HR MANAGERS are going to be confronting religious issues in their organisations in a way that they would not have had to 10 or 20 years ago, social commentators have suggested
HR MANAGERS are going to be confronting religious issues in their organisations in a way that they would not have had to 10 or 20 years ago, social commentators have suggested.
Speaking at the Leading Diversity & Workplace Cultural Transformation Conference hosted by Diversity@work, Monash University’s Gary Bouma and the Council for Multicultural Australia’s Yasser Soliman said religion in general is back on the agenda.
“That’s because of religious diversity on the one hand, which is much greater than it was before, and secondly, because there is religious revitalisation or resurgence. Religion is meaning more to many more people than it was in the recent past,” Bouma said.
With Australia’s diverse Muslim population estimated to number 300,000 and drawn from more than 70 different countries, the conference heard that one of the main areas of discussion needs to be Islam – particularly as the evidence for religious discrimination in Australian workplaces suggests that as a group Muslims are at a disadvantage.
Many Muslims fail to reach their full career potential despite being well qualified, and the unemployment rate for Muslims is three times higher than the national total of those born in Australia. Some job seekers with Muslim names have even been encouraged to change them in a bid to improve their hiring prospects, Soliman said.
Last year, a study by the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney found that 27 per cent of Muslim and Arab employees said they had experienced racism, abuse or violence in the workplace. The situation is not improving much either.
One of the steps that organisations need to take will be to deal with religious matters in a fundamental, structured way. “No matter what diversity you are talking about at work, you can start by dealing with it on a case by case basis but ultimately you have to deal with it on a principle, general policy basis and then see how cases fit with the policy,” Bouma said.
For HR professionals, religious considerations are “going to be coming from places they hadn’t expected like evangelical Christians, Catholics who are taking certain things more seriously, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs”, Bouma said.
“Therefore if there are issues about calendar or diet or issues about some tasks they can or cannot perform, those issues in a work context are going to have to be dealt with.
“How do secular colleagues relate to them, how do colleagues with different religions relate to people with whom they have differences? All of these things now are going to be on the agenda and can’t just be on a don’t ask and don’t tell basis,” he said.
