ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 30, 1997 TAG: 9703280032
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON/THE ROANOKE TIMES
WHEN Spanish-speaking South American schoolchildren toured Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center recently, the hotel found a Spanish-speaking accountant on the staff to show them around.
When Korean guests were present on another occasion, a Korean kitchen employee and a housekeeper who speaks Korean translated some of their conversations - proving a diverse work force can be a bonus for an employer.
Those employees' gestures may not appear to be part of any business strategy to make the hotel more profitable. But they are.
The hotel tries to tap the diversity of its workers to improve its success with customers and the bottom line. How - and how well - a company or organization does that is a hot-button issue in the business world.
"It's the topic of the '90s," said Pam Powell, human resources manager at Litton-Fibercom Inc. of Roanoke.
In Western Virginia, businesses say they are making strides toward cultivating workplace diversity and that these efforts are an aide to minorities getting jobs and promotions.
"It makes good business sense to have a diverse work force," said Coy Renick, personnel director at Vitramon Inc., a Roanoke manufacturer of ceramic chip capacitors. "Your customers have a diverse work force. We deal with Ford, Delco, Chrysler. They have a diverse work force."
One group says progress is coming too slowly.
Earlier this month, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People announced a boycott of 10 national hotel chains. The NAACP said it believed the hotel companies employed too few minorities or that it was denied information about their minority hiring rates. It was only the most recent instance of U.S. companies being accused of workplace discrimination.
The recent case that drew the widest notice involved Texaco, which admitted a racism problem after release of a taped conversation among its executives. Two companies with Roanoke Valley operations -R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. and Norfolk Southern Corp. - also are under the spotlight, as they face discrimination charges of their own.
The NAACP's Roanoke-based chapter supported the hotel boycott, officially an "economic reciprocity" crusade; NAACP officials don't use the word boycott. One hotel quickly affected was Hotel Roanoke, which lost a bid to be the site for a March 16 black film festival. The hotel is managed by Doubletree Hotels Corp., which the NAACP said was a boycott target because it wouldn't release figures on the racial diversity of its work force.
The festival was moved to the city-owned Jefferson Center, despite blacks being better represented on Hotel Roanoke's staff than in the
area population and even though management has said recently that there is a long-standing culture of diversity awareness. While 33 percent of its employees are black, blacks represent about 11 percent of the population of people 16 or older in the Roanoke Valley, according to hotel and census data.
Gary Walton, the hotel's general manager, defends the hotel's diversity record - which he released after the boycott was announced - and said he wishes the film festival had not been relocated.
"We want to be the benchmark in the community for others to achieve to ... if the NAACP wants to go out and say, 'Hey, there's somebody that's doing it right,'" Walton said.
Walton said the hotel has a forum in which employee leaders can tackle any diversity issues that might come up. No issues have, he said. The group is the hotel's in-house Care Committee, which strives to improve guest service and employee performance.
Hotel Roanoke didn't force its bilingual employees into their impromptu roles as ambassadors and translators. They cooperated, calling on skills apart from those needed to he hired.
Also at the hotel, each employee's birthplace appears on his or her name tag that's worn as part of the work uniform. Besides being a conversation starter with guests and dining room customers, the tag reinforces a culture of recognizing and accepting differences. That notion is taught from the top down, and newcomers to the hotel hear this from senior employees, Care Committee members said in a recent interview.
What the NAACP and diversity advocacy groups, such as the American Institute for Managing Diversity, want from employers is three fold:
First, employers would avoid hiring all whites or all males or entirely from any other group but, instead, make their work forces reflect the local population to the extent possible. There is evidence that minority and female representation in the workplace is improving.
Second, companies would appreciate the benefits of differences in race, age, gender, culture and personal style that diversity brings to an office, job site or factory floor. Companies also would value differences in employees' levels of education and pay, union affiliations, martial status, sexual orientation, religion, thinking style and even body shape and size.
Victor Cardwell, a black lawyer with Woods, Rogers & Hazlegrove in Roanoke, said the ideal attitude would be one in which his boss might say to his co-workers at the firm: "Hey, just because Victor looks different, talks different, walks different doesn't mean he can't bring something to the table."
Finally, companies would try to turn worker differences to their advantage, with an eye toward achieving higher productivity and profits.
So far, some national companies have programmed a more diverse approach to running their operations by granting flexible work hours to help parents raise children; offering programs to benefit employees obligated to care for aging parents; and providing health care benefits for the partners of gay people. Others have paired new minority employees with senior white employees or another minority to help the newcomers adjust.
A few have met success in having minority employees tell them how to market to minority customer groups.
|--| Long before diversity programs were in vogue, company managers hired family members and people like themselves in terms of race, sex and age. Work forces were largely homogenous, said Wanda Smith, a professor of management at Virginia Tech.
During the 1960s, affirmative actions laws were passed to reverse the effects of employment discrimination against minorities and women. These laws threaten to take away federal contracts from companies that fail to give minorities a fair shot at jobs and promotions.
