Organizations are made up of People
Diversity Training is the organization’s greatest resource. As the workplace and marketplace become more and more diverse knowing how to effectively engage with differences impacts every dimension of an organization. Developing the understanding and the skills to manage diversity and inclusion become critical and invaluable in contributing to the success and growth of an organization.

The Approach to Diversity Training - The approach to diversity training is working from the inside out. It is a five-step process:

1) Self-awareness 2) Knowledge 3) Develop skill 4) Take action (Act)   5) Evaluate 

Diversity training is an ongoing process that continues to empower individuals and benefit the organization. Individuals have countless ways that they are different from each other. Fitting in and contributing to an organization that has its own culture and constant changes require adjustments.

All this diversity together provides continuous challenges and opportunities for understanding diversity and sharpening our diversity skills.

As the increasingly digital world opens doors to a global audience, every organization’s access to a diverse customer base increases. To make the biggest possible impact, organizations need to adapt to this truth. Diversity training can help make an organization more prepared to thrive in a globalized economy with a global customer base.

Basically, by having an inclusive workplace that attracts employees with all kinds of backgrounds, businesses can likewise attract customers of all backgrounds. This can, in turn, result in increases for the business’s bottom line.

Despite today’s growing diversity and open mindedness, many business decisions are still the result of unconscious biases—often without the decision-maker even realizing it.

By using a diversity training program to help employees and leaders in the organization identify and confront unconscious biases, you can help prevent these biases from causing your best and brightest talents to feel excluded. An investment in these programs helps to boost employee engagement and retention—making for happier, more dedicated workers resulting in growth and success.

Innovation is often thinking of as the product of rare genius—something that only a select, highly intelligent few can reliably produce. However, this is not always the case. Rather than being a product of genius, innovation is often a combination of hard work, critical thinking, and looking at problems from a new perspective.

Having a diverse and engaged workforce means having access to a team with a wide range of perspectives to tackle challenges. Each Individual bring their own experiences and ways of thinking. A potential benefit is that one person could point out something that may seem obvious to them but not to others. In this way, new innovations could be made that increase efficiency or simply make a key work task easier, or even come up with a new idea!

Measure Your Social Climate
Create surveys that assess the social climate at the workplace and provide opportunities for feedback. They need to empower individuals to become more self-aware of developing a mindset of valuing diversity and inclusion and creating a culture of belonging,

Provide Resource Tools to Cultivate an Open and Inclusive Mindset
Two books: 1)“Small Book with a Big Idea 5 Minute Training to Empower You and Transform the World,” and 2) “The Power of Listening in a World of Differences.”
Two short 30-second public service announcements
sponsored by World Unity Inc. as tools to cultivate an open mindset and heart.
1) World Unity Inc. 30-Second PSA: - https://worldunityinc.org/assets/video/WorldUnityPSA2021final.mp4
2) World Unity Inc. 30-Second PSA: - https://worldunityinc.org/assets/video/psavideo2012.mp4
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To make sure that your diversity training program is working, it’s important to:

Treat Diversity Training as a Continuous Effort. No form of training should be a “one-and-done” effort where employees are put through a one-time seminar and left alone. To reinforce lessons and keep new hires up to date, training should be a continuous effort. Training resources should be constantly available to all who need them when they need them. 

Measure Success with Surveys and Other Assessment Tools. Conducting employee surveys and seeing what each employee has to say about their work environment plays a huge role in determining the success of a diversity training program. By tracking employee attitudes both before and after training, you can measure the impact of the lessons learned. These assessments should be repeated frequently (once each month or quarter) to track changes in attitudes over time. Exit surveys can also help identify workplace culture issues that may be costing your organization productive workers.

Measure Success with Surveys and Other Assessment Tools.
By crafting a consistent, voluntary program to enhance employee attitudes toward diversity and inclusion, and then closely monitoring said program’s impacts, it is possible to optimize your workplace culture to better prepare it for the future.

Of course, having access to convenient training resources that your employees can easily access on their own schedules can help a lot. Get started with convenient short-form videos featuring industry-leading experts in diversity and inclusion with Big Think Edge’s exclusive Diversity & Inclusion Course!