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How diverse do SMEs need to be?
Over the last few years large corporations have begun to see how important diversity in the workplace is.
A wider pool of staff coming from a range of backgrounds inevitably brings different experiences and different outlooks and many large established businesses and corporations are beginning to slowly but surely ensure that they are not lagging behind in this area.
For small and medium-sized enterprises( SMEs) however, implementing a diverse workforce, is much more difficult.
In an article in The Guardian( 30 April 2007), Duncan O’ Leary says:“ Employing a more diverse workforce may be beneficial, but attracting people from a range of backgrounds can also involve considerable time, effort and money. Small- and medium-sized enterprises( SMEs) often want to increase the diversity of their workforce, but for busy entrepreneurs the costs often seem to outweigh the undoubted benefits.”
He says the reason for this is that SMEs do not have the finance to advertise in the same way as larger organisations when recruiting, for example, running outreach workshops, creating paid work experience placements, running campaigns and providing diversity training to its staff.
Instead, he says, SMEs continue to recruit through personal and professional networks and therefore end up recruiting people of similar backgrounds and experiences even to themselves and as a result limit themselves.
This of course excludes some potential applicants who may be from a community that is not already‘ networked’.
The Solution?
In a recent report‘ How recruitment is changing and why it matters’, by the think tank for Democracy, Demos, the authors state that the government should step in and make it easier for SMEs to find recruits from all backgrounds. uk | engage ISSUE FOUR 2007