Minorities needed protection "because they have been victimized throughout the history of employment," said William Thorpe, district director of the Office of the Federal Contracts Compliance Program, based in Richmond. The agency keeps an eye on the diversity of federal contractors.
At the same time, the country started aging faster and becoming more diverse, and large numbers of women took paying jobs for the first time.
At first, many companies initially saw calls for work force diversity as a burden and reacted with, "Oh God, we have to do this," said Patricia Digh. She is former vice president of international and diversity programs at the Society for Human Resource Management, an Alexandria trade group for personnel directors at companies and organizations.
There was a period in which companies began hiring certain workers mainly because they belonged to minority groups. The companies thought, "we need one so let's go out and hire one," Smith said. But these workers didn't fit well in their organizations. Whites claimed they were being discriminated against, leading to a bitter backlash against affirmative action.
Backed by public opinion, attitudes began changing in companies' employment offices. Hiring officers tended to look beyond personal factors that earlier led them to build homogenous work forces of people like them. The focus began a shift toward hiring needed skills without regard to the package they come in.
By way of example, Digh said strong handshakes have been a virtual prerequisite to some jobs where the hiring was done by white males from Western cultures who themselves had a firm grip. Today, a company's personnel manager is expected to know not to make too much of receiving a weak handshake from a job applicant who is an Asian male. Asians tend to be less assertive in interviews, making less eye contact and refraining from boasting, Digh said.
"Everyone is not going to be like you and I," Digh said. Companies that don't feel their work forces are diverse enough should ask, "Is it us? Is there something in us that is weeding out qualified people?"
|--| Today, companies are advised to recruit the most diverse group of people possible to apply for job openings but to base hiring decisions on skills and let the racial chips fall where they may. "Most companies," said Bruce Wood, who directs the Roanoke-based Management Association of Western Virginia, seek to hire "the most qualified workforce no matter how that works out."
Litton-Fibercom Inc., a Roanoke maker of fiber-optic communication equipment, announces job openings in help-wanted ads in the Roanoke Tribune, a newspaper targeted to the black community, and in mailings to minority colleges, such as Hampton University in Tidewater.
Placing an ad in wider circulation newspapers such as The Roanoke Times alone "doesn't mean you get a diverse pool of applicants." she said. "We want to give everyone an equal chance."
One challenge for local companies is the smaller-than-average percentage of minorities in the population. The Roanoke metropolitan area labor force is only about half as diverse as statewide or nationally. Despite that, many companies have ended up with a mixture of people on their payrolls, they say.
"We're just trying to recruit the best people we can and diversity happens," said Renick of Vitramon.
He declined to give a racial breakdown of Vitramon's employees. "I just don't see anything our company would gain from that," he said. He said the plant meets its diversity goals.
Renick was not alone in being reluctant to talk openly about diversity issues. Four Roanoke area firms didn't return multiple phone calls seeking information for this article; others voiced support for diversity but refused to discuss such specifics as the makeup of their work forces or allow photographers to take pictures of their workplaces. One possible explanation: Local companies still are finding their comfort zone on this sensitive issue.
"It's just too hairy a subject," said one personnel manager from the New River Valley, begging off from an on-the-record interview.
Virginia Tech's Smith said her theory is that Western Virginia employers are 10 years behind the U.S. business community in general in creating and managing diversity in their work forces. She attributed that to the region's distance from major urban centers and to its relatively small minority population.
In addition, companies that are less diverse than the community generally could fear a backlash if the fact becomes public, according to another source not affiliated with a company but familiar with diversity issues.
The hotel boycott illustrated how a company's diversity can become a public issue virtually overnight.
Another possible concern about speaking up, the source said, is that federal diversity regulators keep an eye on companies that supply goods and services to the federal government. Companies might think that what they reveal through a newspaper article could draw the attention of federal contract compliance officers and put them in line for a surprise review of diversity records they must keep. Such inspections are "grueling" in their thoroughness, said Powell of Litton-Fibercom.
The process is so complex that 10 area companies in 1995 formed an association, the Southwest Virginia OFCCP Liaison Group, to study the rules and ways to comply. The required records must describe in terms of race and gender the people who apply for jobs, those who are interviewed, those offered positions and those hired, promoted and terminated, though specifics vary somewhat from company to company.
The law applies to the subcontractors of suppliers of products and services to the federal government as well.
Its president reiterated the view of companies on diversity.
"It's not just saying we don't discriminate. It's going out and recruiting and hiring and promoting and training persons within protected groups," said Lori Hurley, employee relations manager at Bell South Communications Systems Inc. in Roanoke. "Anytime you do that, you are much better off than having a very narrow focus."
LENGTH: Long : 210 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/THE ROANOKE TIMES. Hotel Roanoke's Careby CNBCommittee, a forum of employee leaders, can tackle any diversity
issues that might come up and strives to improve guest service and
employee performance. color. Graphic: Chart: Work Force. color. KEYWORDS: MGR