Xerox Diversity, the inclusion of different types of people (whether it be race or culture) in a group or organization. How would Xerox, a fortune 500 company define diversity? How diverse is Xerox in comparison to the rest of the market? With diversity your company gains knowledge and experience from different facets of the world, but what would keep Xerox motivated to diversify their workforce? Considering the growth in cultural diversity in the US how has Xerox manage to maintain its diversity? How can Xerox along with other fortune 500 companies improve on their diversity on executive level of management?
These questions along with more will be answered as we explore Xerox and their outlook and actions on diversity. Xerox, founded in 1906, is the world’s largest service and technology company in the computer industry with number one market share and sales in excess of $17 billion. They are also recognized as the world’s most admired company in the computer industry. This has come about as a result of internal growth and diversity in creating an environment where all employees can grow within. Xerox defines diversity as follows: “Diversity is about more than race and gender.
It’s about more than numbers. It’s about inclusion. Diversity means creating an environment where all employees can grow to their fullest potential. ” Xerox allows for individuals to share ideas and as people have different ways of thinking, this is believed to create more innovative solutions and is a tactic that has proven to work very well for Xerox. Xerox continues to invest in innovation through research and development even throughout the most recent recession. In fact, Xerox has a proud tradition of pioneering research and continues to be in the forefront of innovation.
In 2011, Xerox spent over $721 million on research and development. Today they have over 5,000 scientists exploring and trying to innovate new products. Their diversity began with the first chairman, Joseph C. Wilson who took the necessary steps in creating a more diverse workforce during the 1960’s. This led to further emphasis on advancement opportunities for females and minorities during the 80’s. In fact, this was when Xerox had named an African American as the first president of a division. The company has taken ven further steps in the 1990’s by implementing a sexual orientation program as part of the company’s policy in extending their diversity by including lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual employees. Xerox even began providing benefits for such groups and was a leader in doing so. Today, Xerox employs over 140,000 people and as a company they are proud to say that women and minorities make up 52% of their workforce and over 42% of their senior executives is made up minorities to include women, people of color or both. Xerox has over 10,700 patents and has office in 160 countries making them truly a global company.
Their mission and vision statement which reads” through the world’s leading technology and services in business process and document management, we’re at the heart of enterprises small to large, giving our client’s the freedom to focus on what matters most. ” This truly could be summarized as a statement that reflects the company and shows how the diversification of not only products and services, but more importantly, through the diversity of its workforce, has been able to achieve and sustain such a high status throughout the world from a business standpoint and internally from an employee standpoint.
Xerox has been and continues to be one of the best most recognized companies to work for and throughout all of the years, the one thing that has never changed is their core values. As our Organizational Behavior book states in Chapter 2, there are seven reasons why Xerox should be motivated to diversify their workforce. The first reason is that today’s talent is overwhelmingly diverse; therefore, adopting discriminatory hiring preferences would impede companies from attracting the best talent available.
Secondly, companies must have the capacity to effectively solve problems, adapt to new situations, identify new opportunities and quickly capitalize on them. This can only be realized by having a diverse range of talent, experience, knowledge and insight in the workforce. Third, having a diverse workforce helps ensure that products and services are designed to appeal to the buying power of diverse customer bases. By having the makeup of their workforce reflect their customer base, they are able to obtain specialized insight and knowledge.
Fourth, having a diverse workforce is helpful in dealing with increasingly diverse external interactions and communications. Fifth, diversifying the workforce can help turn tax-users into tax-payers through initiatives such as welfare-to-work. Sixth, diversifying workforces can help people who might be disadvantaged to have an opportunity to earn a living and achieve their dreams. Finally, “many employers are under legislative mandates to be nondiscriminatory in their employment practices. ” (pg. 46)
Xerox clearly shows that it values workplace diversity. Starting in the 1960s, Xerox took its first proactive steps to diversify the workforce in response to the race riots that were occurring. With then Xerox President C. Peter McCullough, Wilson called for increased hiring of African Americans in an effort to improve diversity and seek to achieve equality amongst its workforce. Moving onto the 1970s, Xerox went on to establish an internal affirmative action office and began to hire a substantial amount of minority employees.
Xerox placed emphasis on the advancement of minorities and females during the 1980s, and it was during that time that Barry Rand, an African American, was named the first minority president of a division. In the 1990s, Xerox began including sexual orientation in the company’s Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and On-discrimination policy – as they began to provide domestic partner benefits for gay, lesbian, bisexual and also transgender employees. “Xerox is proud to say that women and minorities make up 52% of their workforce. ” Also, it is reported that about 42. % of Xerox senior executives are either women or people of color or both. “Their employee roster is made up of over 30% African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans. ” Xerox has even been rated as one of the top 10 companies in hiring minorities, women, disabled, and gay and lesbian employees by Fortune, Forbes, Working Mother, Latino Style, and Enable Magazines. They have also been in Working Mother’s top 100 family friendly companies for women for the past 15 years (Pg. W-102) When comparing Xerox to other Fortune 500 companies we decided to go with ome competitors that are in the same industry; computers/office equipment. With Dell and Hewlett Packard, one may find a vast resemblance. For starters, all three companies have the same commitment to diversity in the workforce and are well aware of the competitive advantage that they possess in light of it. Mottos such as “diversity equals success” and “unleash the power of diversity” can be found all over these industry giants’ websites. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed any and all sexual discrimination and yet today, we are all witnesses to the glass ceiling and have probably been subjected to it at one point or another.
