Importance of Corporate Diversity - Essay Example

Married households with children drove that drop as they went from 40% to 23%. What is most compelling about this change is the increase in Non-traditional households which have grown from 12% to 22%. This group is made up of all sorts of new family and household formations - mostly single parent households. Single-mother families grew from 3 million in 1970 to 10 million in 2003, while the number or single-father families grew from half a million to 2 million. Non-Traditional household formations also include gay and lesbian households and a newer phenomenon whereby older, single people (single parents are the drive) find long-term roommates to help alleviate the financial burdens that often come with living alone.

As the number of combinations and permutations of how people lead their lives continues to grow, traditional demographics work less productively as proxies for attitudes. Therefore, truly understanding the needs and wants of consumers and building products that meet their unique circumstances becomes more and more challenging. A growing concept is that companies that incorporate diversity in their work force are more likely to innovative compared to those firms that do not. Therefore, it can be seen that diversity is now forcing firms to recruit, retain and develop employees from varying multicultural backgrounds, different ethnicities, minorities, and also from the socially disadvantageous groups in the society.

This diversity affects businesses in several ways; firms can increase their product sales as efforts by executives having diverse background can bring and bring new ideas that enhance sales; a diverse work force brings in new customers because their diverse backgrounds help in serving the customers better according to their needs, a diverse workforce questions and challenges that they think might affect the customer base because of advertisements, slogans or product contents being offensive to a particular customer group; other issues such as globalization demands it; having a diverse work force also is supposed to increase the bottom line of the company since the company incorporating diversity is looked upon favorably by employees, customers and also by the legal and the regulatory authorities.

Some of the benefits that organizations are experiencing as a result of work force diversity also include lower costs since firms now face lesser law suit costs by hiring the diverse workforce, which previously they tend to reject and faced lawsuits over it. The diverse work force strengthens and reinforces the culture that promotes creativity and innovation. As mentioned, diversity generally enhances the bottom line i.e. the profits, firms are also seen as favorable in stock markets thus trading at premium and are also seen as likely targets for mergers.

Firms when growing in size are in dire need of new and more recruits, selecting from the diverse pool of human resources give them a broad base to select from. Diverse population has different and varying lifestyles, thus firm can use this to its own advantage by utilizing some at one time and some other when special circumstances occur. Diversity can