Bridging Racial and Gender Inequality in the Workplace: HRs Role

Abstract

Question Three: Providing Specific Recommendation on Race/ Gender Inequality Racial and gender inequalities are prevalent concerns at workplaces ranging from hiring, nature of work to training among other areas of concern to employees. Such concerns proves to be HR problem because through the HR department most of organisations operations becomes effected implying that this department holds influential powers in determining organisations employees through hiring process, nature of work through categorization of task demands based on certain skills and qualification, remuneration based on skill, job group and performance among other areas. To this effect, in case of any complain regarding gender and racial inequalities on HR decisions on such areas whether the department committed it consciously or unconsciously, HR professionals must come up with effective ways to remedy the situation and enhance equality for all workers to enjoy defined inputs towards realisation of the set organisational goals. First communication is the key. The HR professionals must engage in a communication with the organisations managers including the line managers to understand the root cause of such concerns (Williamson, Colley and Foley, 2020). In most organisations, the line managers serve as the intermediaries between the employees and the HR professionals. For such a reason, line managers set task demands and match them with qualified employees based on skills, experience or academic qualification. Unfortunately, the HR team might remain blinded on the transparency of such a process especially if employee do not raise any complains. Having raised the concern, HR team must analyse the situation through responses from the line managers to understand areas that demand amends to enhance equality for all employees. For example, in cases of race inequalities especially on task allocation where a certain race get the best and well paying tasks while the other gets the worst, HR team can come up with a formula that gives equal employment opportunities based on skills for certain job groups regardless of race to enhance equality. Another potential way to address racial and gender inequality is through direct engagements with employees to understand the root cause of the problem (Ringblom and Johansson, 2020). Such engagements can happen physically through urgent open meetings and discussion where HR team give employees an opportunity to air their views on areas of concern. If open discussion does...