This primarily applies to women and minorities. Once a misconstrued theory, that was rarely acknowledged, today’s society embraces women for their triumphs and recognizes that this glass ceiling effect is far from a facade. Women and minorities are regarded with the utmost prestige at the highest levels of these organizations. Xerox proudly encompasses 42. 5% of their workforce as senior executives, followed by Dell, employing 36. 5% senior executives and finally, Hewlett Packard with 19. 8% of their top executives.
In addition to these staggering numbers, both Xerox and HP have female CEO’s that have defied the odds and achieved greater goals than the average Anglo male. These statistics do not necessarily need to be improved upon; however, they can easily be by integrating Dell’s supplier diversity, in which “Dell works with a number of multicultural business organizations to actively identify new minority, women and disadvantaged business enterprises. ”(Dell) Here Dell goes a few steps further than the competitors by working with minority groups/companies.
In doing so they are inadvertently providing greater business opportunities which lead to higher statistics. The companies could also pursue a much more traditional route with simply holding training seminars that educate current and new employees in all aspects of corporate diversity. Of course, pessimists argue that this is nothing more than just a ploy to keep the law off their backs and that the actions taken by the corporations are done for no reason other than simply gaining social reliance through affirmative action.
This opens the doors to another phenomenon known as reverse discrimination, in which a white male could argue that he is being discriminated against. To a certain extent one must wonder really just how honest and sincere these giants truly are. Are they doing it because they actually feel the need to fulfill some corporate responsibility or are they just enhancing their image to gain profit? Maybe it’s little bit of both. Nevertheless, their commitment to diversity remains strong and is the key to success.
Another angle we can consider as to how this statistic can be approved is by looking deeper into the situation, the number of minorities qualified to obtain these executive positive are trumped by their Anglo-Saxon counterpart. According to the National Center for Education Statistics in the year 2009, 62. 3% of students enrolled in degree granting institutions were white, while Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Nonresident alien students were accounted for the remaining 37. 7%.
In order to obtain these prestigious executive level positions not only must you enroll in college but you have to graduate as well. When it comes to the demographics of graduating students the percentage that minority student represents decreases. The National Center for Education Statistics performed a study on the “enrollment weighted distribution of racial/ethnic groups in all four year institutions”. What they’ve found was that 72% of graduates and this includes Bachelors, Masters, and Doctoral degrees were white students. While, Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native made up the remanding 28%.
According to these minorities aren’t well represented among the qualifying workforce. In order to improve on the numbers of minorities in executive positions in fortune 500 companies we must first figure out how to improve the numbers of qualified applicants for these executive positions. One way we can do this is by targeting the minorities that live in low income neighborhoods, usually, these neighborhoods consist of low college enrollment and high dropout rates. By influencing the people in these areas to enroll in college we can increases the enrollment rate and potentially increase the graduation rate.
As result of the increase in minority graduates we will increase the number of eligible candidates for top executive positions. “Diversity is about more than race and gender. It’s about more than numbers. It’s about inclusion. Diversity means creating an environment where all employees can grow to their fullest potential. ” This not only how Xerox defines diversity but also what they as company swear by. Pioneering the way for diversity in the corporate world since the 1960’s, as a result Xerox has become the first fortune 500 to announce the first African American woman as CEO, Ms.
Ursula Burns. With the growing numbers of diverse job seekers it is imperative that Xerox diversify their workforce for several reasons. By being a diverse company you’re in a position to obtain the best talent available for the job. You also provide the company with a broader outlook in product design and problem solving. Xerox’s customer base is also diverse; you need people who can relate to them. With more than half of your workforce and almost half of senior level executives being comprised of women and minorities it shows that Xerox is truly a diverse company.
As citizen of the US we would like to see more companies take on a more diverse look such as Xerox. Different ideas can be suggested but no concrete answers have been found, but with the growing number of minorities in the US it’s only a matter of time before other companies begin to resemble Xerox from a diversity stand point. Work Cited “About Xerox: Document Management; Business Process Management. ” Xerox Document Management, Digital Printing Equipment, Business Process Outsourcing. Web. 11 Mar. 2012. <http://www. xerox. com/about-xerox/enus. html>. “About Dell. ” Dell.
Web. 11 Mar. 2012. <http://content. dell. com/us/en/corp/about-dell. aspx? c=us>. “2008A? 09 Baccalaureate and BeyondLongitudinal Study (B&B:08/09): A First Look at Recent College Graduates. ” 2008A? 09 Baccalaureate and BeyondLongitudinal Study (B&B:08/09): A First Look at Recent College Graduates. Web. 11 Mar. 2012. <http://nces. ed. gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo. asp? pubid=2011236>. “Placing College Graduates Rates in Context. ” Web. <http://nces. ed. gov/pubs2007/2007161. pdf>. Schermerhorn, John R. Organizational Behavior. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010. Print.
