1995 was a tremendous year for corporate earnings. Now in 1996, company management can finally afford to shift focus and they’re ready to tackle intangibles like the effects of employee loyalty, morale, and perceptions of fairness within the organization. In an environment like this, Diversity at Work is a book whose time has come.

Trevor Wilson, founder of Omnibus Consulting, has seized upon a major issue and his portrayal of it is written with objectivity and clarity. The style of the book is good, but the impact of the message may be more limited than the author intends.

Wilson’s approach is not to enforce equality by legislating employment equity, but to portray the merits of an equity-based organization in such compelling light that management decides on its own accord to eliminate barriers. This leads to higher productivity, lower absenteeism, more customer referrals, and lower turnover, Wilson writes – all factors that should show up as assets.

The book succeeds as a blueprint for corporations that are already strong believers in diversity and equity and are shopping for a consultant to help them implement their own plan. Wilson produces case studies of real corporations (called “The Fairest in the Land”) that hired consultants like Omnibus and now offer testimonials of how much better they feel. The problem for more cynical readers is something of a Catch 22: even if Wilson convinces us that measuring the benefits of diversity doesn’t work because it fails to capture such intangibles as employee satisfaction, he needs to have some recourse to numbers to measure the increased productivity that results from implementing a successful diversity plan. The interesting case studies of corporations like Ernst & Young, Union Gas, National Grocers, Sunnybrook Hospital, and CIBC fail to answer such critical quantitative questions as how much absenteeism has declined, how much customer complaints have declined and referrals increased, and how turnover has changed.

Ignoring these questions implies that either the answers are inconclusive or Wilson has something to hide. The “case” for equity is not yet closed.