Free Custom «Cultural Diversity» Essay Paper

Task One

A. I am a Christian and a Native American

1. A family should maintain good morals and unity, as taught in Christianity, contributing a positive image to the community. Leisure activities must strengthen community cohesion and development as Christianity teaches. Christian values also affect understanding of ideal family. I believe that all families in the community should adhere to moral and ethical rules. The community must ensure that families can satisfy their basic needs such as food, healthcare and education. Being a Native American influences my communication skills, my pronunciation differs from those of other members of the community such as Asian and Hispanic Americans. However, I ensure that I implement an American spirit of equality and respect to all members of the community.

2. My cultural identity of Christian and American may expose me to a wide range of advantages in the workplace. As Christian, I believe in the equality and respect for all people. Each member of the committee will get similar opportunities towards community development. Discrimination based on gender, race, age or education status is not acceptable, all members are equal and important parts of the community.

3. All committee members should complete a cultural self-analysis. This demand is vital for understanding one's strengths, weaknesses, threats and every individual gains a sense of belonging. Accepting personal weaknesses enables changes in strategy to level them. Evaluating personal strengths ensures that the individual can use them in benefit of the community. Considering possible threats such as isolation and minor group’s extinction secures them to receive special treatment in the community. An identity analysis gives one a sense of belonging tracing the person’s roots and foundation.

B. Controversies within the Committee

Racial discrimination or identifying and discriminating people based on their skin color or origin can lead to controversies in the association. The committee can fail to agree on important matters and create a hostile and working environment. The collective body must practice diversity acceptance to ensure that all members of the community benefit.

1. The committee can handle racial discrimination by ensuring fair representation of all racial groups, setting codes to govern member’s interaction and punishing offensive members. Fair representation ensures that members from dominant ethnic groups such as Whites do not feel superior to minor groups such as Asians and Indian Americans. Setting interaction codes guarantees that all members treat each other with respect providing a peaceful collaboration. The committee should punish discriminative and undisciplined members to ensure that every member feels secure and respected and to avoid bullying.

C. Five Guidelines

The committee can follow several guidelines to ensure that its policies are free from cultural bias. These measures include gender equality, fair representation of all ethnic groups, and acceptance of community opinion and representation of all religious groups. Women are key parts of the community and families. Empowering women economically, politically and providing them with education benefits the entire society. Racial discrimination divides community into parts creating a hostile environment for social and economic development. The committee should ensure racial respect and unity to overcome such challenges as drugs and lack of security.

Task Two

Introduction

Every business no matter its size must ensure efficient communication to coordinate all departments and operations. Sourcing of skills equips a business with employees from diverse cultures creating a communication challenge. Volunteering at the American Red Cross society I discovered that cultural difference can be a great barrier to communication. Engaging diverse communities proves to be a difficult task when the two parties fail to communicate effectively. People from diverse cultures think, hear and interpret information differently creating a communication challenge. The cultural landscape changes dynamically, particularly in volunteer work, creating the need for diversified skills. 

Body

Demographic changes are dynamic in the quantifiable statistics of a given population. Analyzing volunteer work at the American Red Cross society highlights main demographic changes that are age, gender, ethnicity and employment. Women participate in volunteer work more than men across all demographic characteristics including employment, age, and ethnicity.  Americans aged thirty to forty-five years will work as volunteers with probability of 30%. Young people at the age from twenty to twenty-four years have the lowest volunteer rate at 18%.  Teens have a rate of 26%. The willingness to volunteer in community services falls dramatically above the age of forty-five. White people are engaged in volunteer work above all, followed by Asian Americans, African Americans, and Indians. Individuals with higher academic education participate more in volunteer work compared to low educated peoples (United States Department of Labor Statistics).

Increasing diversity in recruitments and volunteers is vital for the American Red Cross Society. Organizations with diverse teams of employees benefit from unique ideas and alternatives to challenges facing operations as they incorporate individuals from different ethnicities, with diverse education background and experience. The teammates contribute various and unique ideas that increase organization productivity and create unique solutions to challenges as they think differently.

Several diversity skills can be applied to overcome communication barriers. Feedback and upward communication is one skill that can be applied to overcome these barriers. Feedback helps to eliminate misunderstandings within organizations. The improved listening skills are also a good strategy that can be adopted to remove communication barriers. 

Feedback and upward information ensures that managers receive updates on policies implementation and conduct SWOT analysis. Feedbacks also enable evaluation of the organization performance; therefore, employees must provide precise feedbacks such as reports and surveys. Attentive listening and taking down notes ensure that the audience does not miss important instructions from the speaker. Such skills, therefore, prevent misunderstandings, loss of resources and reduce the time for correcting mistakes. Overall, the diversity skills boost information flow and productivity.

Conclusion

Cultural diversity is a crucial paradigm in the society. It is important to have representatives from different cultures in organization to ensure that the unique ideas in problem solving exist there. In terms of management, cultural diversity enhances good communication mechanism and also improves management of operations.

Recommendation

The American Red Cross should ensure diversity in its collective body by hiring employees and volunteers from different ethnic groups. Diversity in the workforce leads to the generation of new and unique ideas and alternatives in case of challenges. This issue also creates a pool of knowledge ensuring greater productivity. Lack of common communication language and cultural discrimination hinder effective communication. English is an international communication language and is used as a common mode of communication. However, the organization should also accommodate and assist volunteers with poor command of English.