Work Force Diversity : The Young and the Diverse : The Next Generation May Be Better Equipped to Deal With Cultural Complexities at Work

“Is that your real hair?” asked Patrick Navarez, trying to start a conversation with his African American co-worker. Sure, Navarez was genuinely curious about her braided extensions, but his line wasn’t exactly an icebreaker.

And he found that another colleague didn’t take it very well when he pointed to her nose ring and wondered aloud, “Doesn’t that hurt?”

But for Navarez, a fresh-faced 22-year-old recent immigrant from the Philippines, these encounters were part of his workplace education in American culture. His primary tutors were his fellow male stock clerks at the Target store in Pasadena, who gently suggested that he be less direct in his personal questions to women.

For young workers such as Navarez, diversity in the workplace is not a slogan but a daily reality. Young workers, especially teens in entry-level and part-time positions, are a far more colorful group than the older work force.

According to government data, almost half of the 40-year-old population in Los Angeles County is non-Hispanic white--the category used by the Census--while just 27% of the 18-year-olds are. Among teen-agers entering the job market in Los Angeles today, 51% are Latino, 12% are Asian, and 11% are black.

Although the collisions of culture such as those Navarez encountered are inevitable, the experiences of many young workers suggest that they may be far better equipped to deal with the differences, clashes and uncertainties of a highly diverse work force than their elders are.

At the same time, companies that rely on relatively young workers, such as retailers and fast-food chains, have dealt with diversity issues earlier and more intensively than have firms with mostly older employees. That may give them a competitive advantage in entering the next century, when 80% of new workers are expected to be women and other than non-Hispanic whites.

Nurturing a diverse workplace “gives us more talent to pick from,” says Bob Beavers, senior vice president of McDonald’s in Oakbrook, Ill. “Those companies that have addressed that diversity (will) be better prepared, with people of color and women in key management positions to lead them into the next century. Those without people in the pipeline now will perish.”

Some strategies? “You need a sense of humor to work in a multicultural place,” says Navarez, who was glad his co-workers were eventually able to laugh off his faux pas.

And Navarez said being welcomed as the only Asian by his black and Latino co-workers quickly changed some of the stereotypes he had of them. Before joining Target, his only images of those groups were negative ones from television.

“At first I was intimidated. I thought that because I’m different they might gang up on me,” he said. But instead they joked with him and invited him to their homes.

They even learned from him. When a Vietnamese employee joined the team, they brought him over to Navarez, thinking the two would hit it off as fellow “Asian homeboys.” Navarez later explained to them that their languages and cultures are different.

But while Navarez says ways of socializing are different among groups, there aren’t any differences when it comes to work.

“They’re loud,” he says of his co-workers. “You can clearly hear them joking from across the room. But they work fast, and they work hard . . . . Race doesn’t have anything to do with work.”

Not all young, diverse workplaces are as collegial as Navarez’s graveyard shift at Target. But Sondra Thiederman, president of a San Diego-based training firm, that diversity can be easier to manage among young workers.

“It seems young people do a little better with cross-cultural communication than older people--they’re less set in their ways,” she says.

The workplace can be a powerful educator. Although many young people go to schools with a diverse population, they often break down into ethnically based cliques. That’s not possible in many workplaces. The necessity of simply getting the job done is, for many young people, the most effective motivator to communicate across cultures.

“You learn a lot working here,” says James Goodrich, 20, who handles shopping carts at Target. He says that growing up as an African American in South-Central Los Angeles, he felt he didn’t have much contact with other races. Now his supervisor is Filipina and another co-worker immigrated from the Middle East.

“Target wouldn’t run smoothly if everybody didn’t work together,” Goodrich says. “It just comes naturally. In doing your job, it’s forcing you to get along with different races and just people in general.”

If workers at this Target seem upbeat, it may be because they feel they have chances for promotion regardless of their ethnicity. Navarez notes that his immediate supervisor, Rafael Rodriguez, is Latino, and his boss is African American.

Rodriguez, 26, says that when he visited Target’s Minneapolis headquarters, he saw many Latino, African American and Asian faces in the executive offices. That made him feel that he too had a chance to get ahead. Target’s diversity training programs help people get along, he says--but perhaps even more important are twice-yearly evaluation sessions that contribute to a sense of fair play in promotions by giving each employee feedback on his or her performance.

At McDonald’s, where nearly half of the restaurant managers nationwide are women--and half of both male and female managers are minorities--the corporation encourages mixing among various ethnic groups. It has networking groups for African American, Latino, Asian and Middle Eastern employees, through which people can share notes on career advancement. About a quarter of all McDonald’s franchise owners are people of color.

McDonald’s has no formal programs to train its workers about cultural differences. Instead, the emphasis is on joining a culture that’s the same around the world.

Such a strong corporate culture--from Tokyo to Paris to Inglewood--encourages workers to get along as they pledge allegiance to crisp french fries and fast service rather than a single nation.

Ofelia Melendrez, an assistant manager at a McDonald’s in Torrance, says that because of the standardization of procedures throughout the company, among employees “you can go anywhere, and you can relate to each other.”