Best Practices or Best Guesses? Essay Example

In nursing, it is essential to consider reasons for doing things before putting them into action. Before asking myself these questions, I realized that I do not typically think about situations and interactions with others before acting, I tend to just perform the actions that I believe are necessary to accomplish my job duties. However, this exercise made me realize the importance of details and that it is essential to communicate this information to others. The questions that were most difficult for me to answer included “When you have open positions, do you insist on a diverse screening committee and make additional outreach efforts to ensure that a diverse pool of candidates has applied?” and “How do you make the job sound appealing to different types of workers?”. I realized that while I believe that diversity in the hiring process is important, I focus more on the past experiences and education of candidates and focus less on the benefits that diversity can bring to the workforce.

If I had to develop a diversity training program for myself, it would focus on learning about the culture of others in order to foster better teamwork. Since teamwork is essential in nursing, it is necessary to use diversity to an advantage and in a manner that will allow a group to be maximally effective. Typically, diversity can bring a variety of skills and knowledge to a team that is useful in the application of healthcare. The program would focus on educating employees about diversity through group exercises, with group members from different cultures. They will be asked to solve several problems that frequently occur in the field of nursing, such as solutions solution to the problem. The group will then discuss everyone’s answers, and together develop a better solution to the task. This exercise will demonstrate that diversity is essential for success in the nursing field and consulting others from different backgrounds can contribute to the positive experience of the group.

References

Kalev A, Dobbin F, Kelley E. (2006). Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies. American Sociological Review, 71: 589–617