Microsoft is known for managing diversity well. The following is from its websit
ID: 382112 • Letter: M
Question
Microsoft is known for managing diversity well. The following is from its website: As a global company, Microsoft employs people from more than 135 different countries and regions. A multicultural workforce enables us to attract and retain the most qualified employees, develop more innovative products, and better serve the needs of a wide range of customers. Microsoft and the technology industry have an incredible opportunity and challenge to meet the needs of a globally diverse population. As a global industry leader and corporate citizen, we continue our efforts to understand, value, and incorporate differences; to enable talent; to satisfy customers; and to lead technology innovation globally. Microsoft’s corporate commitment to the principle of diversity means that we believe diversity enriches our products, empowers us to provide excellent customer service, enhances the lives of our employees, and connects us to the communities where we live and work. At Microsoft, our goal is to build the greatest multicultural workplace in the technology industry. We know that in order to reflect the growing diversity of our communities and the global marketplace, we must make every effort to understand, value, and incorporate the differences of our employees. To that end, we value training as an important aspect of our overall global diversity and inclusion strategy. Microsoft’s diversity education programs are designed to reinforce the company's commitment to diversity while ensuring that employees have the awareness, skills, knowledge, and ability to carry out their individual responsibilities. The goal of diversity training and education is to provide employees with the key competencies they need to excel in their current or future roles, and to create a workplace environment that is empowering, inclusive, and supportive so all employees can do their best work. The collective strength of employees trained in diversity will help Microsoft provide more innovative solutions, services, and products for a global market. We leverage many training media to deliver quality awareness and skill building to our employees and managers. Microsoft incorporates diversity into core curriculum training courses, offers many standalone diversity training courses, and uses articles, books, and multimedia for further education about diversity and inclusion issues in the workplace. A formal mentoring program, open to all employees, helps each employee find diverse role models and advisors. At Microsoft, employees are responsible for their own career development. By providing learning experiences that build the requisite knowledge, skills, and understanding for success, we strive to develop an inclusive environment in which everyone has the potential to do their best work.
Using the material on the business case for diversity, what evidence do you see that Microsoft is making elements of this case (identify specific examples of how their approach would make business sense) and identify any ways that you think they might fall short or have room to improve.
Explanation / Answer
In this case, the value of Microsoft and its multicultural workforce is explained. Microsoft strives to create such environment that helps Microsoft to capitalize on the diversity of its people and inclusion of ideas and solutions to meet the need of increasing global and diverse customer base.
Microsoft has rich community of employee resource group and employee networks that helps the company to provide career development opportunities for its workforce. By these group they tend to support, provide networking opportunities and assistance in the activities that promote cultural awareness. This also results in community participation and mentoring activity in the organisation. Employees get overall exposure in scholarship programs and community services.
Building a more diverse company the size of Microsoft is a journey that will have many milestones along the way, today being one of them. Every employee have clear signs of progress by seeing with respect to women and minorities coming into the company, and will leverage these results to fuel our ongoing efforts. Data show that company is on the right path, but it will take committed, intentional, focused efforts in the future to stay on that path and increase our velocity.
Microsoft has dedicating resources against a number of priorities and initiatives focused on retention, culture and pipeline expansion pivots. These targeted actions include:
Creating and delivering compelling career development offerings for women and racial/ethnic minorities.
1. Continuing mandatory internal trainings on inclusive hiring and awareness of unconscious and unintended bias.
2. Tying senior leaders’ compensation to diversity gains in their respective organizations.
3. Conducting recruiting campaigns designed to attract and retain more diverse talent.
4. Increasing our investment in our Microsoft Software and Systems Academy program to attract more veterans into tech careers.
5. Launching an Inclusive Hiring website to expand our hiring pipeline and attract diverse talent.
6. Continuing investments in STEM programs to help fill the pipeline with the amazing potential and talents of diverse people.
7. Launching an Inclusive Design initiative to create products and technology for diverse audiences: Xbox Gaming for everyone, which focuses on designing for people with diverse needs and abilities.
8. Continuing to evolve the workplace culture to be more inclusive of all employees.
9. Expanding the reach of internal Dialogue across Differences course to over 7,000 employees and to nearly 900 managers worldwide.
Need to improve areas:-