Aquatech has been a proudly Australian owned and operated organisation throughout its history. In the modern business climate, international and cultural barriers present a significant challenge to entering the global market. In response to this challenge, Aquatech should evolve its policies by increasing diversity within its workforce as an initiative to enhance organisational culture and drive innovative outputs.
As an international company having trading relations with over 45 countries globally, it is vital that Acquatech promotes a multicultural work environment by employing staff from a variety of cultures, backgrounds and ethnicities to further expand the company’s knowledge. As such, a concise and well defined business plan, transformational leadership, which includes each of the areas that are to be addressed; attitudes, leadership style, communication, recruitment, acceptance of the requirement for change and a vision of the future and its benefits will all need to be defined and communicated to all affected by the change through regular monthly meetings and its uptake and acceptance assessed through a half yearly surveys.
1. Introduction
Acquatech is the leading water treatment company in Australia. The business wishes to improve productivity through increased diversity in its workplace.
The basis for achieving the change will be through leading. An article in Forbes Insights (2018) strongly supports the belief that the success of a firm’s diversity and inclusion begins with senior management. Senior management is responsible for the establishment of a vision and the selling of this vision. Leadership is required to drive the change and ensure that the benefits gained through the achievement of the new corporate vision within a time frame acceptable to all stakeholders is achieved. This report places an emphasis on the critical role that strong and clear leadership plays in the achievement of significant cultural change.
Strategies such as transformational leadership and path-goal leadership theory will be considered and recommendations made.
2.0 Defining and framing the issue
Australia is a multicultural country; home to the world’s oldest continuous culture, as well as other inhabitants who identify with more than 270 other cultures. Since 1945, almost seven million people have migrated to Australia (Soutphommasane, 2015 & Australian Human Rights Commission, 2018). This inbound migration clearly supports the proposition that Australia is culturally diverse. To help prevent racial discrimination, Australia has also adopted the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, which promotes the ideology that there should be “a fair go for all”.
Despite the best intentions of the Act and the ready availability of a diverse workforce, unemployment remains highest amongst Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders, older Australians and the disabled. It can be argued that the issue of the lack of diversity is not the availability of talent, diverse ages, sexual identities, abilities, gender and cultures, but rather the suggestion that the barriers to inclusive workplaces are self-made (Chandler MacLeod Group, 2016).
The Chandler MacLeod Group, surveyed 391 senior managers, leaders and specialist, and 387 employees across Australia to better understand workplace diversity. Almost 50% of employers and employees agreed that their organisation’s diversity was not reflective of the Australian population. Three out of four Australians support or strongly support their organisation taking action to create a workplace which is diverse and inclusive (Inclusion@work Index, 2018) and 72% of employees agreed that it would broaden the range of values and ideals and enhance the firm’s skillset (59%). 62% of employees are concerned about communication barriers, 40% worried about conflicting morals and 33% are unsure about the different approaches to work. Strong and clear leadership is critical in terms of ensuring that staff’s concerns are heard and that these concerns are addressed before a new recruitment strategy can be successfully implemented if the desired changes are going to benefit rather than destabilise the workplace. In 2004, the Corporate Leadership Council studied multiple employees in 27 countries, in order to understand the main factors influencing employee engagement. The results showed that the employees were strongly influenced by managers’ opinions and ‘commitment to diversity’ (Skalsky & McCarthy, 2009). Many executive leaders, do not truly endorse diversity practices, and unfortunately continue to spread the view that diversity is just a nice thing to do and is implemented to protect the brand and does not hold any value (Davis et al., 2016 & Page, 2017). These views, can heavily constrain the companies as it can hinder them from achieving the multiple benefits associated with a diverse workplace. Documented benefits include, 10 times more likely to be highly effective, 9 times more likely to innovate, 5 times more likely to provide excellent customer service: (Inclusion@work Index, 2018 & Egan, 2018)
2.1 Diversity in Acquatech.
Acquatech is a family-based as well as Australian owned and operated company. The corporate culture has not embraced the development of a diverse workforce, as all employees share similar beliefs, values, behaviours and ways of thinking that have not encouraged this. If Acquatech is to benefit from the potential advantages to be gained from embracing a diverse workforce then this transition will need to be skilfully managed by leaders with this goal as a primary focus. Principal factors that will potentially hinder the business from building a diverse workforce include non-inclusive behaviour, such as biases in recruitment and unconscious bias. If these biases are correctly understood by leaders, this awareness will have a positive impact on the staff and thus help to initiate innovation through diversity (Bourke & Dillon, 2018). As stated by Rocio Lorenzo (2017) “more diverse companies are simply more innovative, period”. It is said that the diversity in the company’s clientele should reflect the diversity within the company. Additionally, a diverse workforce led and supported by well-informed managers will encourage innovation and creativity in Acquatech’s research.
