectively and employees will be
able to work together in organization with a healthy work environment. Therefore, good
administrators should pay attention to diversity education in organizations in order to learn,
understand, and acknowledge individual behavior; it is also a good opportunity for employees to
get a better understanding of each other. Knowing how to manage diverse workforce can assist
administrators to realize weak points and strong points of each employee. Then administrators
will be able to utilize that realization for developing human resource management approach and
managing collaboration between diverse workforces based on rules of organizations.