Diversity in workplace can be beneficial for the business as it allows the company to deal with clients of varied backgrounds. However, that’s not the only benefit of having employees from diverse backgrounds and cultures in a workplace. Diversity in workplace also allows forming a more accepting, welcoming, and positive workplace culture. Moreover, it also allows the exploration of new business ideas and practices.
As an employer, you can ensure the following measures to promote diversity in workplace by bringing cultures and religions together:
Celebrate Cultural and Religious Holidays
Celebrations are one of the easiest ways to expose team members to each other’s cultural and religious holidays. It makes the employee whose culture or religion is being celebrated more accepted and welcomed into the team and lets other employees get exposed to a new culture or belief in a positive light.
Arrange for a team lunch or dinner with the cultural food and set up a few decorations. The employee whose cultural holiday is being celebrated can talk a little about the holiday’s significance in their community. They can also say a few lines about extending the cultural or religious feast to their teammates, which is bound to lift everyone’s mood.
Encourage Good Manners
People from diverse cultures and religions are usually unaware of each other’s slang terms, jokes, everyday norms, and possible triggers. Therefore, employers should discourage employees from using slang terms and making jokes about all cultures and religions.
Encourage your employees to practice good manners on a day-to-day basis. For example, encourage your employees to greet each other properly every morning, ask for each other’s attention politely, add Mr. or Ms. when addressing each other, and make generous use of clear ‘thank you’ and ‘please.’ Good manners are usually the same all around the world and practicing them can avoid any possible conflict between your employees.
Discourage Discussing Politics
Discussing politics can be more harmful than discussing cultures and religions. Usually, when diverse employees discuss each other’s cultures and religions, they are more open to listening as they know little about any religion and culture apart from theirs. Their curiosity helps make them good listeners even if they don’t truly respect their colleagues’ cultures and religions. They don’t feel the need to disrespect a culture or religion when learning more about it because it doesn’t seem personal to them.
However, discussing politics is another matter altogether. Most people tend to support certain political figures who represent their values. More often than not, these values come from their culture or religion. But when two colleagues from different religions support two opposing political figures, it can quickly feel very personal. Since people see political figures as representing their morals and values, anyone opposing them may seem like opposing their culture or religion. Such situations can cause a rift between employees and negatively affect the workplace culture.
As an employer, you can peacefully promote and maintain diversity in workplace by banning all political conversations.
Finally, you can also promote cultural and religious literacy at your workplace by training your employees for global citizenship. Such training can teach them more about each other’s cultural etiquettes and bridge the communication gap.
