Diversity Top 10 for Global Diversity
DiversityInc’s well-known ranking of the top companies for Diversity is now evaluating Global Diversity programmes. The 2010 and first round of global-diversity research involved 12 countries—Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden and the United Kingdom—focusing on what demographics were measured and what best practices were utilized. Forty-five companies with at least 10 percent of their operations outside of the United States completed the global surveys, which were separate from the DiversityInc Top 50 survey. An executive summary of that research will be available on DiversityIncBestPractices.com this summer. IBM, Pricewaterhousecoopers and Accenture took the top 3 spots.
A few facts about the 2010 top 10 are:
■ All of them have formal programs to prepare employees to work outside of their native countries and 90 percent have formal programs to prepare the employees’ families
■ Almost all of them have specific programs globally to recruit and develop talent of women and “minority groups” (defined differently in each country)
■ Almost all of them have diversity training and anti-harassment global policies
In the 10 years of providing the DiversityInc. ranking system, the creators of the system now clearly recognisable that “diversity” is much more than a simple management practice. It is now a value which is supported, nurtured and enforced by the CEO. Firm leadership builds cultures that treat differences as assets and purposefully manage equity. This is the same process that makes an organization more finely tuned to ideas and concepts that maximise responsible market behavior and avert disaster. They create organizations where you want to work and companies you want to do business with, treat their communities with respect and build rather than use.
While these trends are also very visible in the EMEA region, it is less clear if the evaluation format of the US-based DiversityInc. organsation adequately acknowledges the vaste differences in operating in the many different environments that EMEA region provides – and implementing D&I there. The current benchmarking initiatives on the European level address these differences and build in additional dimensions to the international mobility aspect.
