Diversity is a strength, but managing diversity in organizations requires additional efforts. How important is this in your organization?

Though I’m not working as an employee, the company where I’m doing my masters project has quite diverse employees. In India, every state has different language and cultures, and diversity within states also.
Personally, I like to work within diverse environment, not only within one state or country but also different countries.
I would also like to work with aliens!:)

I think with more companies, projects, orginizations, etc. it’s rarely a bad thing to embrace diversity. The main benefit obviously being that you are able to tap a larger pool of varying opinions on any given subject. The only downside is, different people naturally have different ideologies, and often times those conflict with themselves. I’m still a student, my school isn’t as diverse as I would like it, but I live in a city that’s very diverse with plenty of different cultures and lifestyles, so it makes up for it.

Very. I work for a company that employs 50,000 people in 17 different countries. It’s complicated.

In my previous life, I worked for a large company that spent a lot of time and money promoting it. We had divisions in many countries.
In engineering, we didn’t care if someone was from Mars as long as they could write Matlab code, run a CFD simulation, or KIVA, ADAMS or… the info that really made the product work. Maybe the company should have spent a little less on diversity training and a little more on hard sciences. It’s teetering on disaster now.
My new small company only cares if you are a technical self starter, and can write a good Comsol multiphysics routine in a reasonable time without a lot of questions. I don’t care about race, gender, or even species.
This is not a plug for anyone to send in a resume. I’ve got it under control.

Very. I work for a global company and diversity is everywhere, from voluntary special interest groups to cultural training on our employee development portal…

I work for the phone company, and they treat everyone like shit, without regard for your heritage.

In my business, diversity is welcome, all walks of life and experiences are welcome because they bring tools for communication the whole can share and adapt. Every advantage a person has will be put into play, developed and honed for the benefit of selling the company which in turn makes money for the individuals.

Yes, it can get complicated, but the opportunities are huge. German project managers for example appreciate very direct answers including a simple ‘No’. Indian software engineers for example don’t use simple ‘No’ answers. British colleagues talk about ‘slight problems’ and for some it takes a while to figure out the details. Knowing about the subtle differences helps a lot.

I work at a place that likes to call itself “diversity university.” Some people quarrel with that notion, but still, it’s probably more diverse than most. The university places great value on being a part of the community, and of being a place that is comfortable for all. They provide harassment training, but I’ve never had to go to diversity training. There are “racism” classes in every department. We think we are raising the issues and working on them. Some would disagree, I suppose. There are always complainers. I think our diversity is a strength, and helps us do better work.