I had the opportunity to participate as a table speaker at a recent National Diversity Council (NDC) Roundtable event. Tyson Foods and Walmart have partnered with the Arkansas Diversity Council (ARDC) of the NDC. The ARDC is committed to transforming workplace communities into environments where people are valued for their uniqueness and differences, and are confident that their contributions matter. As a group, we learned a lot from each other, and we thought we’d share some highlights of our notes.
In today’s organizations, the ability of employees and managers to respect and work with differences along all identity lines is more important than ever before. Advances in technology make generational diversity a topic that should be addressed. For example, it seems like managing generational diversity is somewhat about knowledge, and even more about communication. We definitely don’t want to over generalize, but many of us have experiences where different generations are more comfortable with different methods of communication. We have long known that some people are more visual or more verbal; similarly we also need to consider the tools for communication. Some people are more active users of email or text; while some prefer phone calls, and some still would rather have a face-to-face meeting.
Many organizations impose a single preferred method of communication. They can clearly do that, but like with any diversity opportunity, it leads them to miss out on the chance to optimize team effectiveness.
By Dan Sanker (Original article on Linkedin.com -http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130228152024-94530-text-call-email-im-tweet-or-meet )
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