Inclusive Environment Challenges Of IKEA

IKEA operates in multiple countries and known for its diverse reputation. Due to that the focus on cultural inclusiveness has shifted, making IKEA not as concerned about the matter. Given that Australia is a highly multicultural country, it is necessary to enhance cultural diversity within its workforce in order to create a positive environment. In earlier promotions IKEA had a fallout with the LGBTQ community when they portrayed them in a negative and stereotypical light, providing IKEA with a bad reputation, and a need for image repair.

Currently they are having challenges creating an inclusive environment with a diverse workforce of co-workers from different backgrounds working together. IKEA have tried to manage their diversity previously in a reactive way. However, due to society rapidly changing they must combat these issues in a proactive way. Through observation there were four main issues within diversity that were brought to our attention. These issues include working parents, disability support, cultural inclusiveness and transgender support.

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IKEA currently has policies and practices in place regarding working parents. Co-workers are entitled to parental leave. This parental leave policy is a federal law which states you need to be the primary career of a newborn or newly adopted child (parental leave pay) and have worked over 12 months prior to taking out parental leave status (parental leave pay). IKEA allows their Co-workers to extend their parental leave through the process of writing a formal letter four weeks before the end of their 12 month paid parental leave. Policies that IKEA has integrated independently regarding parental conditions at work include working on weekends.

Working on weekends can be challenging for working parents as childcare is harder to find. IKEA permits their Co-workers to one week off every four weeks however this can still be found impracticable for their employees. Furthermore, another underlying issue which can be found to parents coming back to the IKEA workforce is their ability to work in the same job position and role. HR manager of IKEA Emma Fitzpatrick suggested that if a working parent coming back to the workforce after parental leave would like to cut down to part time, their job description is more than likely to change. It is very unlikely that the Co-worker will be able to get their leadership role back, which can cause them to potentially feel undervalued.

IKEA has been acknowledged with having great performance of managing cultural differences for the past decades. One of Ikea’s main vision is “we believe the uniqueness of every individual makes IKEA better!” However, the issue of cultural diversity was discussed at the Ikea’s interview despite having their strong reputation of employees from all over the world. The reason is because Ikea has been evidently diverse due to their branches being in different countries and having their respective employees, they are not concerned about improving diversity even more. As there can always be improvements made. For countries that is highly multicultural like Australia, it becomes even more important to maintain cultural diversity in order to keep the employees comfortable with one another and to create an positive environment. This is the reason, we will be discussing about IKEA’s existing cultural diversity and ways to improve it, so the cultural values stays overtime. It's important to understand cross cultural managers to consider issues that every country has its own attitudes, values and beliefs, and the paradigm shift in business world. This would help ensure IKEA is operating ethically and responsibly within the countries they are operating. Therefore, IKEA would need to adapt changes to keep up-to-date and stay competitive.

IKEA, the world’s biggest furniture retailer, has come under heavy criticism in its home market Sweden after it airbrushed women out of its latest catalogue in Saudi Arabia, raising questions about its policies towards gender equality. Although provided assurity that We will naturally review our routines and working process, to ensure that this will not happen again.” Magazines or other publications featuring photographs of women in skimpy clothing are censored and restaurants are segregated into sections for single men and for families with women to avoid gender mixing. Sweden’s European Union Minister Birgitta Ohlsson on Twitter called the move “medieval”, while European Union Minister Ewa Bjorling noted that women cannot be airbrushed out of reality. “If Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow women to be seen, heard or to work, they lose out on half of their intellectual capital. This shows they still have a long way to go to reach equality between women and men in Saudi Arabia, From since then the elected Saudi king after made few changes in order to promote equality through making working conditions easier for women and being allowed to vote and run for office in all future municipal elections.