3.0 Addressing the issue
Setting goals and implementing clear strategies to achieve them through planning, organising by delegating responsibility for tasks with accurate and timely monitoring reports should be implemented into any business. Yet, it is the function of leading that managers can utilize to maximise staff motivation and innovation. Innovative leaders inspire employees to produce creative thoughts that will flow through the business and enable it to constantly develop leading market goods and services (Maric, 2017). In any competitive market, once a company has its foundational strategies and work processes, it is the role of the leader to implement these and work towards maximising the benefits they bring.
A diverse and inclusive workforce is necessary to drive innovation, foster creativity, and guide business strategies. Multiple voices lead to new ideas, new services, and new products, and encourage out-of-the box thinking (Egan, 2018)
Adopting a clear and consistent leadership style will be critical to the success of developing an innovation through diversity culture. Two leadership styles that are worth considering are documented below for consideration.
3.1 Transformational leadership
Given the family based culture of the business, the less confronting leadership style of transformational leadership, as outlined in the diagram below, is recommended.
Figure 1: The four elements of transformational leadership. (Bass,1985)
Strengths of transformational leadership such as, lower employee and customer turnover costs and corporate learning (Zellman, 2018) are valuable but not always as immediately effective as transactional leadership, which has a strong focus on the establishment of requirements employees need to meet. If choosing transformational leadership then it is suggested that Acquatech, uses strategies such as a specialised transformational training course for managers with an emphasis placed on encouraging diversity and inclusion to enable those leaders to change their biases should they exist. In adapting to these new practices, it is essential to make small changes every day to its management system before undertaking a completely new foundation. Other new behaviours that will enhance the likelihood of success include the adoption of monthly seminars between leaders and employees, to not only build their relationship but to also push employees to contribute to new projects the company might be undertaking. Additionally, it is important that a survey is sent to each staff every six months to discuss and ensure that everyone is happy with the new practices implemented.
3.2 Path-goal leadership
Path-goal theory is based on specifying a leader’s style or behaviour which best fits the employees and the work environment in order to achieve a goal (House & Mitchell, 1974, Clark, 2015). The overall goal is to increase the employees’ motivation, empowerment and satisfaction so they become productive members of the organisation (Clark, 2015). While the theory is not a detailed process, figure 2 represents the basic steps it generally follows.
Figure 2: Path-goal leadership theory (Clark, 2015).
The path-goal leadership is a process in which leaders select specific behaviours which are best suited to the employee’s needs and the working environment so employees obtain their goals (Northouse, 2013). The strengths of this method include its ability of combining the situational, contingent leadership and expectant theories into one developed framework for augmented efficiency (House, 2002). This theory is thought to place more responsibility on leaders and less on employees therefore diminishing independent thinking and development. Through acknowledgement of employee characteristics, the Path-Goal theory strives to promote diversity as it accommodates for differences in age, gender, experience and culture. If Acquatech were to adapt this theory into their work, it is suggested that leaders adopt the participative leadership style and focus on providing support to all employees. This could be done via a training program designed to improve innovation and encouraging and promoting a wide variety of skillsets and ideas. Additionally, to ensure that all backgrounds are given an opportunity to work at Acquatech it is to be taken into consideration to adopt and set up recruitment policies.
4. Conclusion
This report clearly shows that simply acknowledging diversity is not enough, there must be an active process of managing diversity to leverage the full range of potential benefits through clear leadership. The adoption of transformational leadership will enable the business to maintain its family centric culture while encouraging all staff to embrace diversity. Appealing to reason is easier in a family based business and staff turnover is obviously something that is not wanted so the more conciliatory approach inherent within a transformational leadership culture will enable the business to both adopt new ideals while maintaining the strengths of its existing culture.
5. Recommendations
In order to successfully increase diversity the business will need to initially develop a clear business plan that includes each of the areas that are to be addressed. Attitudes, leadership style, communication, recruitment, acceptance of the requirement for change and a vision of the future and its benefits will all need to be defined and communicated to all through regular monthly meetings.
In order for Acquatech to reflect on the implementation of new practices, all staff will be sent a survey via email every six months to discuss, the functioning, effectiveness of the monthly seminars, diversity in the workforce, management and support. This will provide Acquatech with an analysis of what has to be improved and consolidate these strategies.
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