James Hoyte (left), assistant to the president, listens along with others as invited guest, Roosevelt Thomas Jr., CEO of Thomas Consulting and Training Inc., speaks about workforce management and diversity.

Diversity should be more than a goal in the workplace, it should be a way of doing business, according to speakers at the Second Workforce Management Conference, held May 19 at the Taubman Center at the Kennedy School of Government.

The four-hour conference, sponsored by the Office of the Assistant to the President and the Office of Human Resources/Workforce Initiatives, featured perspectives from outside Harvard to help deans, key hiring managers, and human resources personnel from across the University understand the best ways to foster diversity. The conference was the second in a biannual series on workforce management.

President Neil L. Rudenstine also spoke at the conference. Photo by Rose Lincoln.

President Neil L. Rudenstine started the conference by assessing Harvard's progress toward diversity so far. The University, he said, has done an excellent job fostering diversity in the student body and has made steady progress increasing diversity in its faculty.

The University is making less progress in diversity among its staff, however, and it's in that area that it must intensify its efforts, Rudenstine said. The conference is just one of several efforts under way, he said, citing initiatives to increase minority recruiting and to generate a larger pool of minority applicants.

"We are absolutely, unequivocally committed to a variety of forms of diversity, but explicitly including race, ethnicity, and gender at this institution," Rudenstine said. "I think an honest assessment would be that we have been more successful on some fronts and less successful on other fronts. One of the reasons why this conference is important is to see if we can't do well on all fronts."

The conference presented human resource professionals from across the University with views of diversity from outside Harvard. Roosevelt Thomas Jr., author of four books on diversity and former assistant professor at Harvard Business School, began by challenging the audience to define diversity.

Most people believe diversity means getting more people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds into the workplace, Thomas said. He disagreed that that constituted diversity. He called such a numbers-focused strategy "representation," not diversity.

Diversity, he said, involves embracing the differences among people and making those differences a strength. Too often, he said, when people from different ethnic or racial groups are brought into the workplace, they are hired for their skills and told to leave what makes them different ‹ whether it's a way of dress, hair style, or speech ‹ at home.

Diversity means differences, Thomas said, and it already exists in some form in most settings. There are old and young members of the workforce, people with families and without, those with numerous degrees and those with none.

The hard part in embracing diversity in a meaningful way, Thomas said, is in separating requirements to do a good job from preferences and traditions that have grown up over time and are seen as job requirements.

Preferences and traditions, for example, would be that men wear suits, are clean shaven, and wear short hair, even though none of those directly impact their job performance, he said.

In encouraging workforce diversity, Thomas said, companies have to focus on the job requirements and allow individual variations on things that do not affect performance.

"When I talk about diversity, I'm talking about the ties that bind and the differences that make us unique," Thomas said.

Other outside perspectives were provided by a panel consisting of executives from BankBoston, Southern California Edison, and CareGroup -- the health care system formed in 1996 by the merger of Beth Israel, Deaconess, and Mount Auburn hospitals.

Ira Jackson, executive vice president for BankBoston, said BankBoston's turnaround from near bankruptcy in the early 1990s was at least partly due to its willingness to embrace diversity -- not just in its employees, but also in its customers.

Like all banks, BankBoston is required to provide banking services in underserved neighborhoods, such as poor city neighborhoods. Rather than simply fulfilling that requirement as quickly as possible, Jackson said, the company decided to really try to serve that community and do it profitably. The strategy worked, he said, and today inner-city business contributes to BankBoston's bottom line.

At CareGroup, officials strive to ensure that the workplace is free of discrimination and to enact meaningful, rather than gimmicky, changes, according to Mitchell Rabkin, CareGroup's former chief executive officer and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Rabkin said that in order for diversity efforts to really work, they have to be supported by the company's leaders.

"It has to be embraced from the top," Rabkin said.

Harvard's Associate Vice President for Equal Opportunity Programs Jamie Hoyte said those in attendance "undoubtedly found value in hearing how other complex organizations have benefited from management strategies that are based on the principle that workforce diversity can be a very effective tool in accomplishing organizational goals."

Provost Harvey Fineberg closed the conference, reiterating the call for increased diversity among Harvard's staff. Fineberg said diversity in the broad sense should be natural at Harvard, since the University is built upon individual excellence.

"The idea of individual thinking, individual ideas, individual action is at the heart of our university," Fineberg said. "It's up to us to create the conditions that allow each individual to contribute his or her best to the mission of the whole."