Finland: Implementing a global diversity management initiative in Finland

Maria, the HR Manager of Petrocom a Finland, had been both excited and anxious when news came through from regional headquarters that Finland had been selected as one of the first to implement the new ‘Global Workforce Diversity Management and Inclusiveness Initiative’ (hereafter D & I Initiative). The mission of the D & I initiative was to integrate employees from a broad variety of backgrounds such as gender, race, sexual orientation, age, family status, values, beliefs, physical and mental abilities, income, education, and work experience. Maria had known that it was going to mean a lot of work and that getting local buy-in to a corporate initiative of this kind would be a huge challenge. Although she knew that there had been very few cases of harassment or discrimination, she had felt for some time now that Finland and the people at Petrocom Finland had limited experience in addressing certain areas of workforce diversity management in comparison with some of their European counterparts. Maria just hoped that her personal convictions about the business case for diversity management would be shared by others. She also knew this would mean working very closely with Ashoka, the European Diversity Management Coordinator, who had been given the task to support and monitor the implementation of the initiative in Finland. Ashoka, Indian by origin with considerable management experience in the USA, was located at the European regional headquarters. Even from the outset, he was sceptical about Petrocom Finland’s ability to meet the expectations of headquarters and the strict global D & I policy guidelines. Now, five years later, Maria and Ashoka were about to sit in a D & I review meeting to reflect and evaluate the status of Petrocom’s D & I Initiative in the Finnish subsidiary.